It's no secret that I think Kenny MacAskill's decision to remove Chris McEleny from his role as Alba's General Secretary is long overdue, but I do think he's gone wrong in the precise way he's chosen to do it. McEleny was a party employee and therefore, as I understand it, MacAskill and the NEC had the power to simply sack him, and that's what should have happened. There was no need to use the party's disciplinary machinery to remove him, and in going down that road Mr MacAskill has perpetuated the Alba Party's deepest-rooted problem - the intentional use of disciplinary action as a weapon to completely snuff out legitimate internal debate within the party about strategy and policy.
Someone on the previous thread compared the power-struggle and bloodletting in Alba since Alex Salmond died in October to The Death Of Stalin. Obviously that analogy has its limits, because when Beria was removed from power a few months after Stalin's death, he was ambushed at a Politburo meeting and was eventually shot. But the point is that in the Soviet Union, politics had become terrifyingly tangled up with the criminal justice system and in particular with judicial execution. If you spoke out against the leader's policy or displeased him in some other way, he wouldn't just sack you, he would have you shot or tortured. Khrushchev actually thought it was a sign that the country had matured when he was removed from power in a coup without being shot - he was allowed to retire and live out his days peacefully with a pension.
There has been no equivalent maturing process within the Alba Party yet, because the disciplinary process is being weaponised to the max by all sides in the leadership contest. When Kenny MacAskill implied on social media that the Ash Regan camp was flirting with fascism by aping Reform UK rhetoric, McEleny didn't respond with a spirited verbal or written counter-argument, as would happen in a normal, mature political party. He instead framed Mr MacAskill's words as "bullying and harassment" and tried to suspend him. Mr MacAskill has now retaliated by framing McEleny's original allegedly quasi-fascist remarks about asylum seekers as "gross misconduct" and suspended him. That simply perpetutates the problem, because it means that the free and frank exchange of views within Alba will always be impossible. Members will always know that diverging from the ruling faction's policy views in even the smallest way will potentially be a suspension or expulsion offence.
Don't get me wrong, though - I do believe McEleny is guilty of gross misconduct, but not in the form that appears on the charge sheet. I think he should have been sacked, and then entirely separately from that, disciplinary action could have been considered against him at a later stage - but not for the expression of his political views about asylum seekers. His real misconduct was in his abuse of powers in the treatment of party members. The three worst examples I know of are -
* He dishonestly certified numerous party members as having "publicly resigned from the party", therefore effectively expelling them without any disciplinary hearing or due process whatsoever.
* He unilaterally removed Jacqui Bijster from the list of candidates for the 2023 election of Ordinary Members of the NEC, which she was properly nominated for. This was a blatant case of election-rigging, and he justified it by pretending to 'misunderstand' her message withdrawing from the Membership Support Convener election, but not from the NEC Ordinary Member election.
* He instructed his deputy Corri Wilson to lie to the Disciplinary Committee (whether she actually knew it was a lie is unclear) by stating that Colin Alexander had expressed no wish to use his constitutional right to attend his disciplinary hearing. Colin was not granted his wish to attend but the majority of members of the committee expelled him from the party anyway (acting as they always did as a rubberstamp for McEleny's wishes), even though they were fully aware of McEleny's lie by that point.
In the run-up to the hearing, Colin contacted me out of the blue to explain that he had told McEleny he wanted to attend but that McEleny was pulling his usual stunt of ignoring the emails. I presume the reason Colin contacted me in particular was because I had announced on this blog a few weeks earlier that I had been newly elected to the Disciplinary Committee, and therefore I was the only committee member that he knew of or knew how to contact. I had no idea how to proceed. I thought it would be a mistake to reply to Colin because that might be used by others as an excuse to disbar me from participating in the hearing. So instead I just bided my time and waited to see if the situation was resolved.
But when the hearing took place, Corri Wilson flatly announced that Colin had expressed no wish to attend. So that left me with no choice - I told the committee that I knew for a fact that wasn't true. Corri doubled down and insisted there were no emails from Colin expressing a wish to attend, and I said "oh there were, and I've seen the emails". Fortunately I was backed up by Alan Harris, who pointed out that it was extremely obvious from the disciplinary referral document that there were emails missing from the correspondence between Colin and McEleny. I said that it was clear to me that "the General Secretary is playing games here".
Marjorie Ellis Thompson, who had just been directly appointed chair of the committee by the Alba leadership, listened intently to what I had said. But instead of engaging with the actual content of my comments, she then launched into an extraordinarily aggressive attempt to tone-police me. She said that I had to be careful about the way I was expressing myself because it might upset Corri, who was a member of staff. I pointed out that I was not attacking Corri, but that Corri was acting on the General Secretary's instructions, and the General Secretary had clearly instructed her to tell us things that simply were not true. It wasn't a trivial matter, because McEleny had explicitly stated that he wanted us to expel Colin. Therefore the points I had made were perfectly legitimate, and Marjorie shouldn't have tried to rule them out of order.
I don't want to be too critical of Marjorie, though, because my gut feeling is that she had been put in an impossible position by the leadership which had appointed her. I suspect she wanted to act fairly and properly as the chair but had seemingly received strict instructions that Corri Wilson and Chris McEleny had to be protected and defended at all costs.
From memory, Alan, myself and Morgwn Davies all argued that the case against Colin should be dismissed, or at the very least that his suspension should be lifted pending a re-run of the hearing, because clearly McEleny's lie hadn't been Colin's fault. But Josh Robertson, Chris "Lieutenant Columbo" Cullen and Marjorie (who I believe made use of her casting vote) blocked that proposal. I was particularly suspicious about Josh Robertson's stated reasoning for insisting that the case had to go forward to a re-run hearing. I wondered if he had been tipped the wink about a "Plan B" if McEleny's lie was brought to light - and sure enough by the time the re-run hearing took place, Marjorie had resigned from the committee altogether and Josh had magically replaced her as chair. And Josh, I'm afraid, had absolutely none of Marjorie's scruples about acting as a rubberstamp for McEleny's wishes.
Now, you might think that if the General Secretary had been caught red-handed lying to the Disciplinary Committee in an attempt to get a party member expelled due to a personal vendetta, the first thing the Party Chair would do is launch an inquiry into the General Secretary's misconduct. But oh no. This is the Alba Party, remember. Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh instead sent us all a menacing email informing us that any questioning of the General Secretary's good faith was totally unacceptable - seemingly irrespective of how overwhelming the evidence was that he had acted in bad faith. She also reframed the points of order that I, Alan and Morgwn had raised about McEleny's lie and about other procedural irregularities as "possible misogynistic bullying of the committee chair". I'm not making this up - yes, it's straight out of Orwell, but that is exactly what she did. She announced she would be launching a one-person disciplinary investigation into the matter. I don't think she ever had the slightest intention of finding myself, Morgwn or Alan guilty of "misogynistic bullying", because she knew perfectly well it wouldn't be that hard for us to produce a transcript of the meeting and to demonstrate that not a single misogynistic word had been uttered. The whole thing was just a profoundly cynical stunt to deflect attention away from McEleny's lie, which should have resulted in his immediate resignation or dismissal.
In a future installment of "THE ALBA FILES", I'm going to go into much more detail about my lengthy email exchange with Tasmina. But for now, here's an extract from my initial reply to Tasmina dated 25th March 2024 in which I did my best to very politely (perhaps too politely) take her to task about the wholly improper way she was protecting McEleny. Because Colin Alexander's real name is not in the public domain, I have amended the text below to replace his real name with "Mr Alexander" -
"Fourthly, I must take issue with your suggestion that it is 'not appropriate' to attribute motivations to the General Secretary in withholding information from us. It's not just that it wasn't inappropriate to draw the inference that was made, it's that no other plausible explanation for his motivation is even available. Even if the withheld email from Mr Alexander was somehow missed by error, there was enough information in the other emails to infer that there must have been a missing email, and also to infer the likely nature of that email. Therefore, we shouldn't have been flatly informed that Mr Alexander did not wish to attend the meeting when the opposite was known to be true. Let me remind you that this is not a trivial matter - the General Secretary made explicitly clear that he wanted us to use the meeting to expel Mr Alexander from the party. For him to make that request on the basis of false information and partial information is something that must be deprecated in the strongest possible terms. I'm sure you would agree, and I would urge you to speedily make representations to the General Secretary to ensure that it never happens again.
As party chair you command our fullest respect, but as you have chosen to involve yourself in this matter, I would respectfully suggest that the nature of your involvement should be to put an end to the grievous ongoing procedural unfairness against Mr Alexander and Ms Somerville by ensuring our next meeting goes ahead as scheduled on Wednesday evening, and by leaving the General Secretary in no doubt whatsoever that he should never, ever again ask the Disciplinary Committee to expel a party member while withholding key information from us."
