Sunday, January 19, 2025

THE ALBA FILES, Part 3: It is *literally* the case that 50% of the people who voted to expel me from the Alba Party are either Robert Reid's girlfriend or Robert Reid's mum

A rare moment of light relief in the Alba leadership's Kafkaesque "disciplinary" action against me occurred over Christmas, when strapping young lad Robert Reid from Alba HQ randomly started taunting me on Twitter over a period of several hours.  At that point, the Disciplinary Committee had already voted to expel me from the party, but my appeal had yet to be heard.  As several people pointed out, Reid was vividly and publicly demonstrating that Alba HQ were openly hostile towards me while my appeal was still active, and thus proving that the process could not possibly be regarded as fair.  Eventually he went so crazily far with the insults that I began to genuinely wonder if he was unaware of the fact that I had lodged an appeal, or even that I had a right to appeal.  Sure enough, as soon as I mentioned to him that his behaviour seemed completely inappropriate from an Alba employee in view of my pending appeal, he immediately fell silent.  It looks like he either didn't know or had completely forgotten.

He maintained that silence until yesterday, when suddenly the insults started flying again.  Even though the appeals process has now been exhausted, I do think that his choice of language - suggesting in Campbell-esque fashion that I am mentally unhinged - was again very poorly judged and that he may come to regret it once he matures into adulthood somewhat.  Basically his aim was to try to undermine my description of McEleny's charges against me as being "trumped up", and to argue that it's self-evidently absurd to suggest that those charges could have been anything other than well-founded, given that two different Alba committees (the Disciplinary Committee and the Appeals Committee) upheld them.  Well, if Reid believes the charges were well-founded, the first thing he should of course be doing is defining what they actually were, because that's something his boss McEleny utterly failed to do in any of the official disciplinary documentation.  And to the best of my knowledge, nobody else from Alba has made any public comment on the nature of the charges, apart from some extremely vague innuendo.

In fact, as far as I'm aware, Reid's latest outburst is the very first time that anyone with official standing in Alba has publicly admitted that the leadership did take action against me and did expel me from the party, and from that point of view it's helpful, because the silence from them had been so deafening that I started to worry that people would think the whole thing was a figment of my imagination.  I'm still planning in future installments of 'THE ALBA FILES' to give detailed accounts of both the disciplinary hearing and the appeals hearing, but as Reid has now specifically claimed it's unthinkable the Disciplinary and Appeals Committees would ever have upheld trumped up charges against anyone, it's probably a good moment to take a step back and look in detail at who the members of those committees are, how they ended up in that position, and what loyalties they owe to a leadership that was hellbent on expelling me.

The Disciplinary Committee consists of eight members.  Six of them are elected, albeit not by the party membership at large, but by a small selectorate of a few dozen people on National Council.  The other two members are directly appointed by the party leadership.  However, the power of the appointed members goes much further than might be obvious at first glance.  One of the two appointed members is also directly appointed by the leadership to chair the committee, which means that person has the casting vote in the event of a tie, and can also rule the elected members out of order if they try to express 'undesirable' views.

Of the six elected members at the time of my own hearing, one of them was none other than me, so obviously I couldn't sit in judgement on myself.  Also absent from the hearing was Chris Cullen, who presumably recused himself due to the massive conflict of interest of having instigated the action against me along with his fiancée Shannon Donoghue.  In fact, I probably should give Cullen some small credit for agreeing to recuse himself, because he had flatly refused to do so in two previous disciplinary cases against other people where he also had a blatant conflict of interest.  Another absentee was Abu Meron, who never turned up for any of the committee meetings during 2024.  (I'm not criticising him for that, it's just a statement of fact.)

That left just five committee members to hear the case, and of those Morgwn Davies voted against upholding the complaint against me.  So let's take a look at the four individuals who actually voted to expel me from the Alba Party.

Christina Hendry: Directly appointed to the committee by the leadership.  Robert Reid's girlfriend, and Alex Salmond's niece.  Has a 100% record in previous disciplinary cases of voting in favour of whatever McEleny wanted - she voted to expel Geoff Bush for giving an inoffensive interview to The National, and she voted to suspend Denise Somerville for six months for whistleblowing about the rigging of Alba's 2023 internal elections.  In both the Somerville and Bush hearings, she repeatedly expressed the view that Alba is a sort of secret society in which rank-and-file members are absolutely forbidden from expressing their own personal views in public, unless they align with the official Alba position.  I pointed out to her that this effectively makes it impossible for journalists to be Alba members - unless of course they turn their journalism into party propaganda.

Jackie Reid: The mum of Robert Reid.  Technically she's an elected member of the committee, although in reality she's a 'lucky loser' who was only elevated to the committee after Alan Harris resigned in disgust over procedural irregularities and breaches of the constitution.  Has a 100% record in previous disciplinary cases of voting in favour of whatever McEleny wanted - she voted to expel Geoff Bush and to suspend Denise Somerville.  She also expressed some of the most poisonous views that I heard from anyone during my time on the committee.  She indicated a personal dislike of Denise Somerville and said "she's not the sort of person we want in this party", strongly implying that she was abusing her position as a committee member to get rid of people for reasons that had nothing to do with the facts of the case before her.

Josh Robertson: Directly appointed by the leadership as both a committee member and committee chair, with a casting vote and the power to prevent committee members from expressing their own views.  Amazingly, he does not appear to be related to Robert Reid, but his extraordinary behaviour throughout his year as chair leaves little room for doubt that he is trying to curry favour with the leadership for career reasons.  In total loyalty to every detail of McEleny's wishes, he voted to expel Colin Alexander for raising concerns about the 2023 internal elections, to suspend Denise Somerville, and to expel Geoff Bush.  Indeed, he was the person who first "suggested" expulsion as a suitable penalty for Mr Bush, although he was almost certainly under strict orders to make that "suggestion" if nobody else did.  His absolute surrender to McEleny's every desire even extended to him using his casting vote to insert a false account of events into the minutes of a previous meeting, which McEleny later gloated meant that "it officially happened, regardless of whether it actually happened or not".  The reason for this subservience is probably that he sees himself as Alba's next-leader-but-one if he keeps his nose clean (Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was openly talking up that possibility at his Airdrie campaign launch in June), and also that he wants to be an Alba list MSP.  Well, good luck with that, Josh - you've almost certainly earned yourself a plum spot as an Alba list candidate, but actually getting elected is a very different matter.

Geraldine Harron: Elected to the committee by National Council.  I know very little about her, because she didn't turn up to any of the previous meetings of the committee - with just one exception, when she turned up extremely late and Josh almost had a meltdown trying to work out whether to admit her to the meeting or not.  We eventually agreed on a compromise that she would be allowed in as long as she didn't speak or vote.  So I don't know for sure what motivated her to vote for my expulsion.  She didn't say a single word during the twelve minutes I was allowed to be present for my own hearing - which was plainly a deliberate tactic on the part of all of the leadership loyalists in both the disciplinary and appeals hearings. (The chairs of each committee did speak while I was there, but even they were keeping what they said to an absolute minimum.)

So of the four people who voted for my expulsion, 50% were directly appointed to the committee by the very leadership that was hellbent on my expulsion.  50% of the four were either Robert Reid's girlfriend or Robert Reid's mum.  The combined total of those who were EITHER directly appointed by the leadership OR related to Robert Reid is 75%.

I'm sorry, Robert, but nobody in their right mind is going to look at those statistics as proof that the leadership couldn't possibly have persuaded the committee to uphold trumped up charges.  Nice try, but no.

Because I wasn't a member of the Appeals Committee in 2024 (I was a member in 2023 but it never actually met), I'm much less familiar with the people involved there.  I do know with a reasonably high level of confidence that only three members of the Appeals Committee voted to uphold my expulsion, and those three were Thomas Westen (I'm not sure about the correct spelling of his surname), Hamish Turnbull and John Caddis.  I know nothing about them except that all three have a reputation as leadership loyalists, and that John Caddis has a particularly poor reputation among the Alba members I spoke to.  In fairness to Mr Turnbull and Mr Westen, they are both rumoured to have accepted that McEleny botched the disciplinary process against me from beginning to end, but Mr Caddis was such an extreme leadership sycophant that he not only voted to uphold the expulsion, but also apparently refused to accept that McEleny had even put a foot wrong.

Just a final thought - as far as I'm concerned, Christina Hendry's vote for outright expulsion puts beyond all reasonable doubt that Alex Salmond must have signed off on my expulsion before his death.  Anyone who has sat on national Alba committees knows full well that very little ever happened in the party without Mr Salmond's express approval, and Ms Hendry would certainly have never taken a decision like that against her uncle's wishes.

*   *   *

Coming up in future installments of 'THE ALBA FILES'...

* The rigging of the 2023 internal elections

* Fact-checking the notorious "secret speech" at the closed session of Alba's 2023 conference

* Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh: Woman of Letters

plus much, much more.  Stay tuned.

Posted by James Kelly at 2:20 AM 37 comments
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