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.