The man sacked as Alba's General Secretary three months ago for "gross misconduct" appears to now be working - at public expense - as a policy advisor for Alba's "Holyrood leader". This is not a sustainable situation.

Thanks to Anon on the previous thread for alerting us to the fact that Chris McEleny has a new job - and having consulted his LinkedIn profile, I can confirm that he does.

Don't worry - this doesn't mean that the Scottish Parliament collectively has lost the plot.  It almost certainly just means that Ash Regan has hired him to work for her at Holyrood, albeit paid for from the public purse.  But let's set aside the incomprehensible corporate gibberish about "collaborating with stakeholders to drive impactful promotion" - the fact that he's advising Alba's so-called Holyrood leader on policy is pretty astounding, given that he's just been sacked by Alba's real leader for gross misconduct.  Part of that gross misconduct was, I believe, making controversial pronouncements on policy matters (such as his notorious asylum seeker-bashing comments) without authorisation.

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.

The Rev's in a Stew: astounding scenes on X, formerly known as Twitter, as Somerset's favourite clergyman *does his nut*

My faithful Somerset stalker, such a thrillingly foul-mouthed man of God, always assures his dwindling band of readers that he can't possibly be stalking me because he only tweets about me twice a year.  But even if he hadn't already long since vastly exceeded his quota of two tweets for 2025, he'd have done it more than twice over today alone with at least five characteristically well-adjusted tweets, in which among other things he calls me a "pathetically cowardly little weasel".

The main purpose of his rant was, remarkably, to out himself as one of this blog's much-loved gang of anonymous trolls who I have to clear up after on a daily basis, and to share some obsessively-collected screenshots of the troll posts that I later deleted (very un-stalker-like behaviour on his part, I'm sure we can all agree).  This will not be a major surprise to a number of the regulars here who have long suspected that they can see the "Stew Style" in some of the Anon comments.  There was one lengthy comment in particular a few days ago that someone thought was Stew, and if it was indeed him, the remarkable thing is that he appeared to be completely unaware that Panelbase (a firm that both he and I commissioned polls from on many occasions) has rebranded as Norstat.

Stew is a man after the heart of the "Crossmaglen Columbo", because he clearly wants to believe that his comment in the early hours of this morning was some sort of ingenious "Gotcha" that was only deleted because there was no possible answer to it - as opposed to, y'know, because it was merely one of the dozens of anonymous troll comments I receive on an average day, and if I tried to answer them all I'd never get around to eating dinner or getting my shopping done.  But just this once I'll humour the blessed West Country cleric and answer the comment that seems to be particularly close to his heart.

Basically he was responding to a post in which I pointed out the contradiction between his claim in December that there was "zero chance" of the pro-indy Holyrood majority being retained in the 2026 election, and his claim two days ago that the SNP are well on course for five more years in power. He tried to pray in aid a point of pedantry by saying that it's possible for the SNP to stay in power while losing the pro-indy majority. But as I pointed out to a rather more civil commenter who made an identical point a few hours later, Stew has already conceded in a blogpost a few months ago that there is a real chance of the pro-independence majority being retained, so it's rather puzzling that he appears to be reverting to trying to hold the line on a claim that he's long since repudiated.

But let's humour him and assume hypothetically that he really is trying to thread the needle and claim that he knows with a high level of confidence that the 2026 election will definitely fall within the relatively narrow band of possible results in which the SNP retain power but without a pro-indy majority.  There's an obvious logical problem with that, because he specifically says that the reason for his belief that the SNP will retain power is the current state of play in the opinion polls, and yet the vast majority of those polls suggest the SNP and Greens between them are on course to retain the pro-indy majority.  So he'd have to be saying that the opinion polls are right that the SNP are in the lead, but wrong about the scale of that lead.  Is he saying that?  If so, why is he saying that?  I'm not sure he even knows himself.

Indeed, the polls would have to be overestimating the SNP lead by a truly spectacular degree, because for Stew to maintain that there is "zero chance" of a pro-indy majority, the SNP and Greens would have to currently be nowhere near even striking distance of a majority.  That clearly is not the reality of the situation, unless the polls are systemically wrong - and if you believe the polls are systemically wrong, why would you be so confident the SNP are in the lead?  It just doesn't make sense, Stew, and you know it doesn't make sense.

He finishes his rant with the following:

"However much you know you should ignore him, it really is hard not to laugh at someone whose debating skills are as hysterically brittle as this."

Hmmm.  Are you quite sure that's the hill you want to die on, Stew?  After all, you're the chap who boasts about your instablock policy for anyone who disagrees with you on Twitter.  You first blocked me in 2016 because you couldn't cope with me pointing out that the standard 3% margin of error in individual opinion polls doesn't apply to long-term polling averages - a point that even your devoted fan Rolfe (Morag Kerr) picked you up on too.

And you're also the chap who was so unable to cope with a single short comment from Douglas Clark on this blog that instead of responding to it, you got your solicitor David Halliday to send me menacing messages at the dead of night with all sorts of implied threats about what would happen if I didn't delete it.  Anyone would think you didn't have a credible defence to Douglas' claim that you disgracefully blamed the Hillsborough victims for the 1989 disaster.

No, I'm afraid no-one can even hold a candle to you on the "hysterically brittle" stakes, Stew.

McEleny's victims left bemused as he announces Alba should be a "tent big enough for all" just three months after his sacking as the party's Chief Executioner. Damascene conversions are always lovely but the timing of this one may be just a tad convenient.

Chris McEleny: "Alba is a broad church with the raison d'être of restoring independence for Scotland so it needs the support of all of Scotland & has to appeal to all of Scotland.

That means voices of the left, a pro business offering & a tent big enough for all."https://t.co/ysmV8o7eRV

— Christopher McEleny (@ChrisMcEleny) April 10, 2025

That's a fine-sounding sentiment from Chris McEleny, variously known to Alba members as "Disgruntled Employee", "Conduct Christopher", "Mad Dog McEleny" and "That's Mad Dog PRIMUS To You", but it's not really consistent with the industrial-scale purges he carried out during his tenure as Alba's General Secretary, which only ended with his sacking three months ago.  If he's now abandoned his previous mission to make Alba a narrow, paranoid, authoritarian sect, and has instead embraced the wisdom of big-tent inclusivity, his Damascene conversion may have come just a bit too late.  But cynics may also wonder if since his sacking he's in fact been saying a great many things he doesn't actually believe, as he tries to reinvent himself in preparation for whatever the post-Alba vehicle for his ongoing political ambitions turns out to be.

His tweet is in response to negative media commentary about Tommy Sheridan's election to the Alba NEC.  Some have wondered if Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh might in some way have quietly encouraged that negativity.  That's purely speculative, but to my mind there's an ongoing mystery about Tommy's limited involvement in Alba's internal politics until now. Before McEleny got me expelled, I stood for the Alba NEC in three consecutive years, and on two of those occasions Tommy was initially listed as one of the candidates - but was mysteriously missing from the list when the ballot actually took place.  He was also strongly rumoured to be standing for Alba in the 2022 local elections, but again that mysteriously came to nothing.  I've asked around a few times to try to find out why his name always seemed to be removed, but nobody knows for sure.

Tommy has been going through some tough times in recent years, so it's possible he just decided to withdraw for personal reasons.  But given that we now know from Craig Murray and others that Alex Salmond had a habit of manipulating Alba internal elections by making phone calls and pressurising candidates to withdraw, it's at least plausible he did the same thing to Tommy, and indeed that he did so at the behest of Tasmina - who started her political career as a Tory candidate and who still holds right-of-centre views that are light-years away from what Tommy stands for.

If this theory is correct, it begs the question: has the Tas Tyranny been weakened just enough that she wasn't able to block Tommy's candidacy this time?  And if so, is she now continuing her war against him by alternative means?  This could be a major faultline that's worth keeping an eye on.

I don't know if I'm the only person who does this, but when an election takes place in a foreign country, I often look up the parties involved on Wikipedia and decide who I want to do well by seeing how left-wing they are described as being in the "political position" box.  I was slightly bemused after my expulsion to see that Alba's political position is listed on Wikipedia as "centre-left to centre-right".  I'm not sure how on earth I ever ended up in a party that could possibly have the "centre-right" label attached to it.  I certainly would never have joined Alba in the first place if I had thought it was going to be anything other than a social democratic party in the mould of the Salmond-era SNP.

But it's hard to deny that Alba has mutated into something different since 2021.  Partly that's due to the prominence of Tasmina and her Tory views, partly it's due to McEleny and Ash Regan pushing for Reform-style right-wing populism on certain issues, and of course it's partly due to Shannon Donoghue's notorious decision to take part in a far-right podcast. Tommy Sheridan is certainly needed to balance things up just a touch.

The Speeding-Up Of Evolution

Stuart Campbell, 3rd December 2024: "We’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening"

Stuart Campbell, 9th April 2025: "the SNP, a party which has been in uninterrupted government in Scotland for almost 18 years and which current polling suggests will remain in power until at least 2031, taking that number up to 24 years"

OK, I'll throw it out there - does anyone recall a nuclear war or an alien invasion in the four-and-a-bit months between 3rd December and 9th April?

Stuart Campbell, 11th June 2023 (and every other day): "You know I'm always right."

Doomsday poll for Labour has them in a distant third place on just 22% of the vote - and Rachel Reeves is almost as unpopular as Donald Trump

Regular readers will recall the oddity of the monthly Freshwater Strategy / City AM series of voting intentions polls, which are almost invisible - even City AM themselves don't always seem to report the results.  However, the latest poll is such a horror show for Labour that I thought it would be remiss of me not to dig it out.

GB-wide voting intentions (Freshwater Strategy / City AM):

Reform UK 28%
Conservatives 27%
Labour 22%
Liberal Democrats 14%
Greens 5%
SNP 2%

Until very recently, 22% would have equalled Labour's post-election low, but More In Common have recently reported a new record of 21%.  But 22% is still an abysmal figure, and given that it puts Labour six points behind Reform *and* five points behind the Tories, there's a case to be made that this is the worst poll for Starmer so far.

I've gone through the records to see how Labour's current predicament compares with how the party performed under Jeremy Corbyn.  The lowest Labour vote share I can find during the Corbyn tenure was 18%, which may well also be the record low for Labour since the Second World War - I'm not aware of comprehensive records being available anywhere, but I can't think of any other period since 1945 (including even the early 1980s) when it's remotely likely Labour would have dropped so low.  Even under Corbyn, only a tiny percentage of polls had Labour sub-20, but nevertheless it did happen occasionally, so technically Starmer can still claim to be not quite as unpopular as Corbyn was at his absolute lowest points - but the way things are going, he may not be able to make that claim for very much longer.

There are net approval ratings for leading public figures, and both Starmer (-39) and Rachel Reeves (-43) are very nearly as unpopular as Donald Trump (-44).  What will be even more alarming for Starmer is that on the head-to-head question about whether he or Kemi Badenoch would make the best Prime Minister, Badenoch is the clear winner by a margin of 40% to 32%.  That's the question that is often considered more predictive of election results than even headline voting intention numbers.  I'm very surprised to see Badenoch ahead, because the public's reaction to her has been tepid, so it must be assumed she's only ahead by default because Starmer is so loathed.

One of the reasons these Freshwater polls are going largely unnoticed is that they do not appear in Wikipedia's list of polls.  There's a very confusing discussion on the Wikipedia Talk page about the rationale for excluding Freshwater - it basically boils down to the fact that Freshwater are not members of the British Polling Council, but the Wikipedia users can't even agree with each other about what they had previously agreed their policy should be on non-BPC polling firms.  I'd have to say those who are claiming that it was previously agreed to include non-BPC polls must be correct, because Lord Ashcroft polls have appeared on the list for years, and Ashcroft isn't a BPC member.

One user claimed that if they included non-BPC polls, they'd soon find themselves including self-selecting Twitter polls, which is a piece of absolutely hysterical hyperbole.  There are about a billion increments between a BPC poll and a self-selecting online poll.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 in January, and so far the running total stands at £1830, meaning that 27% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

What would be the consequences of Reform taking power in Wales next spring?

As I always point out, YouGov's Scottish subsamples are of more interest than those from other polling firms, because they appear to be correctly structured and weighted (albeit they still have a very large margin of error due to the small sample size).  The latest one is healthy enough, giving the SNP a big 14-point lead, and with Labour in third place - but behind the Tories rather than Reform UK.

What I'm not sure about is whether YouGov follow the same practice with their Welsh subsamples.  If they do, alarm bells should be ringing, because these are the up-to-date numbers: Reform UK 24%, Plaid Cymru 23%, Labour 23%, Conservatives 15%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Greens 3%.  Those are Westminster numbers, but nevertheless they're within the margin of error of the recent full-scale Senedd poll from Survation which gave Labour a slender three-point lead over both Plaid and Reform.  They're also very similar to the last full-scale Welsh poll from YouGov themselves a few months ago, which famously had Plaid in a one-point lead over Reform.

It's clear there is a genuinely competitive three-way battle for first place at next year's Senedd election between Plaid, Labour and Reform, and it's difficult to read what is most likely to happen.  There's actually an argument that Reform might do even better than the polls suggest, because their support base skews older, and it's older people who turn out to vote most reliably.  But the counter-argument is that Reform voters are largely Brit Nats, and a fair few of them are actually English immigrants to Wales, who might not see much point of voting in a Senedd election.  So if anything next year will be a home fixture for Plaid, and they might just out-perform the polls and dramatically clinch first place.

One way or another, though, this looks like being a major story and predictably it's barely even being covered by the London media.  Reform's first chance to take power, with control over (among other things) the NHS and education, will not come in 2028 or 2029, but as soon as next May.  And that thought must privately fill Nigel Farage with absolute horror, because if they make a complete hash of ministerial office in Wales, as they probably would, it might well destroy their chances of winning UK-wide at the general election.

In which case, the good news for Farage is that Plaid, Labour and the Lib Dems between them will almost certainly have the numbers to freeze Reform out if they so choose, even if Reform are in first place.  It remains to be seen whether such an arrangement would be under a Labour or a Plaid First Minister, which is obviously of huge psychological and symbolic importance.

That would be the ideal scenario for Farage as 2028/9 approaches - the status and momentum of first place but without any of the responsibilities of power.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 in January, and so far the running total stands at £1800, meaning that 26% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you're in the Corri Nostra, it's not only forbidden for you to lose, it's literally impossible for you to lose. The final nail in the coffin for the Alba Party, as Chris Cullen, having been rejected TWICE by party members in elections to the NEC, simply appoints himself to the NEC anyway. A nice set-up if you can wangle it.

Last night, the "Alba Founders" Twitter account claimed that Chris Cullen, despite having been soundly defeated in the election for Alba's Local Government Convener, and soundly defeated in the election for Ordinary NEC members, had then simply been appointed to the NEC anyway due to a convenient change in the party constitution giving an automatic spot to a local councillor.  

I've asked around, and although everyone I spoke to thought the story had the ring of truth to it, nobody could give me definite confirmation.  But then I tried a different tack.  I checked the full text of the constitutional revision that was presented to the Alba conference as a fait accompli, and sure enough, buried in there is a short, newly added sentence giving an unelected place on the NEC to not just one but TWO local councillors.  Rather cosily, Alba has precisely two councillors at present and one of them is Chris Cullen.  So his appointment is automatic.

It gets even better, of course, because as long-term readers of the blog know, the constitutional revision was authored by the eight-member Constitutional Review Group, of which Chris Cullen was a member, and his immature fiancée Shannon Donoghue was another member (but the latter was only there on a 'lucky loser' basis after one of the elected members of the group resigned in protest at repeated breaches of the existing constitution).  I was also an elected member of the group until last September - but I ceased to be a member for one reason only, namely that Chris Cullen, his fiancée Shannon Donoghue and others jointly submitted a spurious complaint about me (more specifically about this entirely innocuous blogpost), which ultimately led to my outright expulsion from the party by a kangaroo court.  As far as I know, I was never replaced on the group, which meant that Chris Cullen and his fiancée Shannon Donoghue (who also just happens to be the daughter of Corri Wilson, the party's new General Secretary) had successfully contrived to make themselves a full two-sevenths of the Constitution Review Group, which then went on to write a provision into the constitution making Cullen himself an automatic appointment to the NEC until May 2027 - when, barring miracles, he will lose his seat on South Ayrshire Council.

Cullen then proceeded last month with the pantomime of standing in no fewer than two sets of elections for positions on the NEC, knowing full well that he had already ensured he was going to be on the NEC regardless of whether he won or lost - but of course he didn't bother mentioning that little detail to the people he was asking for votes from.  "No matter how you vote, you'll get me anyway!" is never the most promising of election slogans.

I mean, there's cynicism, and there's nepotism, but there's only one word strong enough for this latest stunt from Cullen, Donoghue and the wider Corri Nostra - and that word is corruption.

To recap, the following is what Cullen and Donoghue made sure was NOT in the constitutional revision after my expulsion:

* One member one vote for NEC elections

* Direct elections for the all-powerful Conference Committee

* Direct elections for the Disciplinary and Appeals Committees

* The removal of the leadership's right to directly appoint top-up members of the Conference and Disciplinary Committees

* Direct elections for the Party Chair, currently an appointed role

* The introduction of either a Policy Development Committee or a Policy Development Convener, to put an end to the ad hoc, back-of-an-envelope approach to Alba policy formation

And the following is what Cullen and Donoghue ensured DID make it into the constitutional revision after my expulsion:

* That Cullen should have an automatic place on the NEC regardless of whether he wins or loses elections to the NEC.

You've gotta admire the Corri Nostra's sense of priorities.

Angry James’ skewed version of events in his many blogs are entertaining for some, but there’s less fiction in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland https://t.co/dS2Wum5EV8

— Chris Cullen (@chris_cullen83) March 31, 2025

This of course has been the Alba leadership's go-to tactic in response to any of the details I've revealed in my blogposts - ie. make very vague and generalised claims that I'm either lying or exaggerating, but without giving any specifics at all about what they're alleging the inaccuracies to be or what they're claiming the truth is instead.  Which is hardly surprising, because on the rare occasions they've been drawn into discussing specifics, they've ended up looking more than a little tongue-tied.  For example, when Alba HQ's Robert Reid claimed it was ludicrous to suggest that the "ordinary Alba members" who had expelled me were involved in some kind of leadership-directed stitch-up, all I had to do was ask him "Robert, is it true that precisely four members of the Disciplinary Committee voted to expel me, and of those four, three-quarters were either directly appointed by the leadership or are your own girlfriend or your own mum?". And he kind of went "er, um, well, erm, could we talk about the Appeals Committee instead?"

But in all seriousness I do take exception to Cullen's tweet, because in accusing me of writing fiction he's quote-tweeted his fiancée making a string of allegations against me that are a work of fiction from beginning to end.  I've already corrected most of Donoghue's lies, ie. she's interacted with me on more than two occasions, I did not scour through months of her Instagram posts (too grim a task even for me, Shannon), the parody comments using her name were not written by me, and I did not pre-approve the publication of those comments because pre-moderation on this blog is almost always switched off.  But one lie I haven't yet corrected is her claim that I have "made reference to her looks".  From the start I was 99% sure that was untrue, but I didn't want to directly accuse Shannon of lying about it until I was 100% sure.  And now I am.  I've checked thoroughly, and I've also asked several people whether they can ever remember me commenting on Shannon's looks, even in a throwaway remark, and the answer is a resounding no.  It never happened.  Shannon has lied.  And unlike the other lies, she doesn't have the alibi of being able to say she was misinformed by others.  She lied knowingly and deliberately, and her motivation for doing so was profoundly cynical.  It wasn't a fiction Lewis Carroll would have been proud of, but it was a fiction just the same.

Incidentally, just to dot the remaining 'i's and cross the remaining 't's, it'll be no surprise to anyone to hear that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was quietly reappointed Party Chair on Saturday, and will therefore remain Alba's unelected Tyrant-Queen for yet another year.  That's ultimately what most of the bullying and the purges and the lies and the stitch-ups and the double-dealing has been in aid of.  I hope you think it was all worth it, Tas, because I can promise you that hardly anyone else will.

Scottish Curling, brought to you by "British Curling"

I have quite an impressive track record of getting myself in the Daily Express (complete with irate quotes from the Scottish Conservative Party!) when I post about curling, so as Scotland won the World Championships overnight, I thought it might be a good moment to have another go, and dig out some photos from my trip to the Scottish Championships in Dumfries two months ago when I got to see Team Mouat in action.  Of course they didn't actually win that week, and if the traditional system had applied, that would have meant they wouldn't have even represented Scotland at the worlds.   That long-standing tradition was scrapped relatively recently and replaced with a selection panel.  I get the impression from listening to other people milling around in Dumfries both last year and this year that most of the curling fraternity fully expected the panel to still take very strong account of the results of the Scottish Championships, but it's absolutely clear they're not doing that at all - Team Henderson and Team Whyte have won the women's and men's Scottish titles respectively for two straight years but on both occasions they've been passed over.

Of course any new and controversial selection policy lives and dies by its results, and now that Team Mouat have won for Scotland, nobody will be complaining.   But for better or worse, one effect the new system undoubtedly has is to downgrade the prestige of the Scottish Championships, which is in danger of starting to look like no more than a warm-up competition.

Regular readers may recall that I got a sort of 'exclusive' at last year's Scottish Championships because I was sitting within earshot of a Scottish Curling bigwig who was speaking very loudly about the controversy over the BBC's last-minute decision not to livestream the competition - he revealed that BBC Scotland had been perfectly happy to go ahead, but that in the finest traditions of the British state broadcaster, they had been overruled by their masters in Salford.  This year, amazingly, I found myself sitting in similarly close proximity to a bigwig from "British Curling", and I wondered if I might get another exclusive, but alas he was speaking more softly.  I did pick him up saying that "grown-up decisions will have to be made starting in April", which I presume was a reference to Olympic selection, but I doubt if there's any earth-shattering revelation in that.

But given that the British Olympic Association seemingly put totally inappropriate pressure on Scottish Curling to allow "British Curling" to form the selection panel that chooses Scottish teams for the World and European Championships, and given that Scottish Curling inappropriately agreed to that demand (presumably they felt they had no choice for funding reasons), it did leap out at me that this particular British Curling bigwig had a strong south-of-England accent and that during hours of sitting watching the Scottish Championships he repeatedly used the words "British" and "UK" but only used the word "Scotland" once - and that was within the context of "BBC Sport Scotland".  I looked him up online when I got home, and his biography describes him as having a "strong connection to all three nations of the mainland United Kingdom".  Who actually talks like that?  What in the name of heavens is "the mainland United Kingdom"?  Does it mean the island of Great Britain?  It reminds me of the Newspeak language used at Conservative Party conferences in the 1990s when delegates from Buckinghamshire used to queue up to denounce devolution by saying "My father fought in the Scots Guards and my great-grandmother was once rumoured to have been on holiday in Monmouth and thanks to Labour's devolution policy I am TOTALLY CONFUSED ABOUT WHO I AM!  We're all one glorious mixed-up UNITED KINGDOM PEOPLE, surely?"

Actually he seemed like a nice enough chap, but it should be an absolutely unbreakable principle that the selection of the Scottish national teams in any sport is done by the relevant Scottish governing body, not contracted out under pressure to some sort of supranational body.  The English FA would never agree to hand over selection of the England manager and team to UEFA, or to a Frankenstein "UK Football" body.

The Olympics are next year, so if Steve Cram is commentating for the BBC again, brace yourself for him to make endless claims that "this Great Britain team are the reigning world champions" without any clarification that the team was actually representing Scotland when they won the World Championships.

Alba is now the party where women are told to wheesht

Zulfikar Sheikh of the Alba Party: "Your hate & jealousy is unmatched, on a daily basis you try & bad name @AlbaParty. @AlexSalmond is no longer with us to defend himself yet you carry on talking about him. @AlbaParty is no one’s to hand over to any one. STOP your hate STOP your bullying STOP your maligning. ENOUGH" https://t.co/hyHGyVUpJZ

— Zulfikar Sheikh (@zulfikar_sheikh) April 4, 2025

I know there's quite a bit of concern in the Alba Party, including even among many who are normally loyal to the leadership, about just how far Zulfikar Sheikh has gone in his latest frenzied outburst.  Telling a woman in no uncertain terms to shut up is not a great look in a party that has previously embraced the slogan "women won't wheesht", and in any case Denise Findlay is not just any woman.  Less than eighteen months ago, she was still the Alba Party's elected Organisation Convener, she was one of Alex Salmond's closest allies, and she worked tirelessly for the party - often at her own monetary expense.

For the uninitiated, Zulfikar is the husband of the unelected Alba Party Chair Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who is widely known to have given an ultimatum to Mr Salmond that effectively forced him to breach the party constitution by nullifying Ms Findlay's re-election as Organisation Convener in October 2023, and then re-running the election two months later without her as a candidate.  So if Ms Findlay should be hearing anything from the direction of the Sheikh family, it's a long-overdue apology, not this type of open harassment and abuse.

I suspect the Tas Talks director doth protest too much here.  Probably what triggered him was the suggestion that Mr Salmond "handed over" Alba to Tas.  But if it was really true - as Zulfikar furiously claims - that Alba is no-one's to hand over, it wouldn't even have been possible for Tas to invoke proprietorial rights and get Ms Findlay's re-election nullified.  The result would simply have stood, Ms Findlay would have remained Organisation Convener, and she would almost certainly still be a leading figure in the party to this day.  The reality is that Alba has been private property from day one, and the members who were promised an internal democracy have been played for mugs.

Needless to say, Zulfikar's latest rant is yet another clear breach of Alba's Code of Conduct and social media policy, which expressly forbid the "targeting of individuals", regardless of whether those individuals are current Alba members.  If consistency is applied, Zulfikar would now be facing expulsion proceedings.  But as we've seen repeatedly, members of the Alba elite (chiefly Zulfikar and Shannon Donoghue, but others as well) are in practice free to regularly breach the Code of Conduct on social media without ever facing any consequences.  It's rule number one of capitalism: the rules don't apply to the owners.

Another day, another new Kendall-driven polling low for Labour, as they slump to just 24% with Techne

Two new GB-wide polls today, and it's the Find Out Now poll that's attracting the most interest, because it shows Reform UK with a six-point lead over Labour, and the 'Stats 4 Lefties' account is arguing that would be enough to produce an absolute majority of seats for Reform.  However, in my opinion Techne's poll is even more significant, because it shows Labour on a new post-election low of 24% with the firm, reinforcing the impression that Liz Kendall's all-out war on society's most vulnerable has made things even worse for Labour than they already were.

GB-wide voting intentions (Techne, 2nd-3rd April 2025):

Reform UK 24% (-)

Labour 24% (-1)

Conservatives 23% (-)

Liberal Democrats 13% (-1)

Greens 8% (-)

SNP 3% (+1)

Although it often feels like Labour voters from last July have moved to Reform in their droves, according to the Techne data tables only 6% have actually done so.  There have been slightly greater movements to the Tories (9%), to the Liberal Democrats (9%) and to the Greens (8%).  The mind boggles as to what the effect would be if Reform do start breaking through with Labour voters to a greater extent.

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 2nd-3rd April 2025):

Reform UK 28% (+2)

Labour 22% (-1)

Conservatives 20% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 13% (+1)

Greens 11% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

22% isn't a new post-election low for Labour with Find Out Now, but it does equal the previous low.  Bang in line with the Techne poll, the data tables show that Labour have lost only 6% of their 2024 voters direct to Reform, although here the biggest slippage has been to the Greens (13%) - logical enough in the light of the anger about Kendall's announcement.

Would the Find Out Now numbers actually produce an overall Reform majority?  Maybe, although the projection will vary a bit depending on the model you use.  I put the percentages into the Electoral Calculus model, and it did produce a Reform majority but not by a safe margin (the target for a majority is 326 seats) -

Reform UK 332, Labour 138, Liberal Democrats 58, SNP 48, Conservatives 44, Plaid Cymru 4, Greens 4, Others 22

That would be quite something, wouldn't it - without even moving out of fourth place, the SNP would have overtaken the Tories UK-wide!

*  *  *

I received a sort of marketing email a few days ago asking me to give a mention to an updated Top 100 ranking of Scottish blogs of all types - ie. not just political blogs.  I'm happy enough to do that, because it has Scot Goes Pop in a very healthy seventh place - and in fact the top four places are all taken by newspaper feeds, so in terms of 'real' blogs, Scot Goes Pop is actually in third place.  I've no idea what the criteria for the ranking is - there are various metrics mentioned, but none of them seem to tally very precisely with the ranking itself.  

I've been receiving these emails periodically for about eight years, and they always remind me of being in Ibiza, because that's where I was when I got the first one in September 2017.  I checked back and Scot Goes Pop was in eleventh place back then, so there's been some progress in line with the recent increase in popularity shown by Stuart Campbell's favourite comparison site.  (Incidentally, the trend shown by that site has been accelerating - since I last mentioned it, the 28-day number of visits for Scot Goes Pop has increased from 60,000 to 72,000, while Wings' visits have dropped to just under 200,000.  Stuart used to boast about having ten times as many visits as Scot Goes Pop, which I doubt was ever really true, but the ratio has now dipped to less than 3-1.)

It's worth looking through the whole Top 100 ranking, because you'll find lots of interesting blogs of all types that you probably never knew existed.  It answers the oft-asked question "where are all the women bloggers?" - as you can see, they're out there in big numbers, but they just don't seem to be writing about politics.  There are travel blogs, fashion blogs, theatre blogs, lifestyle blogs, etc, etc.

Bombshell Survation poll shows that even Labour's *own members* dislike Starmer, Streeting, Kendall and Reeves - and like all people of taste and discernment, they haven't even heard of Ian Murray

As you may have seen, LabourList have been revealing the results of a poll they commissioned Survation to run among actual paid-up members of the Labour party.  Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Labour ministers have a positive net rating among Labour members, but what leaps out as astounding is that among the minority who have negative ratings just happen to be the party leader and his three key lieutenants who are driving the party's right-wing direction.

Net ratings of Labour ministers among Labour party members (Survation / LabourList):

Ed Miliband: +65

Angela Rayner: +46

Hilary Benn: +31

Lisa Nandy: +29

Yvette Cooper: +25

John Healey: +24

Bridget Phillipson: +23

Heidi Alexander: +19

Shabana Mahmood: +16

Jonathan Reynolds: +14

Peter Kyle: +13

Darren Jones: +11

Jo Stevens: +8

Lucy Powell: +8

David Lammy: +5

Angela Smith: +5

Ian Murray: +3

Pat McFadden: +3

Jenny Chapman: +3

Alan Campbell: +3

Steve Reed: +2

Wes Streeting: -2

Simon Hermer: -3

Keir Starmer: -13

Liz Kendall: -33

Rachel Reeves: -41

Now, I don't want to make sweeping statements about something I've only looked at very superficially, but on the face of it, there does seem to me to be an issue with this poll's methodology.  The numbers seem to be weighted to the results of the 2020 leadership election, which I'd have thought must mean that Rebecca Long-Bailey's voters are significantly over-represented, because since 2020 the composition of the Labour membership has fundamentally changed, becoming much less Corbynite and much more Starmerite.  However, the data tables show that even among Labour members who actually voted for Starmer in 2020, Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves have negative ratings (-12 and -21 respectively).  

Although Ian Murray just barely has a positive rating among all respondents, an exceptionally high 48% don't have an opinion about him at all, which probably means that they barely even know who he is.  That speaks volumes about what a low priority Scotland is for both the Labour party and the Labour government.  Among the others who only just eek out a positive rating, it's heartening to see that the awful David Lammy is not particularly well-regarded these days.  But the ongoing popularity of Lisa Nandy among Labour members is both inexplicable and depressing.

Here's the weird thing: the net ratings above have very little correlation with the betting odds on who will be the next Labour leader.  On the exchanges, Ed Miliband is priced at 100, which must surely be value - I understand the theory that he's already failed once as leader, but as the members will make the decision, and as they seem to adore him, and as he apparently may still be interested in the job...well, work it out for yourself.  He must have a higher than 1% chance.  Hilary Benn's excessive odds also look like value - he's probably being discounted because he's in his early 70s, but he's several years younger than Donald Trump and might look attractive as a caretaker Prime Minister in some circumstances.  And although punters are taking Angela Rayner's chances a bit more seriously, her odds of 15 probably still represent value.

Keir Starmer on 3rd September 1939:

"I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country will be undertaking a consultation with stakeholders to assess the possible negative impacts of any limited retaliatory action."

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 3, 2025

As rumours mount that Ash Regan may be on the brink of leaving the Alba party, Shannon Donoghue intervenes to demand that Regan must come to heel - but could such a petulant outburst backfire catastrophically?

I think by this stage it's fair to say that something is definitely afoot with Ash Regan, although probably only a tiny handful of people know exactly what's going on.  Even the best-informed people I know are unsure and are only able to speculate.  But here's what we do know.  Firstly, she refused to make any concession comments after her defeat to Kenny MacAskill.  That's highly unusual in any political party - remember that in spite of the anger and bitterness between the Kate Forbes and Humza Yousaf camps in the 2023 SNP leadership election, Forbes was extremely gracious and generous towards Yousaf in the immediate moments after the result was announced.

Secondly, yesterday many people independently noticed that Regan has suddenly removed the word "ALBA" from her Twitter handle.  It's extremely hard to see why she would have done that unless there was at least a question mark over her continued membership of the party.  There are various possibilities - perhaps she's already decided to leave and is preparing the ground for it.  Perhaps she just intends to quietly remain in a sort of limbo state, half-in, half-out, until McEleny's legal action is concluded, and only then make a decision about whether to leave for good.  Or perhaps she's trying to send a signal to the Alba leadership to see if they will make major concessions to keep her inside the tent.

Whatever her precise intention, there's no doubt that the Alba leadership have picked up on her signals.  Their tactic in response has not been to offer substantive concessions but instead to take presentational steps that they hope will make Regan look like the bad guy if she leaves.

It's pretty clear what they're doing here.  First of all they're making a big show of publicly love-bombing her as a valued member of the team to try to make her worry that any decision to leave will look inexplicable.  And secondly they've carefully selected a quote from her about unity to try to make her panic that they'll be able to portray her as a hypocrite if she walks away.

Which may sound like quite a cunning plan until you remember the Shannon Donoghue factor.  Shannon doesn't really do subtlety, it has to be said.

Shannon always thinks she's being really enigmatic and elliptical, but given her long track record of publicly attacking Regan (in flagrant breach of Alba's Code of Conduct, which apparently doesn't apply to Shannon), nobody is going to mistake the meaning of the tweet - she's saying that Regan has only talked about unity but hasn't put it into practice.  She's saying that Regan must now change her behaviour and come to heel.  

And because everyone knows Shannon is part of the leadership faction and will be in the loop on tactical thinking, it's also going to be obvious that Shannon's words are reflective of the leadership's intention in posting Regan's quotes on Twitter.  It shows that they were not genuine about presenting Regan as a valued part of the team and were instead threatening her.  That's not likely, I'd have thought, to produce a positive response.

This could be a very costly blunder on Shannon's part.  The brutal fact is that without Ash Regan the Alba leadership don't really have a party.  It's only Regan's seat at Holyrood that keeps them looking like a national party of any significance - if she walks away they'll be instantly reduced to fringe status on a par with the likes of the Scottish Libertarian Party, the Scottish Family Party or ISP.  There's not much point in Kenny MacAskill, Tas and the Corri Nostra having taken control of an organisation if five minutes later it turns into an empty shell.

Labour in total freefall as they slump to new post-election low in any poll from any polling firm

These numbers initially seemed so wild that I had to double-check they weren't an April Fool, but someone from More In Common posted them on Twitter this morning (ie. as opposed to yesterday) so they do appear to be absolutely real.

GB-wide voting intentions (More In Common, 28th-31st March 2025):

Conservatives 26% (+1)
Reform UK 25% (+1)
Labour 21% (-3)
Liberal Democrats 13% (+1)
Greens 7% (-3)
SNP 2% (-1)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

21% is a new post-election low for Labour, not only with More In Common but across all polling firms.  What makes it so startling is that the previous low of 22% was only ever recorded by Find Out Now - no other firm has shown a figure lower than 23% until now, so for More In Common to suddenly show 21% gives the impression of Labour falling through the floor.

Other firms have reported that Labour's position has stabilised very recently, albeit at an extremely low level.  The new Opinium poll at the weekend had Labour unchanged at 26% - but the snag is that the 26% in the previous poll was a post-election low with Opinium.  The new YouGov poll has Labour slightly recovering from a post-election low of 23% to get back to 24%, but that just looks like margin of error noise.

And before KC and his chums get excited, margin of error noise is almost certainly the explanation for the SNP's dip in the More In Common poll.  The Scottish subsample size is tiny.

*. *. *

Is this an April Fools Day joke from someone who literally films a weekly TV programme from his own living room? pic.twitter.com/6VGubYzC4e

— Heather McLean (@HeatherMc1960) April 1, 2025

My own question to Zulfs (a national treasure if ever there was one): if we're in our "living rooms", but you "see us", and "others can also see us", does that mean you've *installed spy cameras in our living rooms*?  Shocking behaviour.  Shannon will have to call the fire brigade on you.

A direct reply to Shannon Donoghue's threats: You, madam, are an overgrown adolescent bully straight out of "Mean Girls". You have an entitlement complex the size of Mont Blanc. I didn't tolerate your attempts at bullying during meetings of Alba's Constitution Review Group, and if you think your latest infantile threats are going to have a different outcome, you're living on another planet.

When I heard a few hours ago that Shannon Donoghue had once again blown her top about me on social media, I laughed and said "I've got the sacred annual tradition of the Scot Goes Pop April Fool to attend to, so this time Shannon will just have to wait".  But when I actually read her post and realised it contained a very clear threat, I had a change of heart.  I didn't tolerate that kind of nonsense from Stuart Campbell in early 2021 and I certainly have no intention of tolerating it from Shannon now.  So I'll have to dispense with the April Fool - a great pity, because what I had in mind was a cracker, but there's always next year.  

I'm going to start by correcting the factual inaccuracies contained within Shannon's threat.  They don't strike me as being especially important inaccuracies, but when someone is attempting to throw their weight around while making claims that simply aren't true, it's always useful to flag that up.  She claims that she has only ever interacted with me at two committee meetings - not true, there have also been abusive online interactions, and I'm 99% sure I met her at the 2023 Alba conference.  She claims that I am the author of the dozens of parody posts that have appeared under her name (or variants of her name such as "Shhhh Anon") in the comments section of this blog over the last few months.  That is not true either.  I am, however, the author of the "Great Zulfikar Sheikh" parody posts, and in that guise I have sometimes interacted with the person or persons behind Shannon's own parody.  On those occasions I had absolutely no idea who I was really interacting with, and that made it all the more enjoyable.

She claims that the parody comments under her name only appeared because I "approved" them (which oddly contradicts her claim that I wrote them myself).  In reality, I turned off pre-moderation of comments on this blog well over a year ago, and I've kept it off since then except for very brief periods of no more than a few hours at a time when I was trying to give myself a break from dealing with incessant trolling.  So in the vast majority of cases over the last year, comments that appear on the blog have not been pre-approved by me.  I do, of course, have the option of deleting them later, and in the vast majority of cases I have not chosen to do that with the Shannon parody posts, because they are an entirely legitimate form of satire and/or lampooning, they are extremely funny, they are clearly written by an individual (or individuals plural) of considerable talent, and if I had authored them myself I would be downright proud of them.

Let me explain this to you as simply as I can, Shannon.  You, absurd though it may seem to all of us, are a public figure actively engaged in the Scottish political scene.  Like any other public figure, it is entirely legitimate in a free society for anyone to publicly comment on your behaviour or your personality - and that includes satire, parody, mockery or even the most biting of criticisms.  You clearly don't like experiencing any of that - well, tough.  It is not the free society that needs to change or compromise or surrender to suit your fragile sensibilities, it is you who needs to reconcile yourself to the rights and privileges of the free society.  The only other alternative is for you to leave the political sphere altogether and to cease to be such a public figure, and frankly in doing so you'd be giving the Alba party the greatest gift it's ever had.

Why do you have the status of a public figure?  Although, as you know, I think Alba will probably lose all of its elected representatives in the near future and will cease to be a party of note, that has yet to happen.  Ash Regan's seat at Holyrood is the slender thread that keeps Alba relevant for the time being.  That means you have just stood for election to the governing body of a political party with parliamentary representation.  Mercifully you were unsuccessful, but even standing as a candidate makes you a public figure subject to healthy public comment, scrutiny and ridicule.  It doesn't end there, of course, because for the last year you have been an elected member of Alba's Constitution Review Group and I believe also its all-powerful Conference Committee.  I'm told that before switching parties, you were an agent for candidates at the 2022 local elections.  Your mother was justifiably accused of nepotism when she took on both you and your brother as employees during her brief time as a Westminster MP.  And after joining Alba you freely made the extraordinary decision to take part in an interview for a far-right podcast.  All of these facts make you a legitimate subject of public discussion.

And nor is your relationship with Chris Cullen, and your forthcoming marriage to him, somehow immune from public comment.  That's partly because you have chosen to bring it into the public domain for your own political benefit, but it's also partly because the relationship has direct relevance to your activities within the Alba party.  You and Mr Cullen made up a full one-quarter of the Constitution Review Group between you.  Many people thought that was thoroughly inappropriate.  I was in two minds about it, but nevertheless I experienced first-hand the way you abused the situation to act as a sort of tag-team with Mr Cullen while making attempts to bully during in-person meetings of the group.  

You complain that I have seen one of your "personal" Instagram posts from September 2024 - which, incidentally, is only seven months ago, not the prehistoric era that you're trying to melodramatically suggest I've been digging into.  The reason I saw it is that a Google search for your name several months ago took me directly to it.  Your desperate attempts to reframe the sort of routine Google search to find out some basic information about who a person is, an activity that practically every person on the planet engages in on a regular basis, as a form of "scary stalking" or "creepy harassment" is imbecilic, it is lamentable, and it is doomed to fail.  As pathetic stunts go, it is all too worthy of you.  Instead of ranting and raving about entirely normal online behaviour, I'd suggest a more constructive use for your time might be to adjust your Instagram privacy settings, which you are clearly deeply unhappy with the results of.  That's your own responsibility to sort out, not mine.

To leave you in no doubt about my response to your infantile foot-stamping demands, no, Shannon, "enough" is NOT "enough".  My "behaviour" will NOT "cease immediately".  Indeed, it will not cease at all.  I will continue to publicly comment on you, and your words, and your actions, if I wish to do so and whenever I see fit.  Given your privileged princess position within the tinpot dictatorship that is the Alba party, it's true that you and others around you had some arbitrary power to curtail my free speech when I was a party member - or more accurately to get me expelled when I refused to accept the inappropriate curtailment of my speech.  But you'll find that out here in the real world, when you give orders your mother will not be able to enforce them for you.  Nobody gives a damn about your petulant demands when you have no right to be making them in the first place.

Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that being expelled from a political party is a personal setback on a par with losing a job or a romantic relationship breaking up (the latter has happened to me within the last couple of years, and so I know it was a lot worse).  But expulsion is certainly not a minor thing.  I'm not sure that you and the others who were responsible for it have any idea of the sheer extent of the stress and upset that you maliciously caused both to me and to a lesser degree to the people close to me.  It may be a game to you, Shannon, and I can see how it must feel like a really fun game when you know that you can carry on hypocritically breaching the party's Code of Conduct yourself on an almost daily basis, safe in the knowledge that your family ties make you totally immune from disciplinary action.  But I can assure you that it's not a game to me, or to the other people that you and the rest of the gang of bullies have trampled all over whenever you felt like it.  I'm the lucky one - I have a platform with which I was able to set the record straight, so in a sense you didn't get away with it in my case, which is precisely why you're so angry right now.  Most of your other victims must feel totally invisible.

You'd never be able to put right the harm you have caused, which is perhaps just as well because you have no interest in even trying.  You appear to have absolutely no sense of right and wrong.  But having just gone through the events of the last year, I'll be damned if I ever again allow you to interfere with my right to free speech, regardless of the intimidation tactics you employ.  So you can take your latest infantile threats and throw them into the cold, dark Ayrshire sea.  Whether you like it or not, there will be no censorship on this blog of intelligent and witty parody comments about public political figures, and indeed I actively encourage those responsible for the superb Shannon parody to continue posting their comments, in order to vividly demonstrate that your latest attempts at bullying have failed comprehensively, and that all such future attempts will always fail, as they will always richly deserve to.

How can the Alba Party ask for the trust of the public when it has shafted its own members as cynically as this?

After yesterday's blogpost, an Alba member was kind enough to send me the full text of the relatively minor changes to the Alba constitution that were put to the party conference on Friday.  He also confirmed my guess that the new text was offered on a strictly "take it or leave it" basis.  Afterwards I spoke to another Alba member who explicitly confirmed that no amendments were permitted.

That is simply astounding.  Some people were scathing in the comments section of this blog when I was strongly advised that the SNP constitutional conference in Perth that I attended as a delegate nine days ago was a private session and that I therefore wouldn't be able to say anything about what happened there.  But whatever you think about that confidentiality rule, at least the SNP constitutional conference was a serious affair which debated and voted on multiple alternative options over a period of many hours.  By contrast, the tokenistic culmination of Alba's year-and-a-bit long "constitution review" process was an absolute joke that brings shame upon everyone involved.  It was a classic exercise in top-down control freakery that left Alba members totally frozen out.

Just to recap, in late 2023 Alex Salmond sent out an email to all Alba members in the midst of the outrage over the party's rigged internal elections.  He announced the constitutional review and specifically added that this would be an opportunity for members, if they wished, to introduce one member, one vote for NEC elections, thus abolishing the discredited pay-per-vote system.  Long-term readers of this blog may remember that I posted about that email, and that I interpreted it as victory for the one member, one vote campaign, because I didn't think Mr Salmond would have raised expectations unless he had reconciled himself to the fact that the vote-rigging had made the pay-per-vote system untenable.  In retrospect I was completely wrong about that, and what Mr Salmond was actually embarking on was an archetypal "make the issue go away by having a snail's pace review" wheeze.

Let's look at this constitution review process step by step to see whether Alba members have *ever* had a chance to influence the decision (let alone make the decision themselves) on whether one member, one vote should be introduced.

Step 1) An eight-member Constitution Review Group was set up, but it was *not* elected by the rank-and-file membership.  Four members of the group were directly appointed by the leadership, and all of those appointees were viscerally opposed to reform.  The other four were 'elected', but only by the tiny selectorate of the few dozen people who attend National Council.  In spite of the limited franchise, though, three of the four elected members were pro-reform.

Step 2) Almost immediately, the leadership set about trying to 'solve' the 'problem' of a substantial minority of the group being pro-reform.  Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh sent an email making vague - and ultimately baseless - threats of disciplinary action against two of the reformers (myself and Alan Harris), presumably in the hope that we would feel pressurised into resigning from the party and thus getting rid of us from the group.  Alan Harris did resign shortly afterwards, albeit not because of Tasmina's threats but in protest at repeated breaches of the existing Alba constitution.  I stood my ground and continued pressing in the group's meetings for one member, one vote - a stance which led a few months later to me being unconstitutionally removed from my elected position on the group, and eventually to my outright expulsion from the party.  Alan was replaced by an anti-reform 'lucky loser' from the election at National Council (Shannon Donoghue), which meant that after my expulsion there was an entirely artificial 6-1 anti-reform majority on the group.

Step 3) After faffing around for over a year, the anti-reformers on the group finally deigned to "involve the party members", but this was a purely consultative in-person session at which no votes were held, and which from the look of the photos was attended by a couple of dozen people at most.

Step 4) The group then went away to "interpret the wishes of members", and by an absolutely astonishing coincidence that interpretation was that the members wanted exactly the same thing as the group - ie. no substantive reform and no democratisation.

Step 5) The group's proposed constitutional text was then presented to conference as a fait accompli and no amendments from members were permitted.

I defy anyone to look at that process and identify the stage at which it would have been possible for a membership that wants one member, one vote to even get it onto the agenda, let alone to insist on its introduction.  It was absolutely impossible.  The Alba leadership have done what they always do - stitch up the process from beginning to end, and they didn't care who got trampled on along the way (and by God were some of us trampled on).

I've mentioned a couple of times that prior to my expulsion, I was subjected to low-level bullying attempts by Chris Cullen and his immature partner Shannon Donoghue at in-person meetings of the group in Alba's ramshackle "headquarters" in Glasgow's Southside.  One thing in particular that kept happening was that Cullen tried to make me look like Dumbo answering questions about Michelangelo on Mastermind by constantly interrupting me to demand in a mocking tone that I give him exact names of Alba members who supported one member, one vote, because according to him nobody at all wants it and anyone with a brain knows that.  Whenever I gave him a couple of names off the top of my head, he would then just sneer and demand more names.  Eventually I said to him: "Look.  A few weeks ago, I stood for Membership Support Convener of this party.  The main part of the platform I stood on was the introduction of one member, one vote.  I topped the poll on first preferences, and then only lost on the second count by 50.5% to 49.5%.  I'm not saying I quite had majority support but it's very clear that there is widespread backing in the party for one member, one vote.  The result was certainly not consistent with your claim that 'no-one at all' wants it."

I thought that was a fairly unanswerable point, but Cullen reacted to it by leaning back into his chair and chortling to himself with a look of sheer glee, rather akin to how a school bully reacts when the target of his bullying turns up for school wearing a pink cagoule.  Hamish Vernal then made some sort of "let's move on" interjection, which in a sense was a pity, because I'd liked to have challenged Cullen on what precisely he thought was so obviously laughable about what I had said.  Does he think Alba members are morons who don't bother to check who and what they're voting for?  Or does he just think any exercise in internal democracy is worthy of contempt, and thus regards as inherently ridiculous anyone who prays in aid the actual results of a vote?

There's a pretty straightforward contradiction in Cullen's position.  If he is so confident that nobody wants one member, one vote, it's very hard to understand why he and the others needed to go to such extreme lengths to prevent the members actually being asked whether or not they want it.

In future, any suggestion that Alba is a "member-led party" should provoke nothing more than a derisive Cullen-esque chortle-in-a-chair.  Alba is member-led in the same way that the German Democratic Republic was democratic.  If you're an Alba member who still hasn't woken up to how power is exercised in your party, you may be thinking that even at this stage it would be theoretically possible to introduce one member, one vote simply by taking the idea to a future annual conference, which after all is Alba's supreme decision-making body.  But nope, that wouldn't work - nothing can be discussed or voted on at conference without the permission of the Conference Committee, and one of the key decisions of the Constitution Non-Review Group was to maintain the status quo of how the Conference Committee operates.  It will still not be elected by the membership, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh will still automatically be the chair of it for as long as she is Party Chair, and it will still be "consensus-led", which translated into English means "no votes are ever held, instead Tasmina will express views which committee members are obliged to endorse, preferably in respectful silence".  Therefore any constitutional amendment that is proposed will be unilaterally dismissed out of hand by Tasmina with her much-loved catchphrase "THAT'S A BIG NO FROM ME!"

Actually, in a sense Alba is indeed member-led, and that member's name is Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh.

You might wonder: just *why* were the leadership so hellbent on retaining pay-per-vote that they were willing to expel people and tear the party apart over it?  From what I've been told by insiders, it ultimately boils down to Tas herself.  She feels that without pay-per-vote she can't be sure of topping the female NEC ballot every year, and that unless she tops the poll it's harder to justify her unelected position as Party Chair.  And from her point of view she 'needs' to remain Party Chair so that she has status and a title when she goes to international conferences.  Her favourite hobby is apparently cosplaying as a world leader.

In other words, what this whole tawdry process was leading up to was the announcement this very morning of the results of the latest pay-per-vote NEC elections, which of course have seen Tasmina top the female ballot for a fourth successive year.  I hope you think all the carnage you've caused was worth it, Tas, because you're certainly not impressing anyone by this stage - everyone knows Alba is the most God-awful democracy that money can buy.

Alba NEC: successful candidates from female ballot

Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh

Christina Hendry

Deborah McAlpine

Debbie Ewen

Alba NEC: successful candidates from male ballot

Angus Brendan MacNeil

Tommy Sheridan

Charlie Abel

Robert Slavin 

Inevitably the leadership have used the vote-purchasing system to mainly get loyalists elected, but there are some silver linings.  Almost everyone I know speaks very highly of Deborah McAlpine, and while Tommy Sheridan seems very close to the leadership as things stand, everyone knows he's his own man and he's no pushover.  In fact if there was a dictionary definition of "the opposite of a pushover", Tommy would be it.  Tas clearly thinks she can browbeat pretty much anyone into silence at NEC meetings - well, good luck trying to browbeat Tommy Sheridan, hun.  

And just look at who is not on the list of successful candidates.  No Shannon Donoghue.  No Chris Cullen.  No Daniel Jack.  No John Caddis.  And no Yvonne Ridley, who had a thoroughly deserved poor showing, attracting just *three* votes.

The whole 'Cullen project' which started with his belated defection from the SNP in 2023, and which was clearly intended to win him a plum spot on Alba's Holyrood list, is now looking decidedly ropey.  He obviously thought he could just use his "Councillor Cullen" title (he's practically changed his name to "Councillor" by deed poll) to waltz straight in to the NEC, but he's now failed to be elected twice.  The Holyrood list remains the real prize for him, but I'd no longer be surprised if that doesn't work out as he'd hoped either.

Incidentally, the little-known Abdul Majid mysteriously went from topping the male poll with over 60 votes last year to getting just 3 votes this year.  That's pay-per-vote for you, folks.  That's the constitution you're now stuck with.

Sometimes a woman gives a man an ultimatum ‘her or me’
And the man gives in
But the consequences of his betrayal spiral out of control.
The man always knows what he had to give up and blames the woman.
He gets angrier and angrier and sadder and sadder. 😢

— Denise Findlay 💚🤍💜 (@gracebrod1e) March 31, 2025

Alba's pay-per-vote NEC elections descend into chaos yet again as members are robbed of the vote they paid for

You really couldn't make this up.  Having practically torn their party apart just to keep the loathed and utterly discredited pay-per-vote system for NEC elections, you'd think the Alba leadership would at least have made a big effort to ensure that administratively, the latest pay-per-vote elections this weekend went off without a hitch.  But no.  Instead those who had purchased a vote were given contradictory information about what time the vote was due to close.  They were told by email that it would close at 7pm last night, but the Alba website told them that it would close at 3pm this afternoon.  That's a twenty-hour discrepancy, and needless to say the earlier time proved to be the correct one, meaning anyone who relied on the information on the website was at high risk of being robbed of the vote they had shelled out a substantial amount of money for.  Anecdotally, it seems that some people were indeed caught out.

Was this cock-up or conspiracy?  Although it feels more like a cock-up, it's not hard to see how sowing confusion about the closing time could work in favour of the leadership faction's slate of candidates as long as they made sure their own people were aware of the correct information.

By the look of it, the conference has been a real oddity.  Traditionally any political party's annual conference is its shop window - and OK, no TV station is going to clear their schedules for live coverage of the Alba conference, but presumably that was precisely why Alba used to livestream their conferences and make sure the feed was as accessible and well-publicised as possible.  These days, it looks like the leadership's paranoia and obsessive secrecy have trumped all other considerations, and although the conference was filmed, probably that was only for the purpose of selecting carefully sanitised short clips for later inclusion in Slanszh Media's little-watched weekly YouTube show Tas Talks.

There's an intriguing point about Slanszh Media.  Generally the relationship between it and Alba is considered to be analogous to the relationship in the old days between Sinn Féin and the IRA - ie. it's basically the same organisation with the same underlying command structure, which means that Zulfikar Sheikh's role as director of Tas Talks gives him roughly equivalent status to that of an Alba national office bearer.  But would that relationship have survived a Regan/McEleny takeover of Alba?  I'm not sure it would have done, but that question will remain unanswered now.

Because of the remarkable secrecy of the conference, I have no details at all about the "constitutional motion" that was apparently debated on Friday.  I'm guessing it will have been a heavily debased "reform" package, with all but a few cosmetic changes stripped out, presented to conference attendees on a 'take it or leave it' basis.  One thing I did find out, though, was that Craig Murray made a very good speech during the debate in which he basically called on the Alba leadership to stop expelling people, and he apparently mentioned my name and others who have been expelled for equally absurd reasons.  Hamish Vernal, the anti-reform chair of the Constitution Review Group, apparently responded to that in his summing-up speech by saying "some folk just put your full patience to the test".

There's no video footage available so I've no idea of the tone of voice in which Hamish said those words.  But my guess is that it was a misguided attempt at humour to try to defuse an otherwise unanswerable point - ie. the subtext was "due process is all very well, folks, but some people get on my nerves too much to bother with all of that".  I'm sorry, Hamish, but that simply isn't good enough.  No serious party can function like that, and certainly not a small party like Alba that is struggling for its very survival.  You can't have party grandees, or those who imagine themselves to be party grandees, thinking they have special rights to summarily show the door to anyone they happen to take a dislike to.

Hamish, incidentally, was the front-man for the initial complaint that led to my expulsion.  He almost certainly wasn't the real instigator, but he was the secret witness called by Josh Robertson at my disciplinary hearing - although I was never intended to know about that or to know what Hamish said or to have any opportunity whatsoever to challenge it.  I only found out by chance.  I later saw the minutes of the hearing, which predictably contained only minimal details, but one thing it did reveal was that Hamish had referenced my blogpost of 21st April 2024, entitled 'The case against a small political party treating its own members as the enemy'.  He claimed that, although the blogpost started by saying I was bound by confidentiality rules and thus wouldn't be discussing the work of the Constitution Review Group, the contents of the rest of the post went on to indirectly discuss all of the points the anti-reform members of the group (ie. Hamish himself, Chris Cullen, Shannon Donoghue, Robert Slavin, Suzanne Blackley and Daniel Jack) had been making in meetings.

Really, Hamish?  If you truly believe that the contents of that blogpost indirectly revealed what anti-reform members of the group were privately saying, that must mean that they were saying that rank-and-file members of the party couldn't be trusted with any power to make decisions about how the party is run or about its policies.  It must mean that they ludicrously claimed that it didn't matter that Alba members don't get to elect the Conference Committee because "everyone on the Conference Committee is an Alba member anyway".  It must mean that much of the discussion on the group focused on how Alba could "protect itself" from its own members, who were regarded as a bunch of filthy "infiltrators".  It must mean that the anti-reformers were insistent that Alba members shouldn't even be provided with any information about decisions taken by the NEC, because such matters are the preserve of the party elite only.

Frankly, Hamish, if you're telling us that these are the the things being said in private by the small group of people who control a purportedly "member-led party", that's of far, far greater concern than the fact that I wrote a short and innocuous blogpost.  The extreme lengths you and others were prepared to go to in order to hush all of this up, and to crush any calls for internal reform and democratisation, have certainly "put my patience to the full test" along with the patience of many others.  In fact that's the understatement of the century.

The authors of the "Wee Alba Book" have both now rejected Alba - and Wings is inching ever-closer to an open endorsement of the far-right unionist party Reform UK

My year-and-a-bit on the Alba NEC, which now seems like about five centuries ago, was dominated by the interminable 'Wee Alba Book Tour'.  It got to the point where even McEleny was being a bit sarcastic about it - when talking about the party's future, he started saying things like "we can hardly be doing Wee Alba Book Night 3698 in two years' time".

The Wee Alba Book was always an oddity, because it was written by two people who were never Alba members (or at least not to the best of my knowledge) and in one case who never even supported the party from outside. Officially Robin McAlpine was the author and Stuart Campbell was the editor, although as anyone who has ever had their work edited by Campbell knows, he very much takes the "Robert Holmes as script editor of Doctor Who" approach and rewrites extensively to the point where he is practically co-author and the original author's intention may have been partly or wholly lost.

Perhaps the authorship could be seen as a form of "ghost-writing" in which McAlpine and Campbell were commissioned for their professional skills in order to communicate points and arguments that they didn't necessarily agree with.  Nevertheless it's startling to see both men now publicly repudiating the party.  McAlpine said in a recent blogpost "I amn’t convinced Alba knows what it’s really for itself" (didn't you read the book, Robin?!), and went on to call for the creation of an entirely new party.  Campbell then followed that up with a blogpost agreeing in principle with the call for a new party, but without even mentioning the word Alba - and you can hardly get a more contemptuous rejection of Alba than that.

Campbell's stance towards Alba has been very difficult to follow.  It's an open secret that he knew all along that the 2023 Alba internal elections were rigged, but that he refused to cover or even acknowledge the story (so much for his "fearless investigative journalism"), and that he rejected all guest post submissions on the subject - presumably exactly the same articles that ended up on the Iain Lawson blog instead.  That looked very much like he was consciously protecting the Alba leadership due to personal loyalty to the people involved - and yet where was that loyalty during last year's general election?  He basically told his readers to reject Alba and to vote for unionist parties (especially Labour) instead.

It's been obvious since the election that his attraction to the Trump / MAGA project has steadily increased and that consequently he's been gagging to advocate a vote for MAGA's de facto sister party Reform UK.  But that obviously poses something of an image problem for him, given that Reform are not only a unionist party but also on the far-right of the political spectrum.  So he's embarked on a long-term process of softening up his readers for the unpalatable messaging to come - and of course we've seen this pattern several times in the past as he prepared the ground for his initial rejection of the SNP and of the mainstream independence movement.  

His first pro-Reform gambit was to try to convince his readers that Farage might deliver an independence referendum as Prime Minister - and bizarrely he refused to give up on that barmy idea even after Reform themselves shot it down in flames with a withering comment about Wings itself.  To be clear, there is no way on God's earth that Farage will be proposing an independence referendum.  The real question about Reform's constitutional policy is whether or not they want to completely abolish the Scottish Parliament and reimpose direct rule from London.  

It looks from the new blogpost as if Campbell has now come up with another wheeze.  His support for McAlpine's idea of a new party is not what it seems, because he mainly emphasises the practical barriers and how murderously difficult it will be and how long it will all take.  The post closes with the sentence "the only thing we know for certain is what the first step is: burying the SNP", which is when you realise what the previous twenty-four paragraphs of waffle were really all about.  I suspect Campbell's line next May will be: "OK, there's a half-formed long-term plan for a new political force to bring about independence, but it's much too difficult to implement immediately, so just for now, just as a provisional tactical first step, you need to vote Reform UK on the list and Labour / Tory / Lib Dem on the constituency ballot".  We'll now probably have to suffer at least a couple of dozen transitional posts between now and then as he tries to indirectly implant this bastardised "logic" in readers' minds without them noticing that he's slowly steering them towards a predetermined outcome.

As other people have noted, it wouldn't surprise me if Campbell did an Alec Douglas-Home in an actual independence referendum by telling his readers to vote No on the logic that "it's the wrong type of independence" and you need to vote No if you want to get the right sort.

Oh, and one other point: Campbell carefully smuggles in a "tell me you support the genocide in Gaza without telling me you support the genocide in Gaza" moment midway through the post - 

"I could name a bunch of other people I also like and respect and whose commitment to independence I don’t doubt for a moment, but where we’d really struggle to be in the same party for one reason or another. (If that party were to take a stance on Gaza, for example, then the vastly principled and honourable Craig Murray and I couldn’t both be signed up to its manifesto.)"

Oh really?  Well, as Craig Murray opposes the mass slaughter in Gaza, I can only assume that means you're an enthusiast for it, Stew.

*  *  *

I was asked on the previous thread whether there are any good candidates for Alba's NEC Ordinary Member elections, which will take place over the coming days (and remember it's the notorious pay-per-vote system, so you'll only be able to vote if you've purchased a conference pass, although I believe it's still possible to purchase one - and you don't need to attend conference in person to cast your vote because it's an online ballot).  I'll copy and paste my reply below, with a couple of amendments, in case anyone is interested - 

Yes, there are some good people in there. This is not an exhaustive list, but I'd certainly be voting for Deborah McAlpine and Maggie Chetty on the female ballot (Judith Reid and Fiona Campbell have also been mentioned to me as decent people), and on the male ballot I'd be voting for Mike Baldry and Morgwn Davies. Mike was the only reformer left on the Constitution Review Group after my expulsion. It'll no longer be possible to vote for Frank Anderson because he's already an office bearer. The unreconstructed lefty in me still has some sympathy for Tommy Sheridan, but his closeness to the leadership worries me. And Angus MacNeil is impossible to dislike, although what his exact relationship with the likes of Tas is, I'm not sure.

As it's a preferential system, I'd also be voting tactically by ranking everyone else ahead of the worst candidates of all. The worst of the worst are: Chris Cullen, John Caddis, Daniel Jack, Iain Cameron, Yvonne Ridley, Shannon Donoghue, Christina Hendry, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and possibly Debbie Ewen and Robert Slavin.