The Alba Party implodes as Alex Salmond's closest "telepathic confidante" Chris McEleny is ruthlessly EXPELLED FROM THE PARTY - so will Ash Regan now leave in protest?

This just goes to show that once a political party has a culture of arbitrary, summary execution, that culture doesn't really change - or not without huge difficulty.  You might look at Kenny MacAskill and think he's a likeable, mild-mannered sort of chap (and for what it's worth, that's my own personal experience of him), but once he identified Chris "Mad Dog" McEleny as a personal enemy, he proved just as ruthless and unscrupulous as McEleny himself had always been in dealing with his own personal enemies.  It's like learned behaviour - once the culture is there, you just don't know how else to behave, and you'd probably be astonished to learn that external observers think what you're doing is downright odd and are looking on in a state of bemusement and disbelief.

This might be a surprising thing for me to say, but I personally think this is yet another day of shame for the Alba Party.  It's not that I don't think Chris McEleny was guilty of gross misconduct - he absolutely was.  It's not that I don't think he deserved to be expelled - he absolutely did.  But the gross misconduct he should actually have been expelled for was as follows...

* His role in the blatant rigging of the 2023 Alba internal elections.  The best-documented part of that was his removal of Jacqui Bijster's name from the list of candidates for Ordinary Members of the NEC, even though she had been properly nominated and hadn't expressed any wish to withdraw.

* His cynical certification of countless Alba members as having "publicly resigned from the party", even though in many cases they had done no such thing.  This had the effect of bypassing the proper disciplinary process and insta-expelling them.

* His abuse of his role as General Secretary to get people he disliked expelled.  The most blatant example of this was the extreme pressure he put on the Disciplinary Committee to expel Colin Alexander, who had made an irreverent joke about him on Twitter.  He even lied to the committee and told us that Mr Alexander had expressed no wish to attend his disciplinary hearing, which was absolutely untrue.

But apparently, according to Alba, the above behaviour is all totally normal and fine.  The gross misconduct that McEleny has instead been expelled for is making a few mildly critical comments about Kenny MacAskill.  That tells you all you need to know about Alba - it's a Stalinist party that is sick to its core.

Since my own time on the Disciplinary Committee, it has been renamed the Conduct Committee, but as far as I know it hasn't yet been re-elected, so its membership is unlikely to have changed much, except possibly for the NEC appointments (I vaguely heard on the grapevine that Josh Robertson, aka "JoshBot 6000", may have stepped down as chair).  That means Chris Cullen, mired in his own corruption scandal as I outlined in the previous blogpost, is likely to have played a role in McEleny's expulsion, as is Jackie Reid, mum of Alba HQ's wonderbairn Robert Reid, and also Christina "of Salmond blood" Hendry, who is Reid's girlfriend.  During meetings of the committee I attended last year, Hendry, Cullen and Reid all strongly expressed their support for a Stalinist system in which all rank-and-file Alba members have a duty never to express personal views that the leadership disapprove of, except possibly behind closed doors and not necessarily even then.

The big question now is what Ash Regan will do.  She has gone out of her way to publicly associate herself with McEleny, and even went as far as adding him to her paid Holyrood staff while the disciplinary action against him was already underway.  It is hard to see how her position within Alba is now tenable.  If she does leave, MacAskill, Ahmed-Sheikh and the Corri Nostra will pay a heavy price for upholding the culture of Mafia-style vengeance and bloodletting within Alba, because they will quickly discover that without their only MSP, they don't really have a party at all.

I follow the Moskva

Down to Gorky Park

Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

An August summer night

Soldiers passing by

Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

Take me 

To the magic of the moment

On a glory night

Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)

In the wind of CHANGE

Mmmmm

 

"And it's goodnight from him."