SNP's decision on independence strategy is greeted with revivalist fervour in the Aberdeen hall - but my own deep concerns remain

I was in the second row from the front at the afternoon session of the SNP conference in Aberdeen today, when the party made its fateful decision on independence strategy.  In this video I give you a sense of what the atmosphere among delegates was like, and set out my own (quite deep) concerns about the implications of the decision.

Apologies for the technical quality of the video - as I'm away from home I had to use my phone, and it seems to have 'issues'.

 

The STUC back the principle of Scottish self-determination on an ordinary majority - but will the SNP repudiate it?

Good afternoon from Aberdeen, where as you may have seen, Roz Foyer of the STUC made a well-judged and well-received speech just before lunch, in which she expressed her strong support for the principle of self-determination, which she described immaculately as meaning that if a pro-independence majority is elected to the Scottish Parliament, the parliament should decide for itself on holding an independence referendum.  She received a huge round of applause.  Are we as delegates really going to follow up that applause in the afternoon session by surrendering to Westminster and imposing an impossible supermajority requirement upon the Scottish people?  I hope not, and it would be a truly bizarre thing to do, but that is exactly what we are being pressurised to do.  Fingers crossed for a sensible outcome.

Catch up with my election pitch to represent Central Scotland & Lothians West on the SNP's National Executive Committee

Just a reminder that the SNP internal elections open for voting tomorrow morning (ie. Saturday morning), and it's conference delegates who have the right to vote.  I'm standing for three committees, and all delegates, regardless of where in Scotland they come from, will be able to vote for me if they wish for the Conferences Committee, which will be elected by a country-wide vote.  By contrast the NEC ballot is split into regions, so if you're a delegate from the Central Scotland region (or Central Scotland and Lothians West as it's now become on the new boundaries) you can also vote for me in the NEC election.  And I'm also standing for the Policy Development Committee.

You can catch up with my election pitch in the video at the bottom of this post - it's essentially about empowering party members as much as possible, moving forward to win independence by seeking an outright mandate for it at a scheduled election, maintaining a firmly left-of-centre policy course, and holding the line against any dilution of the SNP's stance in favour of the eradication of nuclear weapons.  And I don't think regular readers of this blog will be in any doubt about how staunch my support for the Palestinian cause is.

I'm still in two minds about whether or not to submit a request to speak in tomorrow afternoon's crunch debate about independence strategy, but in case I decide not to, I just want to make one more key point.  The SNP does not actually have the right, any more than any other political party does, to surrender, or to partially surrender, or to curtail in any way, Scotland's right to exercise national self-determination on an ordinary majority.  Self-determination is an inalienable right that belongs to the people themselves, not to any political party.  But although the SNP do not have the right to surrender it, they may have the power in practice to do so.  In a system where the UK Government makes up the constitutional rules as it goes on, it can hold Scotland to the SNP's words - with the classic example of that being the way in which Alex Salmond's "once in a generation" line has been weaponised against the people since 2014.

If the SNP leadership do not, for whatever reason, feel able or willing to make a serious effort to use next year's election to win independence, then I think that's highly regrettable and I think that's a mistake.  But if that's the call they've made and if nothing can dissuade them from it, the important thing is to at least do no harm, ie. to do nothing to make it harder for us to use future elections to win independence.  Setting a needless precedent of saying that a single-party SNP overall majority is required would indeed make that much harder, because the UK Government would eagerly leap on it and hold us to it until the end of time.  Above all else that's what we must avoid tomorrow afternoon.  

I will be voting for the amendment that would turn the 2026 election into a de facto independence referendum, and I very much hope it passes.  But if it doesn't pass, it's vital we get behind the second amendment which quietly removes the requirement for a single-party SNP majority.  If neither of those two amendments pass, we'll be putting the independence cause into a much weaker state than it's been for decades.

Ash to Ashes, Alba to Dust: the Alba Party dramatically ceases to be a parliamentary party seven months earlier than expected, and is reduced to fringe party status

Well, this is it: for four and a half years Alba have enjoyed continuous parliamentary representation, either at Westminster or Holyrood (or for a short while at both), but Ash Regan's resignation brings that era to an end, and it's highly unlikely to ever be revived.  Alba are now in every sense of the word a fringe party - they do admittedly still have two local councillors (including the "Crossmaglen Columbo"), but then the Rubbish Party (look it up, it's a real thing) have one local councillor, so that's kind of the level we're talking about now.

Although the timing of Regan's announcement is a surprise, the logic for her decision has been overwhelming for months, because she remained openly in alliance with Chris "Mad Dog" McEleny after he was sacked as General Secretary for gross misconduct and then expelled from the party.  That situation just wasn't sustainable.  I don't know if she was holding on in the hope that something might turn up which would allow her to topple Kenny MacAskill and the real leader Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (aka "Tyrannical Tas"), thus enabling her to reinstate McEleny, but if so she must have finally accepted that was never going to happen.  The interesting thing now is what McEleny himself does, because Regan will undoubtedly be coordinating her actions with him.  Does he belatedly move on and relinquish his role as Alba's Nominating Officer, allowing the party to pointlessly get on with the task of nominating candidates that will be heavily defeated at next year's election?  Or, on the contrary, is Regan's departure at this stage specifically designed to clear the way for him to go nuclear and block Alba from standing candidates at all?

No wonder Tesco are still rationing popcorn.

So where did it all go so horrifically wrong for Alba?  In truth they sealed their own fate a long time ago by not only choosing the wrong path, but the polar opposite of the right path.  A party like Alba could only have thrived by throwing out the welcome mat and becoming a warm home for all of the most radical parts of the independence movement - instead the party became a narrow, paranoid, authoritarian sect run for the exclusive convenience of an extremely small self-appointed elite of closely linked families and friends, ie. the Corri Nostra, Tas & the Great Zulfikar Sheikh, Robert Reid and his mum, "Those of Salmond Blood", etc.  

The problem with narrow sects is that they tend to only be popular with the people actually running the show, and there just aren't very many of them.

 

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With less than three months of the year to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure.  If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE.  Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Just THREE days to save independence: the John Swinney strategy motion MUST be amended, or the dream could be over

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With less than three months of the year to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure.  If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE.  Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Vote James Kelly #1 for the SNP National Executive Committee: why I'm standing and what I believe in

As you may already have seen on a certain other blog, I've put my name forward for the forthcoming SNP internal elections, which will take place over the weekend.  I'm standing for election to three committees: the National Executive Committee (NEC), the Policy Development Committee, and the Conferences Committee.  I've made a video to explain my reasons for standing, which are mainly to give people who broadly share my views on the way forward on independence strategy, and on the need to reverse the hollowing out of internal party democracy (a problem that exists across all major political parties) someone to vote for.  The first half of the video explains my thoughts on independence strategy, and the second half gives you an overview of my broader political outlook and views on other policy areas.  Some of that might seem like motherhood and apple pie stuff, but in this day and age I'm not sure anything can be taken as read.

Incidentally, if you spot any errors in my explanation of how the voting process works, please let me know so I can correct it.  I've done my best to get it right, but I can't be 100% sure on every single detail.

The Alba Party's days could be numbered as the disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny chooses his moment to unleash "the full wrath of a Mad Dog"

Back in the spring, I exclusively broke the news on Scot Goes Pop (based on what I'd been told by a reliable source) that the Alba Party's disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny was refusing to step down as the party's Nominating Officer, and that under Electoral Commission rules, the Alba leadership had no power to remove him against his will.  This left Alba in the extraordinary position that a man they had just expelled was in total control of the list of candidates they put forward for elections, and indeed had the power to block any Alba candidates from being put forward at all.  McEleny's controversial Somerset-based blogger mate "Stew" swiftly ridiculed what I'd revealed, implying it was no more than a figment of my crazed imagination, but even at that stage a lot of the story was easily verifiable from information in the public domain on the Electoral Commission website, and now the rest of the story has been fully confirmed by the Sunday National, who several months later are the first mainstream media outlet to pick up on this latest crisis for Alba.  They have a quote from McEleny in which he openly admits that he has remained the party's Nominating Officer since his expulsion.  It appears that the Alba leadership are betting the house on legal action proving enough to dislodge McEleny without having to do any sort of deal with him - but based on my reading of the rules, that seems to be an extreme long shot.

A commenter on the previous thread asked for my reaction to the Sunday National piece, and you can hear it in the video below.  A key question, of course, is what McEleny's motivations and intentions are - if he's just making a symbolic gesture and trying to make the Alba leadership sweat a bit, the consequences may not be all that severe.  But if he's genuinely planning to use his full powers as Nominating Officer to block candidates from standing, it may be checkmate for Alba and they may be forced to start afresh by registering a new party with a new name.

Those of you who have been suffering withdrawal symptoms from my extensive Shannon Donoghue coverage earlier in the year will be delighted to hear that she does get a passing mention in the video.  But please take this opportunity to update your Donoghue-related fan merchandise, because the Wedding of the Century has now TAKEN PLACE and she's therefore now called Shannon Cullen.

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With less than three months of the year to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure.  If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE.  Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

"Brexit 2 - This Time It's The Kitchen Sink" is coming - and we mustn't squander this second opportunity to use the shock to win independence

Given how consistently the Tories have been trailing in a poor third place in the vast majority of GB-wide polls, it's easy to dismiss anything they say or do these days as a total irrelevance.  But in my view, Kemi Badenoch's announcement that a Tory government would withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights really does matter, because it actually does make it significantly more likely that "Brexit 2" will happen.  That's for two reasons - 

1) There are up to four years left to go until the general election, which leaves plenty of time for Reform to implode, just as every Farage project in the past has ultimately imploded.  If that happens, the Tories are much more likely to pick up the pieces than Labour.

2) If Reform don't implode, they may yet need the Tories as a junior coalition partner if they are to form a government.  Badenoch's decision removes any chance that Reform would have to give up on ECHR withdrawal to seal the coalition deal.

So there's now probably a 75-80% chance that within five years, Britain will be in the dubious company of Russia and Belarus as the only European countries outside the ECHR and outside the Council of Europe.  That will be a shock to the system of liberal unionists in Scotland, and if we strike while that shock is at its most raw, there'll be an opportunity to bring a significant minority of those people over to the Yes side and win a decisive majority for independence.  

But as we learned from squandering the opportunity that Brexit 1 offered to win independence, the window of opportunity will be limited, because over time liberal unionists get used to new realities and reconcile themselves to them.  So we'll need to be ready and this time there can be no procrastination.

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With less than three months of the year to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure.  If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE.  Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal.  My PayPal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.