As has been discussed a number of times on this blog over the last year or so, one of the gaping plot-holes in the ludicrous claim that Alba is a "member-led party" is that it's absolutely impossible for members to democratically control the party unless they democratically control the Conference Committee, and they simply don't. It's the annual conference that formally determines policy, and the Conference Committee is the gatekeeper of what can and cannot be discussed, voted upon and decided at conference. The committee is not directly elected by rank-and-file party members. Some of the people on it are elected by the tiny selectorate of a few dozen members who attend National Council, but others, including the committee chair Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, are directly appointed by the leadership. Additionally, meetings of the committee are often flooded by office bearers who the leadership have unilaterally decreed "have a right to be there" even though nothing in the party constitution says they do. When this extraordinary state of affairs has been challenged, the reply has been that the NEC has certain powers to "interpret the constitution", which essentially means the NEC has taken upon itself the right to see things in the constitution that simply aren't there. Exactly the same excuse was of course used by the leadership as they ignored their own rule-book while pursuing the McEleny Purges last year. The constitution is, bluntly, not worth the paper it's written on.
However, it's been pointed out to me that it doesn't actually matter how many members of the committee are appointed or elected, or how many non-members of the committee its meetings are routinely flooded with, because by far the most important problem is that the committee never actually holds any votes anyway. It's supposedly "consensus-led", which is code for "Tasmina makes the decisions and the committee is obliged to silently agree with her". This guiding principle was exemplified by the legendary incident eighteen months ago when a motion was submitted proposing the establishment of a policy development committee, to try to get a grip on Alba's chaotic, ad hoc, top-down approach to policy formation. Tasmina bellowed "THAT'S A BIG NO FROM ME!!!!", which apparently was supposed to be the end of the matter.
If any Alba members were naive enough to think that the spotlight that has been shone recently on the leadership's abuses of power would at least lead to a touch more circumspection from now on, the list of motions accepted by the committee for discussion at this month's conference should disabuse them of that notion. It's a threadbare list of mostly very bland, sometimes utterly pointless motions, that makes Alba look like a party that has completely run out of ideas. That's not entirely fair, because plenty of weightier motions of far greater consequence were submitted, but of course they were insta-blocked by the Tas Tyranny on the Conference Committee, with boilerplate excuses being given (some of which actually contradicted each other).
So which motions has Tas decreed are far more important than, for example, discussion of a policy development committee? One of the motions that has made the cut, and I'm sure this is just an astounding coincidence, was submitted by none other than Shannon Donoghue, the notoriously immature thirtysomething daughter of the party's new General Secretary (or is she just the acting General Secretary?) Corri Wilson. And it was seconded by Corri Wilson herself. It calls for expectant mothers to be better informed of the benefits of home births, in order to relieve the burden on NHS maternity services.
Everyone I've spoken to about this is unanimous that Shannon's motion is somewhere on a continuum between utterly redundant and downright harmful. It's redundant in the sense that pregnant women are already fully informed about the home birth option, and it's harmful in the sense that home births can almost double the risk of adverse outcomes in a first pregnancy. It would plainly be irresponsible to relieve the burden on the NHS by pushing too hard for women to select a non-clinical option that will result in a greater number of deaths.
The widespread view is that Shannon knows perfectly well that her motion adds no value whatsoever, and she's only doing this to give herself a readymade excuse to deliver a "moving personal experience" speech to the conference about her own home birth. The speech will of course coincide with the running of the pay-per-vote "election" for Ordinary NEC Members, in which Shannon is a candidate. She seems to have calculated that making an "emotional connection" with conference delegates is her ticket to electoral success.
But isn't that a bit of an amateurish way of doing it, Shannon? If you want to get on the NEC that badly, why not just bulk-buy a few dozen votes like You-Know-Who did last time around? That's what the system is there for, surely?
Maybe Shannon is a bit short of cash at the moment, who knows. Meanwhile, there's an 'r' in the month, so she must have been breaching Alba's Code of Conduct yet again - behaviour which would, if equal treatment was applied, lead to her being hauled before the Disciplinary Committee to face possible expulsion from the party. The social media policy is absolutely explicit that Alba members are forbidden to "target individuals" in social media posts, regardless of whether those individuals are current members of the party or not. And yet behold...
While we might chortle at the spectacular lack of self-awareness of someone lecturing others on the need to "get somewhere on their own merit" when she herself owes her position on several committees to the fact that her mother is a senior party functionary, and while we might marvel at the sheer brazenness with which she regularly breaches the Code of Conduct knowing her mum's status will always protect her, there is of course a deadly serious point here. Shannon is one of the people who jointly submitted the initial complaint against me which ultimately led to my expulsion from Alba. Although the disciplinary referral document drawn up by Chris McEleny was ludicrously vague about what I was supposed to have done wrong, one of the few points of specificity was that I was being charged with having breached the social media policy - the very thing that Shannon, one of the complainers, regards as very much an optional extra in her own life.
Alba really is nothing more than a racket set up for the benefit of a few elite families and friends. My advice to Alba members is to either put an end to that racket by means of an internal democratic revolution, or if that proves to be impossible (as I strongly suspect that it will) stop wasting your time on a party that is going absolutely nowhere and start seeking more useful avenues for pursuing independence.
Incidentally, not to be outdone by Shannon, one of the dividing lines drawn by the disgraced Chris McEleny (aka "that's Prime Dog MADDUS to you") in his self-indulgent but doomed campaign to be depute leader is a ban on surrogacy. Although I don't necessarily disagree with that in principle, it's an odd choice of policy to run on, given that McEleny concedes himself that Holyrood has no power to implement a ban. But it's been pointed out to me that McEleny's opponent Neale Hanvey is known to have attempted surrogacy with his partner on three occasions. Is that why McEleny is doing it? Given what we know about the nature of Alba internal politics, that possibility certainly cannot be ruled out. What a lovely kind fluffy party I used to be a member of, to be sure.
