I've speculated a number of times that Regan and McEleny may be preparing the ground to go it alone with some sort of fresh breakaway party. This new appointment would be consistent with that theory, because Regan seems to be doubling down on joining herself at the hip with a man that the Alba leadership regard as Public Enemy Number One. An alternative possibility is that she's trying to set up a sort of Dual Authority system in Alba with herself as the 'other leader' - ie. she's banking on the assumption that she can't be sacked for disobeying authority, because without an MSP MacAskill doesn't really have a party. So she'll just come up with whatever policies she wants, employ whatever staff she wants, and basically just act as if she is the leader and as if MacAskill's authority doesn't extend to her.
If that's what she has in mind, it's not going to end well. The Alba branding has always been toxic and it's arguably more toxic than ever now. There are good reasons why Eva Comrie outpolled Kenny MacAskill in Alloa & Grangemouth last year, and one of those is that she stood as an independent while MacAskill was weighed down by Alba's baggage. If Regan stands as an Alba candidate next year, she's highly likely to lose her seat and the special status she's able to exploit for now will be gone within just twelve-and-a-bit months. She will very soon become expendable to MacAskill, to the Corri Nostra (who already publicly treat her with contempt) and to the Tas Tyranny. She'd be much better advised to ditch McEleny and start working out some sort of credible non-Alba option for defending her seat.
James: Chris McEleny seemed to be taking part in the debates at the ALBA conference as normal. Would he do this if planning to splinter?
ReplyDeleteYes, I believe he would. It would be part of his way of trying to demonstrate continuity with the new party, ie. he's supposedly just trying to recreate the type of party "created by me, Kirk Torrance, Laurie Flynn and Alex Salmond". Those have become the Four Albateers of McEleny theology.
DeleteRegan / McEleny to rejoin the SNP after publicly renouncing ALBA as a failed project.
ReplyDeleteNobody would believe I'm on board a bus near Kemijärvi in Finland reading about this. But I am.
ReplyDeleteI am sitting behind you
Deletebelieve it
I heard you breathing deeply and thought my luck was in. Sadly, I'm not a fan of over-garlicky breath and the fumes of Sanatogen tonic wine.
DeleteI'm on board a train in Croatia.
DeleteI'm on a unicycle in Albania
DeleteIs that TD or RT who is up there on the bus in Kemijärvi? One of the Hki squad here.
DeleteI'm standing on one leg next to bus stop outside Klaipeda in Lithuania.
DeleteNice. But I'm on the Swedish island of Fårö looking at myself in a mirror and mouthing the word 'succulent'.
DeleteAsh would be well advised to ditch the Alba brand. But she should keep Chris who is good with the media and has support 500 current Alba members voted for him.
ReplyDeleteIf Chris and Ash were to start a new party they’d probably be able to get about 1000 members fairly quickly which makes them viable.
They probably need some people to help in starting the party but it’s a completely sensible idea and far better than sticking with Alba
There is zero chance that Chris would pass Alba vetting so his only chance of election next year is a new party
Or he could bring the painful courtship to an end and get on with actually joining Reform.
DeleteAnon 3:47
DeleteI doubt they would join Reform as it is unionist but they should start a new party. It’s their best chance of being elected it wouldn’t do any worse than Alba.
Ash should set up a re-election team for the Lothians. And they could set up the party
"I doubt they would join Reform as it is unionist"
DeleteThat would be no barrier to a careerist like McEleny.
500 supporters? That many? It is jokeland stuff. Personally, let them wither and let’s move on to discuss Berger policies for the snp to pursue
DeleteThe money he is being paid should be SNP money. Reagan was elected on an SNP ticket. Disgraceful that this no use liar is getting public money, especially money Alba are not entitled to.
ReplyDeleteIf you think the Comrie-MacAskill clash was embarrassing, that was just a warm-up. We've got a Regan-MacAskill crash coming up next year as they both need to stand in the same constituency/region. That's the real reason MacAskill was bumped out to Grangemouth, so she could have them.
ReplyDeletePolitics is the art of compromise, but there's no possible compromise here. Both of them know contesting the constituency is a campaigning tool to pump up list votes, so they can't do an one-each.
Chris McEleny and Ash Regan seem to have a strong professional relationship. In the leadership election I noticed that they seemed to be a team.
ReplyDeleteKenny MacAskill cannot be selected to stand in the same constituency that Ash is currently a member for: Ash is the incumbent, and political convention dictates that the incumbent gets first dibbs, all the more since Ash is considered to be a good politician who has done her job well.
Ash should therefore expect to be the candidate and Kenny McAskill should be expecting to seek candidature elsewhere.
You've missed the memo: MacAskill has stated Alba will remain a list-only party. So unless that changes, Regan will be standing on the Lothian list, not in her current constituency.
DeleteOn the Lothians list, for instance.
DeleteWhich produces a scenario where Regan is unlikely to win, but every double vote she does recruit potentially results in MacAskill being elected. The irony is tortous.
In turn, this means Regan doesn't campaign very hard at all. Which imperils MacAskill's list seat. So he has to take both and he could. "Incumbents first" is only a convention and many a sitting politician has lost reselection.
MacAskill will surely not be on the same regional constituency as Regan where she is the incumbent.
Delete"every double vote she does recruit potentially results in MacAskill being elected"
DeleteThat sounds like meaningless gobbledegook to me. Can you explain what you mean in concrete terms? What's a "double vote"?
McAskill for Central or Southern
DeleteIt's the idea that you can gain more list votes by having constituency candidates(even if they have no hope). Because theoretically, any voter the constituency candidate convinces to vote for them is highly likely to also support that candidate's party on the list.
DeleteFor example, the Greens have built up a pocket in Glasgow Kelvin, which provides about a fifth of their Glasgow Region votes. They don't need to win Kelvin(and may never), but trying to is part of getting them across the line on the list.
But that theory doesn't work. I've heard that the Greens have realised that running constituency candidates has cost them list votes, because some voters were determined to split the ticket, so if they voted Green on the constituency ballot they automatically voted for another party on the list. Whereas if you stand only on the list, you maximise your potential vote on the list.
DeleteIn any case, I come back to my original point: Alba will not be standing any constituency candidates at all, if Kenny MacAskill's word can be trusted.
Greens are said to be standing constituency candidates in Glasgow.
DeleteIt really isn’t true that not standing on the constituency hampers the list vote
DeleteFirst most ballot papers are not split. The voter votes the same party for the constituency and list.
The ones that don’t have voted tactically for the constituency vote then their favoured party on the list
The SSP made their breakthrough in 2003 by standing in all 73 constituencies leading to 6 MSPs
The Greens stand in constituencies to which boosts their list vote.
The orher problem with being list only is there is no chance of the party actually winning the election which has a psychological effect
It works and it doesn't work. That's why Kelvin was my example; it hasn't worked anywhere else for them, although there's a secondary effect from splitting the vote and pushing an unionist party further down the list if they should win a constituency as a result.
Delete"if Kenny MacAskill's word can be trusted." It shouldn't. If he sticks to that, he and Regan are butting heads over being Lothians 1 - and it throws away Alba's most precious asset, Regan's constituency. Her contesting that is more likely to produce a list seat for Alba than, say, Christina Hendry contesting the constituency her uncle planned to.
It's also about how toxic Alba is. By contesting some constituencies, MacAskill can use them to divert a number of people off the list whilst binding them to the party. Even worse, he could go around assuring everyone that they've got number one in such and such, then blindside them at the latest possible minute.
All the above is why your mission to democratise Alba was so pivotal. Prying that selection control out of the leadership's hands and getting it out of the way early was the only way the party ever had a chance: Choose a core team of eight and build them up, or spend the years with everyone perpetually climbing over each other to win Salmond's affections.
Albs do not have the activists to mount a national campaign but they will because they are delusional.
DeleteThey would be better concentrating on returning Ash in the Lothians. That was their only chance but by electing MacAskill as leader that’s likely gone now.
IMO they should stand in the constituencies and be a party in their own right not some weird adjunct to the SNP
Their pitch seems to be elect us as we want to be MSPs. People don’t vote for a mathematical formula and Alba aren’t giving anyone, anything to vote for.
Just a bunch of failed SNP politicians standing on the list whose sole agenda is to be MSPs
Robert Reid a potential candidate for one of the list seats.
ReplyDelete"Robert Reid a potential candidate for one of the list seats."
DeleteChrist on a stick, they really do have a death wish. Who next, Yvonne Ridley?!
Which list ?
DeleteMSF is Neale
Ash Lothian and MacAskill Southern or Central.
DeleteI'd like to see Robert Reid standing because as far as I know he us one of the few prospective MSPs who is part of the movement to have Cavalcanti designated as one of the greatest if British film musicians of the postwar era.
DeleteHa says someone not liking the fact James’s is exposing all the corruption in
ReplyDeleteAlba
Stu Campbell doesn’t touch these stories. Presumably because he doesn’t want to admit he was wrong.
The mainstream press really do not care about Alba.
So only James documents the truth about how poisonous the party is.
Of course that’s uncomfortable for people in Alba who are hoping to grift their was to an MSP seat
Stu seems to get on well with Alba types and actually retweeted Alba-supportive tweets today.
DeleteStu has zero principles. He rants about the SNP but supports Alba who behave worse
DeleteIs McEleny careerist? He was an electrician and worked in the party machine and/or humble councillor while his politics are motivated by conscience Catholic social values. Not sure careerist.
ReplyDelete"McEleny"
Delete"values"
😆 LOL 🤣
I don’t think McEleny is a careerist. He’d passed SNP vetting to be an MP unlike several of those in Alba. If he was a careerist he’d have done much better to stick with the SNP
DeleteAs opposed to join a new party whose leader had already guaranteed him the role of General Secretary and a fat salary?
DeleteChris already had a ‘fat salary’ as leader of the opposition group on Inverclyde council.
DeleteSo he swapped one for another, probably calculating (wrongly) that he had a better chance of becoming an MSP in Alba.
DeleteHe did the job for free for six months. Imagine he would’ve made more money as an electrician and leader of the snp on the council than he did as general secretary or even as an MSP
DeleteHe's practically Jesus (but with a salary).
DeleteIs it anticipated that Tas will stand in Glasgow?
ReplyDeleteShe will definitely be top of the Glasgow list.
DeleteJames - "The Alba branding has always been toxic".
ReplyDeleteWhen the party first launched they enjoyed goodwill from many, many of us, not least given the vast wealth of committed and capable activists that joined them from the off. So, not a toxic brand then.
It became toxic, yes, fast and continued to get even more toxic henceforth..... but it was not always toxic.
Agreed.
DeleteWhy did Alba get toxic?
Delete"Why did Alba get toxic?" - please can I refer you to previous blog posts on this blog, this topic exhaustively covered by James.
DeleteAgree that WoS is fast heading for irrelevance, aided by the website experiencing all of its recent & seemingly recurrent problems, highly off-putting (but not as off-putting as the content)
ReplyDeleteHave a read at some of his views on Gaza on other platforms and make your own mind up.
ReplyDeleteYes, RevStu is a big Netanyahu fan.
DeleteFrom Green Harvie: "Times when instead of speaking up in an open and democratic way, a small minority of members have taken to anonymous leaks, smears and insults, undermining the work of fellow members and damaging our whole party and our reputation by doing so."
ReplyDeleteActually it's the members who do speak up in public, or whose leaks criticise the leadership, that makes the Greens as a whole, more attractive and enhances their reputation. They used to be fellow travelers on the road to Independence, and openly and publicly critical members are needed to get the Green party back onto that road.
As a leader it is not for Harvie to criticise members - it is the other way around - members should be able to criticise the leadership. To attempt to suppress that criticism makes Harvie look autocratic, dictatorial, totalitarian and a wannabee tinpot despot. And to make matters worse it seems he reserves the right to announce his preference for the new leader(s) - just as he did for the SNP leadership (to their eternal shame some actually paid attention).
The guy is carried away with his ego, but is symptomatic of what is wrong with probably ALL political parties. No respect for members.
yir2 at 1.29 am ... OTT twaddle.
DeleteYou would say that, Lorna.
DeleteBreaking news. Ash Regan defects to the Scottish Green Party and launches leadership bid. Chris McEleny for depute.
ReplyDeleteMaggie Chapman: 'I welcome both Ash and Chris. Any differences we may have had over all that trans nonsense is water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned'
Ayre, sure. Anyway, Scots Greens don't have Leader/ Depute Leader set-up, they instead have a dual Leadership system (ancient Sparta ran a system of dual monarchy, 2 royal families reigning alongside each other as standard - perhaps that's the inspiration?), male & female.
DeleteInteresting. How do the Scots Greens define male and female, I wonder?
DeletePatrick and Lorna ...
Delete