Is this SCOT goes POP or SCOT goes MYSTIC MEG? As exclusively forecast here yesterday, Alba's disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny has been officially SUSPENDED FROM THE PARTY

Thanks to your own efforts, Chris, it's not exactly an exclusive club, but welcome to the club anyway.  

In fact it's getting to the point where you'd need a small football stadium to accommodate everyone who has been suspended or expelled from the Alba Party, but McEleny is probably the most high-profile victim so far.  Oh to have been a fly on the wall when he received the email from his own former deputy Corri Wilson telling him that he'd been suspended.  It must have been like the scene in I, Claudius where the wannabe emperor Sejanus is arrested for treason by his second-in-command Macro.  But chin up, Chris, I mean Sejanus was executed within a few hours, and it's not going to be quite that grim for you.  There is life after expulsion, believe me, and if you need any moral support, you've got my email address.  In fact it would be quite refreshing to receive an email from you that isn't trying to "discipline" me in some way.

Will this process inevitably culminate in outright expulsion?  I'd have thought so, but remember McEleny is taking legal action against Alba and he might try to leverage that.  Maybe he'll indicate via a nod and a wink that he'll drop the action in return for a lesser penalty, perhaps a six months suspension or something like that.  

But on the other hand, what good would that actually do him?  Alba is only any use to him as a vehicle for his ambitions to become an MSP, and it's hard to imagine the Alba leadership letting someone who was suspended for "gross misconduct" top their West of Scotland list for Holyrood next year.

I follow the Moskva

Down to Gorky Park

Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

An August summer night

Soldiers passing by

Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

Take me 

To the magic of the moment

On a glory night

Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)

In the wind of CHANGE

Mmmmm

MacAskill spells it out: Alba will not be standing in any Holyrood constituencies next year, which means (barring U-turns) that Christina Hendry's bizarre masterplan to help the Tories gain Banffshire & Buchan Coast has been foiled

Alba have put out a brief statement on Twitter confirming that they will not be standing in the forthcoming by-election in Christina McKelvie's old seat.  That's not a major surprise, because they've been regularly sitting out the vast majority of local council by-elections, presumably due to a lack of funds and a shrinking, demoralised, demotivated and generally scunnered membership.  However, what is interesting in the statement is the crystal-clear assurance that Alba will only be standing on the list in next year's Holyrood election, meaning they will be very sensibly sitting out every single constituency contest.

That's a rare piece of good news from the direction of Alba.  Although opinion polls show that it's highly unlikely that Alba will win any seats on the list, they could still have had an impact on the election (and a very negative one) if they had intervened in the constituencies, because they could have split the Yes vote and gifted some marginal SNP seats to unionist parties.  For some bizarre reason (actually her incomprehensible stated reason was "being of Salmond blood"), Christina Hendry seemed hellbent on doing just that by standing as an Alba candidate in the ultra-marginal SNP seat of Banffshire & Buchan Coast, where the Tories will start from a very close second place.  Her self-indulgent and destructive plan has been deservedly foiled - unless of course MacAskill backtracks on his decision.  Some people suspect he may still U-turn, but I think that's become a lot harder for him to do now that he's set out the position so unambiguously.  

The chances of retaining the pro-independence majority at Holyrood next year have just increased.  Maybe only slightly, but as the Brit Nat ultras at Tesco would say, "every little helps".

Oh come off it, Chris.  We all understand why you're making desperate attempts to play to the gallery in the wake of your long-overdue sacking, but there really is no point playing the innocent here.  As the disgraced former General Secretary of Alba, you know as well as anyone that the Alba Party does not make decisions by means of "votes".  A quaint notion, but nope.  You've directly rigged a fair few internal votes yourself over the years, let's not forget.

If all the bad, mad and weird decisions in Alba are made by leadership diktat, it's probably fitting enough that one of the few sensible decisions has been taken in the same manner.

"Because we're worth it": The Corri Nostra tighten their unelected grip on the Alba Party, with Corri Wilson appointed as a "like-for-like" replacement for the disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny - who may now have had his party membership suspended

The tentacles of the Alba Party's so-called "Corri Nostra" stretch far and wide, but at its core are the Ayrshire-based family and friends of Corri Wilson, who was briefly the MP for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock between 2015 and 2017.  It's widely regarded as a 'party within a party' (I was going to call it a 'shadowy party within a party' but then I remembered Shannon's social media presence), which has repeatedly got its enemies ejected from Alba at will.  It's dominated by the following -

* Corri Wilson: former MP and previously deputy to the disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny

* Shannon Donoghue: Wannabe Instagram star, "totally unfiltered straight-talking independent woman", champagne lover, interviewee on a far-right podcast, daughter of Corri, and centre of media controversy when she was nepotistically employed at public expense as Corri's caseworker/personal assistant at Westminster

* Kieran Donoghue: Son of Corri, and centre of media controversy when he was nepotistically employed at public expense as Corri's caseworker/personal assistant at Westminster (are you spotting a pattern here?).  Apparently has a more mature temperament than Shannon, but has still been more than willing to mix it on behalf of the clan in Alba's internal politics.

* Chris Cullen: Fiancé of Shannon and thus will become Corri's son-in-law once the society event dubbed 'the Wedding of the Century' finally takes place.  Currently one of Alba's two local councillors, simply because he happened to be an SNP councillor in South Ayrshire at the time of his defection.  By all accounts regarded as a poor local representative by residents of his ward, and rumoured to have failed vetting to stand for Holyrood as an SNP candidate - probably the trigger for his change of party.  It's always useful to have your future mother-in-law in control of a rival party as a back-up plan.

The Corri Nostra's efforts in recent weeks to entrench their power within Alba by democratic means have failed spectacularly.  Shannon was one of the defeated candidates in the election for female Ordinary Members of the NEC, while Cullen was defeated in the male ballot and was also defeated in the Local Government Convener election - effectively meaning that Alba members rejected him for the NEC twice over.  You can't really get a much more comprehensive rejection than that - but it still didn't matter, because he and Shannon had already abused their positions on the Constitution Review Group to smuggle in a "reform" (ahem) that would automatically guarantee his appointment to the NEC if he failed to be elected.

Meanwhile, Corri Wilson herself has used her close ties to the party's unelected tyrant-queen Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh to ensure that she would be appointed as the replacement to the disgraced former General Secretary Chris "Mad Dog" McEleny, who was informally known as the Chief Executioner due to him presiding over mass-scale purges of anyone who displeased the leadership in even the smallest way (I was one of his many victims, of course).  The position has been rebranded from "General Secretary" to "Director of Operations", but it remains wholly unelected, and Wilson is seen as a 'like-for-like' replacement for the thuggish machine politician McEleny.

Delighted to be appointed Director of Operations for @AlbaParty.
Big year ahead - looking forward to working with our new NEC and members across Scotland as we campaign for #SP2026 and progress towards independence.
⁰#AlbaRising #VoteAlba #Independence

— Corri Wilson 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@Corri_Wilson) April 14, 2025

So without bothering to win any internal elections, the Corri Nostra now hold two key positions of power, and one of them puts Corri herself in control of the party's entire behind-the-scenes operation.  This is another crushing blow to the dwindling number of democrats who remain in the party, but there really wasn't anything they could do to stop it - the ruling Alba elite are self-appointed and maintain their position by force of will.  The internal elections are just there for show, and are routinely cancelled, rigged or bypassed if the members are impudent enough not to vote as they're supposed to.

No, the only real struggle for power in Alba is within the elite, and in that battle there are no elections, and no 'good guys' either - only winners and losers.  The Corri Nostra seemed to somehow have advance knowledge that they were going to come out on top in their 'Sauron v Saruman' war with McEleny, because I gather from people connected to Corri on Facebook that in January she posted a bizarre video in which she made a cartoonish "BOOM" gesture with her hands and said words to the effect that "people are about to get what's coming to them".  She didn't explain what she meant by that, but within days McEleny had been magically removed from his position.  It seems that those who speak butterfly language operate on a different plane from the caterpillar people.

A number of people have pointed out that McEleny has been fulfilling the role of Beria in The Death of Stalin.  In other words, after losing Alex Salmond, the remaining Alba elite had a number of discussions about their problems, and decided that the solution was to execute the executioner.  ("Let's bump off Beria!").  I can't prove this, but my instinct is telling me that McEleny has now at long last had his party membership suspended, pending a disciplinary hearing which may see him expelled.  That's consistent with one or two whispers I've picked up, and it would also fit in with the latest version of his Twitter bio, which replaces the unwitting comic genius of "Primus" with "proud member and supporter of the Alba Party".  The word "supporter" is of course redundant unless there is some sort of question mark over the status of his membership.

Sensational surge for Plaid Cymru in latest Senedd poll

Welsh Senedd voting intentions (Beaufort Research / Nation Cymru, 3rd-25th March 2025):

Labour 27% (-)
Plaid Cymru 24% (+7)
Reform UK 23% (-1)
Conservatives 16% (-2)
Greens 5% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 4% (-2)

The surge for Plaid has occurred at some point (or possibly gradually) over a period of several months since the previous Beaufort poll in November, so at first glance this isn't a surprising result - it simply brings Beaufort into line with the last two polls from other firms (YouGov and Survation) in showing a very close three-way battle between Plaid, Labour and Reform.  But in actual fact, the November poll from Beaufort was conducted at roughly the same time as the YouGov poll showing Plaid in a slight lead.  So if Beaufort are reporting a big swing to Plaid since then, it's theoretically possible that a new YouGov poll would show Plaid extending their lead.  That sort of logic doesn't always work, of course, but it would certainly be interesting to see a full-scale Welsh poll from YouGov right now.

Among Welsh speakers, Plaid are on a heady 43% of the vote in the Beaufort poll and have a 17-point lead over Labour.  The British state is probably still secretly glad it beat the living daylights out of successive generations of Welsh-speaking schoolchildren, because if Wales was still a predominantly Welsh-speaking country, it would be well on its way to independence by now.

Overall Plaid are in second place in the popular vote, but they are still projected to finish only third in terms of seats - which is odd in a way, because Wales is scrapping the Additional Member System and replacing it with a pure list system, which ought to be more proportional.  However, seats are still being distributed on a regional rather than national basis, which gives Reform apparent scope to amass votes slightly more efficiently than Plaid.  

One thing I didn't realise until checking a few minutes ago is that the reforms are apparently accompanied with a reduction in the Senedd's term length from five years to four.  That's a very healthy democratic step and I wish Scotland was following suit.  Five-year terms were only introduced in Scotland and Wales as a panic reaction to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which otherwise would have seen the dates for Holyrood and Westminster elections coinciding in 2015.  But the Fixed Term Parliaments Act has now been long since repealed, so what exactly are we keeping five-year terms for?

Language has been liberated on the gender identity issue - so now do Israel

The front page headline of today's Telegraph reads "Trans women are not women", and while those are still provocative words, I'm not sure even a Tory-supporting publication would have dared use them in that way a few years ago.

I kept thinking back yesterday to 2021, when several people urged me to crowdfund a poll on GRA reform.  After a bit of thought, I agreed, because most of the polls I had seen on the subject were marred by particularly awful question wording.  Organisations like Stonewall would artificially generate pro-reform results with questions that made it sound like all that was being proposed was some modest administrative tidying up and "streamlining".  Whereas on the other extreme, you had Stuart Campbell using tortuously worded, novel-length, absurdly leading questions to get anti-reform results.  It seemed obvious to me that he was harming his own case by doing that, because the majority of the population are in fact in tune with gender critical views, so to demonstrate that fact all you need to do is ask very simple, straightforward, balanced questions using plain language - and the results you get will have much more credibility.

However I had no idea how difficult it was going to prove to persuade polling companies to run neutral and balanced questions on the subject.  I ran into an Orwellian insistence that balance was bias and that to achieve true balance the questions all needed to be converted into Stonewall-esque Newspeak.  Plain language like "biological women" or "people who were born female" needed, I was told, to be replaced with misleading, incomprehensible or ideologically-loaded jargon like "cis women" or "individuals assigned female at birth", or else the questions couldn't possibly run.  My question asking about concerns that allowing trans women to participate in women's sport could result in women being seriously injured was met with either panic or incredulity.  Apparently to maintain balance you have to genuflect to the fiction that there is no documented injury risk that people are even allowed to be concerned about.

If you can't run a poll to ascertain whether a population approves or disapproves of a new ideology that is being imposed on them without the poll questions themselves pushing that ideology, I began to wonder what the point was in polls or in polling companies.  Eventually in desperation I turned to the slightly more expensive Panelbase, and they saved the day by running the questions as I had written them, with one exception where they made a perfectly reasonable clarifying edit.  And the results were of course exactly as expected, with strong support for women-only spaces and women's sport being reserved for biological women.  But if Panelbase hadn't existed, I'm not sure that poll would actually have been possible.

I suppose it's conceivable that the British polling industry of 2021 just happened to be largely run by strong supporters of gender ideology.  But I think it's much more likely that they were running in fear of the reputational damage that would be caused to them if they were labelled as "bigots" or "transphobes", and therefore they were allowing militant activist groups to police their language and police their polls.  Many other organisations, public bodies and media outlets were doing much the same thing.

It's amazing how quickly that reign of terror has since been broken, and that raises hope that other subjects where intimidation has led to distorted language and self-censorship on an industrial scale can eventually be discussed freely.  The obvious example at present is the genocide in Gaza.

Can we look forward to a time when the BBC report on the death toll without trying to detract from the credibility of the numbers by robotically reminding people that they come from a "Hamas-run" health ministry?

Will they one day allow interviewees to call the genocide a genocide without an instant heavy-handed intervention from the presenter to point out that Israel denies a genocide is taking place?  (I mean, it's not necessary for programmes on the Holocaust to provide "balance" by pointing out that Dr Goebbels never confirmed a genocide had happened.)

Will they eventually drop the blatant double-standard that only Hamas has "hostages" and that Israel merely has "prisoners" and "detainees"?

Will they in future report plainly on war crimes, without insulting the intelligence of viewers by parrotting ridiculous Israeli propaganda about the bombed hospitals being terrorist bases?

This particular reign of terror is going to be harder to break, because the State of Israel is even more influential in this country than Stonewall is, and by all accounts is engaged in a massive programme of bribery, intimidation and blackmail to cow the media and politicians into silence.  But yesterday's events offer a glimmer of hope that the tide can eventually turn.

BREAKING: Stuart Campbell dramatically downgrades his claim about next year's Holyrood election from "there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority" to "I think it's unlikely that pro-indy parties will win more than 61% of the seats"

A couple of preambles to this.  Firstly, although the intensity of my interest was perhaps not quite as great as "feminist bloggers" such as Stuart Campbell (no chortling at the back), I did watch the live-feed of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman, and I was enormously relieved by it.  And although the Scottish Government were nominally defeated, I suspect they (or at least many within their ranks) will be privately relieved too.  The position they were arguing for was incoherent and would have been a festering sore if it had been upheld.  In principle, these decisions should of course be taken by solely Scottish authorities and interpreted solely by Scottish courts, but in a universe where that doesn't yet happen, the Supreme Court has at least gifted the independence movement with another golden opportunity to draw a line under the destructive gender identity wars, and let's hope we take it.

Secondly, although this blogpost indirectly relates to the Holyrood numbers released from the Find Out Now poll yesterday, I'm being slightly cautious about covering those numbers until I see the data tables, which at time of writing have not been published yet.  Regular readers will understand the reason for my caution after the bizarre drama of the last Holyrood poll from Find Out Now at the start of this year, when the results were initially misreported and Ballot Box Scotland then "blacklisted" Find Out Now on the basis of how implausible he found the misreported numbers to be.  (For reasons only he can explain, he seemingly didn't reverse that decision even after the error came to light.)

Nevertheless, the results of the new poll as they've been reported do point to pro-independence parties winning 79 seats at the Holyrood election next year, and unionist parties winning only 50 - which would obviously be an overwhelming pro-indy majority.  Mr Campbell has written a scathing and probably rather foolhardy blogpost in which he not only claims the numbers are obviously ridiculous, but specifically attacks John Curtice's method of projecting constituency seats.  I think I'd just gently point out that Professor Curtice, as the UK's leading psephologist bar none, is unlikely to have not thought his projection model through in the rather simplistic way Mr Campbell is suggesting, and that if the numbers do turn out to be wrong in any way, it'll be because the vote share percentages were wrong, not because Professor Curtice knows less about how to convert percentages into seats than Mr Campbell does.

Nevertheless, Mr Campbell is so sure of himself that he offers a wager to any of his readers who think pro-indy parties will actually win 61% of Holyrood seats (which is what 79 amounts to).  But just one snag, Stew: you've already said there is "zero" chance of pro-indy parties winning a majority of seats next year, which means of course that the benchmark for your certainty is 50.1% of seats, not 61%.  So why are you only offering a wager based on 61% of seats, not 50.1%?  This wouldn't be your crafty way of downgrading your previous monumentally stupid claim, and doing it with such bombast that you hope no-one will notice?

If not, please confirm that you're also offering wagers based on your original claim, made only four months ago, that there is "zero" chance of pro-indy parties winning 50.1% of seats.  Who knows, I might even be tempted myself.

More analysis of the extraordinary poll showing 56% support for independence

Just a quick note to let you know I have a new article at The National about yesterday's Find Out Now independence poll, in which I expand on the possibility that the extraordinary 56% Yes vote in the poll may be early evidence of Liz Kendall's welfare cuts boosting Indy support.  You can read it HERE.

Find Out Now! Find Out How? Find Out THAT TO OUR PRECIOUS UNION WE SAY "CIAO-CIAO"! Leading polling company shows mammoth, history-making lead for the Yes campaign

I hope you appreciate my attention to detail here, because I've just done a quick impromptu course in Italian to work out that the only way of making "ciao" definitely mean "bye" rather than "hi" is to say it twice.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Find Out Now / The National, 7th-11th April 2025)

Yes 56% (+4)

No 44% (-4)

I'm about to go and get some fresh air before the sun goes down, but when I get back I'll update this post with analysis.

UPDATE: OK, so I'm back.  As most of you know, Find Out Now have been conducting independence polls for several years, and all but one of those polls have shown an outright Yes lead.  So whenever another one comes along showing the same thing, we must sound that pesky "settled will" klaxon.  However, this goes well beyond that norm because as far as I can see 56-44 is the biggest Yes lead Find Out Now have ever shown.  There are two caveats to put on that: a) Find Out Now only started polling on independence a few months after the peak period for Yes in the autumn of 2020, and b) any individual poll that shows something a bit out of the ordinary has to be treated with caution until and unless more polls come along that show the same pattern.  However, in this case it's not hard to see a plausible reason why Find Out Now might be picking up a completely new boost for Yes, because this is the first independence poll from any firm to be entirely conducted after Liz Kendall's hammer-the-vulnerable speech to the House of Commons.  (The YouGov poll of 17th-21st March which excited KC so much took place partly before the speech and partly afterwards.)

It's also worth noting that five of the last seven independence polls across all polling firms have shown a Yes lead - and the two that didn't were both from YouGov, which is known to be one of the most No-friendly firms and thus a 'house effect' may have been at play.

As of yet there's no sign of the data tables on the Find Out Now site, although The National's write-up does reveal a familiar disparity among age groups, with under-30s backing Yes by a 3-1 margin, and over-75s backing No by a 2-1 margin.

Alba moves yet another step closer to splitting in two as Ash Regan lodges a Holyrood motion on surrogacy that directly contradicts Alba policy

Ash Regan, with the support of John Mason, has lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament calling for a total ban on surrogacy.  The Scotsman has reported on the motion, but has completely missed the party political significance of it, which is that it's in direct contradiction of Alba policy as decided at the party conference only a few weeks ago, when a motion on banning surrogacy was rejected.  That rejection was almost inevitable given that the new Alba depute leader Neale Hanvey has spoken publicly about his own past attempts to have children via the surrogacy route - 

"We had three protracted and ultimately failed surrogacy attempts, but it was always clear to me that the genetics of the child were not important. What was important was the provision of a loving home and providing a role model or someone who would believe in the child."

I don't doubt for a moment that Ash Regan genuinely believes in a ban on surrogacy, but she's not a fool and she knows the signal she's sending by lodging a motion in support of a policy that her party has only just rejected.  It's identical to the signal she sent very recently by taking on Chris McEleny as staff at the expense of the public purse, only weeks after the Alba leader Kenny MacAskill had sacked him for gross misconduct.  That signal consists of two fingers in a raised, vertical position.

It was of course McEleny himself who first brought up a surrogacy ban during the Alba depute leadership election - and few people I spoke to at the time doubted that he had only zoned in on the issue because it was so personally sensitive to his sole opponent in the race, who was none other than Neale Hanvey.  To say that there's an ongoing ugliness to Alba's internal politics would be the understatement of the century.

As I pointed out the other day, Regan is systematically putting herself in a state of open rebellion against the Alba leadership and it's hard to see how this ends without a formalised split in the party, with her and McEleny going their own way.  Maybe she's daring MacAskill to sack her or to take disciplinary action against her (that would be a novelty in Alba!) in the hope that it will give her a convenient pretext for launching a new party.  Or maybe she's calculated that he literally can't take any action against her, and she's trying to make a public demonstration of that fact so that she begins to look like a de facto party leader autonomously setting policy for the "Alba parliamentary group of one".  But that's a dangerous game, because if she stays in Alba, she's only twelve months away from losing her seat, at which point she'll no longer be of any great importance and MacAskill, the Tas Tyranny and the Corri Nostra will dump her like a hot brick for disloyalty.  She would then have to choose between starting a new party from a much weaker position, or leaving politics altogether.

My view is that she's being very badly advised by McEleny.  All of the mis-steps she's made in recent months, for example her ill-judged warm words about Reform, have had McEleny's fingerprints all over them.  Whatever "Mad Dog" may be telling her now, you can't make your own party leader irrelevant through sheer force of will.  Assuming she has no interest in returning to the SNP, she has three basic options open to her: a) stay in Alba and accept MacAskill's authority over her, b) make a clean break in a new party, or c) try to emulate Margo MacDonald by standing as an independent.  At the moment she appears to not be choosing any of those options, and that's not a sustainable position.

On the substance of the issue of surrogacy itself, I do personally have some sympathy with a ban.  It's one thing imagining yourself to be happy with a surrogacy agreement before conception occurs, but expecting any woman to be held to that agreement after nine months of pregnancy, then giving birth, and then potentially bonding with the baby, seems to me to be expecting far too much.  The only counterargument I can see is a libertarian one, which is that in a free society people have to be free to make even the most foolish decisions that they may later regret.

But I'd be interested to know how Ash Regan thinks a ban should actually be implemented, ie. who should bear the criminal responsibility for breaching the ban and potentially end up in prison.  As long-term readers of this blog will know, I'm very strongly opposed to Regan's so-called "Unbuyable" bill on prostitution law, which essentially would introduce the Nordic Model.  That's rooted in classical Marxism, because it reimagines all prostitution in an almost metaphysical sense as "male violence against women" (just as classical Marxism reimagines paid work as "wage slavery"), and thus holds that only males can be held criminally responsible for transactions that women have also entered into.  The women are not only absolved of all responsibility for those transactions but are held to be victims of them due to "false consciousness".  It essentially reduces women to the legal equivalent of children who are not permitted to know their own minds or to have any agency.

Would the surrogacy ban work in the same way?  Would the surrogate mother be classed as a victim of a transaction she has freely entered into, and would only those paying her be held criminally responsible?  I certainly couldn't support a system like that - it would be blatantly discriminatory.

We are closing in on securing the Netanyahu family's support for an independent Scotland - only a few uncontroversial words from Starmer are required

 

Clearly Bibi (no Bi Bi without the C) should have sent his son to a better school, because French Guinea became independent in 1958 and is therefore no longer called French Guinea.  He's probably getting it mixed up with French Guiana, which is not independent and is technically an integral part of France.  And yes, it's totally bonkers that France has a land border with Brazil, but no more bonkers than the ongoing systematic extermination of the Palestinian people.

Although I said "uncontroversial" about Macron's remarks, that's not quite true because I'm not sure it's even possible to have a Palestinian state without Hamas.  Certainly not a democratic Palestinian state, because Hamas won the most recent democratic elections in Palestine - that was a very long time ago, but their popularity is only likely to have increased as a result of the daily Israeli atrocities.  That doesn't necessarily mean Hamas would win every election but they'd be bound to have a substantial voice in parliament.  Banning them from standing for election would be pointless because a proxy would soon emerge.

Would any world leader dare to say "Yes to the continued existence of the State of Israel but only without Likud"?  The principle is essentially the same.

THE ALBA FILES, Part 10: Fresh evidence emerges of Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh fostering a culture of bullying within the Alba Party

There's been a curious phenomenon in the Alba Party as a result of the recent leadership election.  Some people who were previously very critical of Chris McEleny have started to try to rehabilitate him, at least to a limited degree.  My guess is that's because they were (and are) Ash Regan supporters, and McEleny's staunch backing of Regan has led them to instinctively feel they should be defending him.

Those of you who occasionally dip your toes into the scary world that we call the comments section of this blog may have seen that there's been one anonymous commenter in particular, who on the face of it appears to be quite well informed, and who has been pushing back determinedly against the information I was given about McEleny's precise role in the malicious "disciplinary" action that was taken against me last year, in particular my initial unconstitutional removal from my elected position on a party committee.  The commenter has even claimed that McEleny argued against my removal, precisely on the basis that there was nothing in the Alba constitution allowing it to be done, but that others on the NEC left him no choice and effectively instructed him to proceed with an unconstitutional action.

In my view, any quibbles about McEleny's exact role in the choreography of my own eventual expulsion from Alba are missing the point.  When the history of the Alba Party is written, McEleny is not going to come out of it as anything other than a major villain.  During my time as a member of the Disciplinary Committee, I saw with my own eyes his abuse of the disciplinary machinery to thuggishly try to hush up the rigging of the 2023 internal elections.  He lied through his teeth to the committee in claiming that Colin Alexander did not wish to defend himself in person, and insisted upon Mr Alexander's outright expulsion from Alba in pursuit of a personal vendetta after Mr Alexander made a harmless but irreverent joke about him on Twitter.

In a guest post on this blog, Heather McLean outlined in detail the wrathful vengeance McEleny meted out against Alba members in Dundee who had unwittingly displeased him.  Screenshots of the appalling emails he sent to Leanne Tervit are in the public domain, and it's also known that he played a direct role in the 2023 vote-rigging himself, most notably by removing Jacqui Bijster's name from the list of candidates for Ordinary NEC members, even though she had been properly nominated and hadn't chosen to withdraw.

In my own case, it's beyond dispute that McEleny broke the rules at the point at which the initial complaint against me was submitted.  (It was nominally submitted by Hamish Vernal and co-signed by Shannon Donoghue, Chris Cullen and others, but there's very little doubt that the real instigators were Donoghue/Cullen and possibly Corri Wilson and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who were using the irascible Vernal as their front-man.)  The limited documentation I was provided with shows that Vernal submitted the complaint to McEleny and Ahmed-Sheikh on 23rd April 2024, and that Ahmed-Sheikh belatedly acknowledged receipt on 2nd May.  And yet no disciplinary action was instigated until September.  I was kept completely in the dark about the complaint until an email I received from McEleny out of the blue on 9th September.  

By definition, this means McEleny failed to do what the Alba constitution absolutely required him to do, namely to either immediately dismiss the complaint (he had full powers of veto) or to immediately refer it to the Disciplinary Committee.  In my view, it's obvious he should have dismissed the complaint because it was plainly without foundation, but at least if he had immediately passed it on to the Disciplinary Committee he would have been abiding by the rules.  By taking neither course of action he was perhaps taking the coward's way out, because he didn't feel able to make a ruling on the invalid nature of a complaint that was formally submitted by Vernal (who as an elderly former Provost of Aberdeenshire is the closest thing Alba has to a "grandee") and in reality was instigated by the all-powerful Corri Nostra and Ahmed-Sheikh.

Even if it's true, as the anonymous commenter claims, that certain NEC members insisted upon dredging the complaint up again in September and that McEleny spoke out against it, that's not particularly to McEleny's credit because his concern was almost certainly that he knew I had a platform, that I wouldn't go quietly, and that there was plenty I could reveal about the way he had repeatedly abused the disciplinary machinery over the preceding months to pursue vendettas against Colin Alexander, Denise Somerville, Geoff Bush and others.

In any case, I pointed out to the anonymous commenter that the claims they were making about McEleny's actions directly contradicted the information I had received from elsewhere, and that if they were claiming to have definite knowledge, they really ought to clarify whether or not they were on the NEC in September - because only an NEC member who attended the relevant meeting in September could possibly know for sure what had happened.  They then sent me an email in which they stressed they needed to remain anonymous (for reasons I'm sure we can all easily understand) but provided me with a screenshot from the NEC Whatsapp chat group to demonstrate that they were indeed an NEC member at the relevant time.

The screenshot itself is extremely revealing.  I won't publish it here in case it somehow identifies the source (I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do but I can't rule out the possibility that there's some quirk of Whatsapp formatting that I'm unaware of), but it shows Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh saying the following about one of my blogposts - 

"Dear NEC

I post this for your info because he refers to a "current or former" female NEC member (I'm sure he knows which and I'm sure we can decipher).

If he carries on in this vein, I will be asking the General Secretary to write to him and tell him to cease and desist attacks on the NEC and that his blog will also be passed to the Conduct (sic) Committee as an additional piece of evidence in the matter they will be considering in short course.

Thank you"

Initially I didn't think there was anything I didn't already know in that, but I then checked the specific blogpost Ahmed-Sheikh was referring to.  It's this one, in which I first went public about the blatant harassment I had been receiving by Direct Message on Twitter from a former Alba national office bearer, who kept sending me entirely unsolicited and unwanted private messages taunting me that she had inside information from her senior chums (probably Ahmed-Sheikh herself and the Corri Nostra) that a private decision had been taken to stitch up my expulsion from Alba long before a complaint had ever been officially submitted.  I didn't name that person at the time, but I later revealed it was Yvonne Ridley.  It was beyond dispute that the harassment had occurred and that Ridley had sent me the offending messages unprompted, because extraordinarily she proudly published the entire exchange herself.

It is nothing short of astounding (or ought to be) that the chair of a political party can see indisputable evidence that a former party officer bearer has breached the Code of Conduct by bullying and harassing a fellow party member, and react to it not by taking action against the former office bearer, but by instead unleashing the forces of hell on the victim of the bullying - who was apparently required to silently submit to it lest he be accused of "attacks on the NEC".  (Eh?  "Yvonne Ridley" and "the NEC" are rather different concepts - Ridley wasn't even a member of the NEC at the time.)

You may remember that I warned Ahmed-Sheikh during a lengthy email exchange in the spring of 2024 that she was in danger of fostering a culture of bullying within Alba.  How comprehensively correct she proved me only a few months later.  But then, that's exactly what you'd expect Ahmed-Sheikh to do if Yvonne Ridley's boast had been honest all along, ie. if the whole disciplinary process against me was a sham designed to bring about a predetermined outcome privately decided upon by a corrupt Alba elite many months earlier.

New GB-wide polls show that Labour have not budged from the rock-bottom Liz Kendall sent them to

What Liz Kendall did to society's most vulnerable certainly doesn't appear to have faded from the public's minds yet.  Two new polls from Find Out Now and Techne respectively show that Labour haven't recovered one iota from the scarcely believable sub-25 vote shares they've been languishing on.

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 9th April 2025):

Reform UK 26% (-2)

Labour 22% (-)

Conservatives 21% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 14% (+1)

Greens 11% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

GB-wide voting intentions (Techne, 9th-10th April 2025):

Reform UK 24% (-2)

Labour 24% (-)

Conservatives 22% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 15% (+2)

Greens 8% (-)

SNP 2% (-1)

Could there be at least some minor respite on the horizon for Labour, though?  They've just broken the habit of a lifetime by doing something a) relatively left-wing, and b) potentially very popular.  The Techne and Find Out Now fieldwork won't have picked up any effect of the nationalisation of British Steel (one of the flagship policies of Harold Wilson's 1964 general election manifesto!), which other polls separately showed the public wanted to happen by a massive majority.  It's amazing, isn't it - England reliably votes right-wing, but when you ask them about specific socialist policies (like public ownership or what the Americans would call 'socialised medicine') without attaching any sort of ideological label, it turns out that they're all in favour.

The Labour right certainly don't deserve any credit for very reluctantly doing what Jeremy Corbyn would have done enthusiastically years ago if they hadn't sabotaged him, but polling trends and fairness are often two different things, so I wouldn't be totally surprised if there's some sort of modest and probably temporary Labour recovery off the back of this.  It's a double-edged sword for Starmer, though, because there's a lot of anger in Wales in particular that Labour have moved heaven and earth to save a steel plant in England but didn't lift a finger when a similar scenario arose in Wales.  To a lesser extent, the same point is being made in Scotland about Labour's studied inaction over the closure of the Grangemouth refinery.

I think it’s hard to overstate the anger in parts of Wales that everything seems to be on the table with regards to saving steel making in Scunthorpe whereas this seemingly wasn’t the case for Port Talbot.

Just 12 months till the Senedd election.

— Will Hayward (@WillHayCardiff) April 12, 2025

In all seriousness, it’s ridiculous that this wasn’t on the table when it came to Wales. pic.twitter.com/G3DAQDQKs8

— Will Hayward (@WillHayCardiff) April 9, 2025

Not all heroes wear capes. Just take a look at these brave Labour MP’s having to travel in to Westminster on a Saturday. Thankyou all for your sacrifice pic.twitter.com/CXNogGkSOg

— Razor Marone (@Streettough) April 13, 2025