The Alba Party descends further into shambles and corruption: the Corri Nostra tightens its unelected grip on the party, an NEC member angrily doubles down on the official fiction that no vote-rigging occurred in 2023, Stuart Campbell lets slip that a senior Alba figure has got away with a severe breach of the party's Code of Conduct, while Tasmina gets on with the vital task of selling real estate in the United Arab Emirates

When the history is eventually written of how Alba ceased to exist as a credible political force, Friday 16th May 2025 will probably look like something of a landmark day.  Most important of course was the party's catastrophic result in the Clydebank Waterfront by-election, taking just 1.6% of the vote - and that happened in spite of the fact that Alba deliberately only puts up candidates in a tiny minority of by-elections these days, so they can concentrate their resources in the ones they do stand in.  For the first time, this disaster has caused some Alba members to seriously wonder whether the party can survive in its current form long enough to even stand in the 2026 election.

But there were also plenty of other things going on at roughly the same time.  The Alba NEC member Charlie Abel made a spectacularly ill-judged response on Twitter to someone who asked him why people should support Alba after they rigged their own 2023 internal elections.  He flatly denied reality, insisting the vote-rigging never took place, which many of the Alba rank-and-file regard as a contemptuous insult to their intelligence.  This is what he said:

"The 'cheating' did not happen.   I see people throwing  malicious accusations without evidence, against a party fighting for independence. I don't know their reasons. I prefer to trust my own mind and instinct, and would question rather, the judgement of the many, often anonymous keyboard warriors, who are doing nothing to help our Independence cause but stoke anger."

And then with jaw-dropping cynicism and arrogance, he added:

"Truth eventually wins.  That's also why you should still support Alba and vote for indy on the list in 2026."

You're right about one thing, Charlie.  Truth will win.  And that by definition means that Alba will lose unless it stops treating its own members like idiots.  A common theme among all organisations where disastrous failings have occurred (such as the BBC after the Jimmy Savile revelations or the Metropolitan Police after the investigation into Stephen Lawrence's murder) is that it's only possible to move on and regain trust after the facts have been admitted and acknowledged by the organisation's leadership, and after the toxic culture that allowed those failings to occur has been comprehensively addressed.  The Alba leadership hasn't even begun that process yet, and it seems the intention is never to begin.  Realistically, Charlie Abel is only saying these things because those higher up are instructing him to.

Meanwhile, with glorious irony, the two main beneficiaries of the direct vote-buying aspect of the 2023 vote-rigging, namely Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and Abdul Majid, were seen on Facebook getting on with the vital task of making even more money by selling real estate in the United Arab Emirates.

As regular readers of the blog will recall, the assumption of insiders I've spoken to is that the bulk vote-buying in 2023 was intended primarily to help Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and that Abdul Majid was an 'accidental beneficiary' - but it was because the little-known-but-wealthy Majid topped the male ballot for Ordinary NEC Members by such a wildly implausible margin that the decision was taken to keep all of the results secret.  Chris McEleny then demeaned himself by trotting out a series of excruciatingly bad cover stories for the hush-up - first he claimed that it was "important to avoid embarrassment for good candidates who received no votes" and then eventually he settled on a nonsensical explanation about data compliance issues.

OK, there's nothing illegal about spending your time in plush Glasgow hotels selling UAE real estate, but the optics are dreadful, and Alba members will again wonder about Tasmina's sense of priorities, and about whether Alba to her has really been about the accumulation of money and status, rather than about the pursuit of Scottish independence.

Meanwhile, Friday also saw an announcement that Kirsty Fraser, the Alba Women's Convener and one of the more independently-minded people to be elected to the NEC a few weeks ago, has resigned for what are described as "personal reasons". She has been replaced on an unelected basis by Debbie Ewen - a key member of the "Corri Nostra" which functions as a party-within-a-party, and which already had a tight grip on Alba due to Corri Wilson's unelected role as "Director of Operations" and Chris Cullen's unelected role as an NEC member.  (He made two attempts to get elected spots on the NEC and failed on both occasions, but it didn't matter because he and his immature fiancée Shannon Donoghue had already abused their positions on the Constitution Review Group to wangle a guaranteed unelected spot for him.)

And last but not least, there's the damning information that Stuart Campbell let slip on Twitter.  The fact that he did it was a side-benefit of his truly epic (and still ongoing) meltdown about his "tactical voting" debate with me not working out in quite the way that he'd hoped.

I mean, I know why Alba really kicked him out, but I don't give a sh*t.

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) May 16, 2025

I defy anyone to interpret that as meaning anything other than that Campbell, who has never been a member of the Alba Party, was directly informed of the real reason for my expulsion.  I of course was never informed of the reason.  It hasn't been hard for me to work it out by inference - it was undoubtedly the leadership's fury that I stood up to them on both the Disciplinary Committee and the Constitution Review Group.  But nevertheless, disciplinary proceedings are strictly confidential, and it's hard to think of a more serious breach of the party's Code of Conduct than to pass such confidential information on to a non-member while withholding it from the subject of the hearing.  

Only a few senior figures within the party would have had the information, so by definition Campbell is implying that a senior Alba member severely breached the Code of Conduct and got away with it.  Campbell of course met Alex Salmond in person at the IMAX event shortly before Salmond's death, by which point the action against me was already underway.  But there are also a few other possibilities of who the culprit (or culprits) may have been.

Alba is a profoundly corrupt organisation in which the party constitution, the Code of Conduct, and internal democracy itself, are all shams.  All that really talks is money, blood connections, and transactional arrangements.