In case you've ever wondered, this is what the Alba Party website looks like to a suspended member

Not much to see, really.  And certainly not much point in following the advice in the text, because it's obvious even to the most basic single-cell life-forms that my suspension is not warranted, and yet every email I've sent regarding the matter (four so far) has been totally ignored, no matter how many senior people in the party I've copied it to.

But even though I cannot access the website, that of course hasn't stopped Alba from collecting the direct debit payment for my membership.  I checked my bank account, and with grim irony this month's payment was deducted a day or two after my suspension.  Which begs the obvious question: what the hell am I actually getting in return for my money?  I'm sure it's just a total coincidence that Chris McEleny timed my suspension to occur just a few days before I could have applied for a conference pass, allowing me to exercise my most important right as a paid-up party member, ie. to vote on party policy and in internal elections.  I'm sure it's just a total coincidence that he timed my suspension to occur just a few days before I could start collecting nominations to stand in those elections, which I would otherwise be doing right now - I had intended to stand again for Membership Support Convener after coming within a 1% margin of being elected to the position last year, and also for one of the male slots on the NEC. 

Mr McEleny has a history of getting extremely angry whenever anyone has used the phrase "rigged election", but when one man arbitrarily decides which party members will and will not be allowed to stand in internal elections, some people may well feel that the word "rigged" is objectively justified or even unavoidable.  So far there has been no due process in my case.  I remain suspended from the Alba Party and deprived of all my rights as a paid-up party member purely on the whim of one man: Christopher McEleny.  He has provided no adequate explanation for that suspension, just ultra-vague waffle about "blogposts attacking the party".  All of my attempts to seek further clarification have been deliberately ignored by him, by his deputy, by the party chair, and by the party leader.

In my most recent email on Tuesday, the key question that I asked was whether my "temporary suspension pending a hearing" would be allowed to drag on for an unacceptably long period of time, as has happened to others before me, or whether a Disciplinary Committee hearing would be held as soon as practically possible.  The fact that even that question was ignored did not fill me with confidence, so I went back and had a look at Mr McEleny's original email, and noticed that there was not even a reference to my right to be told the date and time of the Disciplinary Committee meeting and to attend it if I wished to put my defence in person.  That might be an oversight, but let me put it this way.  As an elected member of the Disciplinary Committee myself, I am still bound by confidentiality rules and cannot comment on whether or not Mr McEleny has always abided by the requirement on him to allow defendants to attend hearings if they express a wish to do so.  However, that is a subject covered by Alan Harris' recent guest post and I would recommend you read it with care if you haven't already.  What I can comment on, because this has nothing to do with the work of the committee, is that someone who was expelled by the Disciplinary Committee a few months ago later left a comment on this blog to reveal that he had written to Mr McEleny to confirm that he wished to take up his right to an appeal to the Appeals Committee, and that Mr McEleny had totally ignored that email (how uncharacteristic!) and the appeal never took place.  In other words, he was seemingly expelled from the party without due process - something which I believe could be challenged in court.  If the Alba leadership keep doing this sort of thing, eventually their luck is going to run out and they're going to come up against someone who actually has the money to launch a legal challenge.

If I sound angry and cynical about this, there's a good reason.  Most reasonable people would say that expulsions and suspensions from political parties should be reserved for the most serious wrongdoing, such as violence or racist outbursts, not for fatuous reasons such as "being a bit critical of the party leadership in a blogpost".  One of the key reasons so many people flocked from the SNP to Alba is that the SNP disciplinary process was being abused and people like Neale Hanvey and Grouse Beater were being suspended or expelled on bogus or highly questionable accusations of anti-semitism.  And yet now the leadership of the party that they flocked to as a refuge is abusing the disciplinary process in an even more extreme way.  As many people have pointed out in recent days, Chris McEleny was a fierce critic of the Sturgeon leadership when he was an SNP member, certainly far more critical than I've ever been of the Alba leadership, and yet the SNP did not suspend or expel him or interfere in any way with his right to stand in internal elections.  He would have been outraged if they had done, but they did not.  It is absolute rank hypocrisy of him to arbitrarily impose an extreme standard on Alba members that he was never prepared to accept being imposed on him as an SNP member.  The basic principles at stake do not change just because Mr McEleny currently happens to be the person given some power and no-one is preventing him from abusing it.

As you have been so studiously ignoring my emails for three weeks, Chris, you leave me no option but to say this to you publicly on this blog, which I know you are monitoring.  If you are trying to pull a fast one on me, as you have done to other Alba members in the past, in the literal sense I cannot stop you doing that.  But what I can prevent happening is you doing that in secret.  This time the curtain is going to be pulled right back and Alba members are going to know exactly what you've done.  Maybe they'll approve of your actions, maybe they won't.  But they're certainly going to know.

Thoughts on Russell Findlay's win in the Scottish Tory leadership election

The irony has often been noted that Labour and not the Tories are self-conscious about being a party of diversity, and yet it's the Tories not Labour that have produced three female Prime Ministers and one ethnic minority Prime Minister.  The argument is that the Tories will always choose merit when they see it, whereas Labour will allow unconscious prejudice to get in the way.  However, judging from Meghan Gallacher's poor result this morning, it looks like the Scottish Tories choosing a leader with a working class accent will remain the Final Frontier for many years to come.

Scottish Conservative leadership election result:

Russell Findlay 2565 

Murdo Fraser 1187 

Meghan Gallacher 403

Possibly the SNP and Labour have both dodged a bullet with Gallacher's failure.  It's hard to know for sure, because the Tories might have found that the downsides of having her as leader would have outweighed the upsides, but the one thing that might just have caused working class voters in west-central Scotland to take another look at the Tories would have been a Tory leader who speaks just like them.

Someone on the previous thread suggested it was a shame independence supporters didn't infiltrate the Tories and swing the contest for Murdo Fraser.  But that might be a case of 'careful what you wish for', because an independent centre-right party free of Tory branding, portraying itself as patriotically-Scottish-but-oh-isn't-independence-such-a-bore might actually have done quite well. Look at what happened with the CAQ in Quebec.

No, we may be just as well having Russell Findlay, who will change nothing and doesn't strike me as Mr Charisma.  He's a more credible figure than Douglas Ross, but then so are most hamsters.  And assuming the Tories are mostly in the market for committed unionist voters, a slightly more competent leader may even do us a favour by drawing support away from Labour.

It was Ruth Davidson who originally pushed Douglas Ross as some sort of Messiah, wasn't it?  That says a lot about her own much-vaunted political judgement.

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Big win for the SNP in Perth City North by-election

There was a by-election double-header in Perth & Kinross yesterday, and as is often the case in the wacky world of STV by-elections, things are not quite as they seem.  The Perth City North result is being billed as an SNP gain from Labour, but in fact it's a ward where the SNP were defending a huge lead and their vote share dropped.  The Strathallan result is being billed as a Liberal Democrat gain from the Conservatives, and indeed there was a Conservative lead in the ward last time around - but on first preferences there was this time too.  The Lib Dems only won on transfers.

Perth City North by-election first preference votes (26th September 2024):

SNP 44.7% (-10.5)
Labour 15.3% (-0.1)
Conservatives 14.4% (-5.1)
Reform UK 10.2% (n/a)
Alba 6.5% (+4.3)
Liberal Democrats 4.6% (+0.4)
Greens 4.2% (+0.8)

Strathallan by-election first preference votes (26th September 2024):

Conservatives 32.1% (-14.6)

Liberal Democrats 30.0% (+18.6)

SNP 17.4% (-17.5)

Labour 11.2% (n/a)

Reform UK 6.0% (n/a)

Greens 3.3% (-3.7)

Within minutes of the Perth City North result being announced, there was synchronised tweeting about it from John Swinney, Pete Wishart and Jim Fairlie, and in spite of the 10 point drop in the SNP vote, it's probably fair to say this is a solid result for the SNP.  They didn't win a single local by-election anywhere in Scotland in the whole time Humza Yousaf was leader, so to win even the safest of wards by such a big margin must be regarded as pretty satisfying.  Although Labour's vote in the ward has only declined very slightly, they're effectively stuck where they were in 2022 - when nationally they were in a distant second place and only just barely ahead of the third-placed Tories.  You'd expect better from a party that won the general election in Scotland less than three months ago, and it bears out the message of recent opinion polls that Labour are suffering from Keir Starmer's unforced errors.

That said, Labour's result in Strathallan is actually OK in a ward that has been poor for them in the past - they didn't bother standing in 2022, but in 2017 they took only 5% of the vote, while in 2012 they took 10%.  The SNP's showing in Strathallan is disappointing, there's no getting away from that, and it's hard to escape the impression that there must have been some kind of direct movement from the SNP to the Lib Dems, who did have a genuinely impressive result in spite of not quite topping the poll on first preferences.

If there's a common thread to the two by-elections, it's the strong showing from Reform UK, and that does look like an increasing problem as Holyrood 2026 comes into view.  Unless Reform UK's Scotland-wide vote drifts downwards to 5% or below, they may win enough list seats to make it very hard for the pro-independence majority at Holyrood to be maintained, even if the SNP stay in first place.

If I was being Machiavellian, I'd say what is required is a pro-independence party on the radical right to take on Reform UK on their own terms.  That won't happen, of course, so perhaps some shameless left-wing economic populism is the order of the day to try to win back the disaffected voters drifting to Reform.

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Dedication, ooooh dedication, that's what made Keir a record-breaker, yeah

Just a quick note to let you know that I have an article in The National today about Keir Starmer's record-breaking journey from landslide victory in early July to deep unpopularity in the polls in late September.  I'm not sure if it's in the main part of the website, but it can be found on page 8 of the print or digital edition. [UPDATE: It's now also on the main part of the website HERE.]

A personal statement about Chris McEleny's decision to suspend me from the Alba Party for the heinous crime of (*checks notes*) blogging

Over the last two weeks, I have sent three short and to-the-point emails to Chris McEleny, the General Secretary of the Alba Party, seeking the further information and clarification I am fully entitled to after his bizarre message out of the blue announcing that the NEC had removed me from my elected position on the Constitution Review Group - something the NEC had literally no power to do under the existing constitution.  (A person's party membership can be temporarily suspended pending a disciplinary hearing, but the NEC has no power to simply remove someone on an 'a la carte' basis from their elected position on an individual committee.  It would be total chaos if they did have that power - if there was a troublesome minority on the NEC itself, for example, the majority could simply vote that minority out of existence.)

Because Mr McEleny ignored the first email, I made sure that the two subsequent emails were copied to the Deputy General Secretary (Corri Wilson), the party chair (Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh) and the party leader (Alex Salmond) - just so I would know there was no danger that they would be overlooked accidentally.  All four individuals have quite plainly made an intentional decision to ignore my messages for fourteen days.  In my opinion, for any party member to be treated in that way is disgraceful and an act of carefully calculated contempt.  I would be lying if I said that this has not lessened my respect for these four people, which used to be considerable, and sky-high in the case of Mr Salmond.  There was a time, actually, when I used to hear from Mr Salmond quite frequently by phone - but, of course, that was when he needed people like me to put his side of the story following his trial and to try to ensure enough support was there among committed Yessers to get Alba off the ground if and when the launch came.  I was once warned by someone who has known Mr Salmond for far, far longer than I have that one of his greatest faults, ironically, is a lack of personal loyalty - if someone is no longer deemed useful, he'll drop them like a hot brick.  My reaction was "not to worry, I'm big enough and ugly enough to look after myself, and I'm not naive either - I know how ruthless many senior politicians are".  All of that still stands, but my goodness, what a prescient observation that person made.  No longer am I needed to defend Mr Salmond's reputation after dodgy proceedings against him - now he is the instigator of dodgy proceedings against me, and conveniently the phone has fallen completely silent.  My liberty is not at stake, of course, so my situation is infinitely less stressful than Mr Salmond's was five years ago.  But suffice to say that this little irony has not gone unnoticed by me or by others.

I finally received an email today from Mr McEleny, but it continued to completely ignore all of the emails I had sent him over the last two weeks.  It simply informed me that I have now been suspended from the party, pending a Disciplinary Committee hearing, due to new allegations that I have publicly "attacked the party" on this blog and on Twitter.  I of course have done no such thing - I have made legitimate, measured and well-reasoned criticisms of the party leadership's actions in specific areas.  I must say that there is a whiff of Stalinism about any party leadership that cannot differentiate between itself and the wider party, and thus regards any criticism of itself as an attack on the party.  This is absolutely no surprise, though, because I have been an elected member of the Alba Disciplinary Committee since January, and I have seen exactly the threadbare, nonsensical reasons that have been put forward for expulsions and lengthy suspensions.  Confidentiality rules have, frankly, been abused over that period to ensure that Alba members do not have a clue of the outrageous things that have been going on behind the scenes.  I have known for months and I haven't been able to say anything.

It is the very problem of a party leadership that thinks it is the party that I have been trying to address in the Constitutional Review Group since January - in other words I have been battling against the odds to try to turn a sham internal party democracy, one where everything is carefully controlled and managed by a self-perpetuating leadership elite, into a real democracy in which the members can if they want change things for the better without the leadership's permission.  I have not done that to "attack" the party, I have done it to try to rescue a party that will otherwise be in a death-spiral if it alienates and loses any more members.  It now seems obvious to me that Alba was actually set up as a small, private version of the SNP for a few closely-connected families and friends to control in a way that suited themselves - although nobody bothered to mention that to the thousands of people from outside the in-group who joined and were promised a 'member-led' party.  It's actually much more like a private living-room rather than a fully-fledged political party.  We had an extraordinary demonstration last year that the leadership will even cancel internal election results if they dislike the outcome - I doubt if even the Sturgeon clique would ever have dared go quite that far in the SNP.  Anecdotally, I've been left in no doubt that Alex Salmond had been monitoring the progress of those votes and only made the final decision to nullify them once he was sure the "wrong" people had won.  If democracy had prevailed, Denise Findlay rather than Rob Thompson would currently be Organisation Convener, and Jacqueline Bijster rather than Daniel Jack would currently be Membership Support Convener.  Instead, we have a de facto autocracy.  I am nowhere near as big a threat to that autocracy as Ms Findlay, Ms Bijster and Eva Comrie were, but it seems that the leadership are being very thorough and meting out draconian treatment to even the lesser threats like myself.

Having served on the Disciplinary Committee for months, I know all too well that in its current composition it is a rubberstamp for the leadership.  Things were a bit more evenly balanced at the start of the year, but following Marjorie Ellis Thompson's early resignation as convener and Alan Harris' automatic removal from the committee after he left the party, the leadership now have a 100% dependable majority, and of course I won't be allowed to sit in judgement on myself, which makes the majority even bigger.  So whatever Mr McEleny wants the outcome of the hearing to be, that will be the outcome.  This latest development is, therefore, fully consistent with Yvonne Ridley's boast to have inside information that a decision has already been taken to expel me from the Alba Party.  The only thing that might theoretically stand in the way is the Appeals Committee, and to be honest I'm not sure if that's a more independent body - although the one appeal I am aware of this year was dismissed, so that doesn't bode well.

Nevertheless, I will be challenging both the Disciplinary Committee and the Appeals Committee to demonstrate that the Alba leadership are not presiding over a Mickey Mouse organisation in which the procedures are just for show, and to do that by actually applying due process.  I haven't been given a date yet for the first hearing, but when it takes place I will have the right to bring with me another Alba member for support.  That person will not be able to "represent" me as such, but having sat through several disciplinary hearings this year, with my jaw dropping to the floor on multiple occasions at what I was witnessing, I think it might well be useful to have an independent witness to events, if nothing else.  So if you're a current Alba member and if you think you might be able to help at the meeting (particularly if you have legal expertise or some sort of equivalent), please drop me a line at: icehouse.250@gmail.com

A final point.  Mr McEleny's allegations in the email suspending me are once again incredibly vague, and the closest thing he gets to specificity is by complaining that I publicly criticised Shannon Donoghue and Yvonne Ridley (he doesn't mention them by name but there's no-one else he can be referring to). I have made clear that I was subjected to attempted bullying during my period on the Constitution Review Group, by two people in particular.  One of those was Shannon Donoghue, and to a small extent her bullying attempts spilled over into the public domain on Twitter, with one particular episode just after the general election in July.  Yvonne Ridley, meanwhile, has I believe actually publicly posted the full exchange in which she attempted to bully me a couple of weeks ago.  She blocked me immediately after posting it, so I wasn't able to doublecheck that she had quoted both of us fully and accurately, but if she has, I don't think there's much room for doubt about which direction the menace and poison was coming from.  So the Alba leadership is now very publicly showing itself to have no interest in protecting party members from bullying, and there's one simple and over-riding reason for that - ie. the bullies themselves are actually in charge, or at the very least are in positions of enormous influence due to connections of family and friendship.  The disciplinary process is in itself a useful tool by which an enhanced form of bullying can be administered.

I fully expect the forthcoming process to be a charade and that I will be expelled.  I'm not sure even Keir Starmer would expel people just for criticising the Labour leadership in blogposts, but this is the grotesque place we find ourselves - Alba is now more authoritarian than Starmer's Labour party.  I was advised by someone in this blog's comments section the other day to start looking ahead to life outside Alba just in case the worst comes to the worst, and of course I've been doing that: I have no intention of being left politically homeless if the Alba leadership expel me from a party that I have worked extremely hard for over the last three years.  In the meantime, though, I've never backed down in the face of bullying in my life, and I don't intend to start now.  I will be seeing what might risibly be described as this "disciplinary" process through to its conclusion.

Survation poll confirms that Labour have lost their lead in Scotland - and suggests the Scottish public wants Devo Max

When the Opinium poll came out the other day showing the SNP seven points ahead, I did raise the possibility that the SNP might have been flattered due to an Opinium house effect, because a couple of previous Opinium polls had also been unusually favourable.  I didn't think that was likely, but I may have to revisit that verdict because I now realise that a Survation poll also came out on Wednesday and showed the SNP and Labour roughly level-pegging.  Nevertheless, that's still a good news story for the SNP, even if it's on a more modest scale than Opinium.  

I really can't emphasis this enough for people who haven't previously looked at polling trends immediately after a general election.  What would usually be happening at this stage is that there would be considerable novelty surrounding the new government - the people who had elected it would be euphoric, and the people who did not elect it would be influenced by that euphoria and some of them would even start thinking that they made a mistake or were too cautious and should have voted in line with the tide.  That would generally push the winning party further ahead in the opinion polls than they were on polling day.  It's a temporary effect but it can usually be expected to last at least a good few months. 

With the added factor that a lot of people seem to be a bit jaded with the SNP government in Edinburgh, it would have been entirely reasonable to expect a Labour lead over the SNP of anything between about 8 and 20 points at this stage.  Instead, Labour have lost their lead entirely, which speaks volumes about just how dreadful Starmer's first few weeks in office have been, and bodes extremely poorly for Anas Sarwar's hopes of becoming First Minister in two years' time.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Survation):

SNP 31%

Labour 31%

Conservatives 14%

Reform UK 11%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Greens 3%

Alba 1%

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 31%

Labour 31%

Conservatives 13%

Reform UK 9%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Greens 6%

Alba 1%

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 28%

Labour 26%

Conservatives 14%

Reform UK 10%

Greens 10%

Liberal Democrats 10%

Alba 3%

Seats projection: SNP 40, Labour 39, Conservatives 17, Liberal Democrats 13, Greens 10, Reform UK 10

Survation's data tables round the numbers to two decimal places, and for what it's worth on that measure the SNP have a slight lead across the board: they're 30.93% to 30.76% ahead of Labour on the Holyrood constituency ballot, and 31.16% to 30.80% ahead of Labour in Westminster voting intentions.

The independence numbers are less good than in the Opinium or More In Common polls, but nevertheless Survation becomes one of three out of four pollsters who in anniversary week have shown the Yes vote higher than it was in 2014.

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 46%

No 54%

Survation's client for this poll was Progress Scotland, the organisation run by Angus Robertson.  They've taken a leaf out of my book on this occasion - maybe not intentionally, but it's almost identical to something I did in a Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll around four years ago when I asked a simple question about whether Scotland should rejoin the European Union, without specifying whether that would be as an independent country.  I think that's a really useful question, because it forces unionist respondents to answer about what they think should happen to Scotland in particular, rather than the UK as whole, while also allowing them to leave their views on independence to one side.  The pro-European majority this time is even stronger than it was in the Scot Goes Pop poll.

If there was a referendum on membership of the European Union tomorrow, how would you vote on the question: "Should Scotland join the European Union?"

Scotland should join the European Union: 69%

Scotland should not join the European Union: 31%

I know that a non-trivial minority of independence campaigners have misgivings about the EU and hanker after decoupling the independence cause from pro-Europeanism, but when you look at figures like the ones above, it's hard not to conclude that it would be strategically foolish to go down that road, and that if anything, the SNP should be ramping up the pro-EU message and trying to tap into anger about Brexit and Scotland's will being ignored.  Only 20% of Yes voters from 2014 would vote against Scotland joining the EU, while an extraordinary 54% of No voters want back into the EU.

Also encouraging is that by substantial margins, respondents think the Scottish Parliament and not Westminster should have control over pensions, taxation, the cost of living, energy policy, public transport, crime, human rights, employment rights, relations with Europe, the environment, immigration, social security, and the calling of any independence referendum.  The only exceptions, ie. policy areas where respondents prefer Westminster control, are national security and foreign policy - and on the latter the margin is pretty narrow.

In a nutshell, this is a population that strongly favours Devo Max - the genuine type, not the Jackie Bird version.

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Here is the *minimum* that Alba members should be demanding from the constitution review process, in my view

The weekly Alba email to members, this time written by Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, has announced among other things that a National Assembly of the party will be held in Perth on 1st December to discuss the proposals of the Constitution Review Group.  This is the first news of any type I've heard about the constitution review process since I was suddenly informed by Chris McEleny around ten days ago that I had been removed from my elected position on the Constitution Review Group - a decision which I am reliably informed by those with legal expertise that the leadership quite simply had no right under the existing constitution to take.  (The General Secretary can certainly temporarily suspend someone's party membership pending a disciplinary hearing, but there's no provision for someone to be removed or suspended on an 'a la carte' basis from their elected position on a specific committee or group.)  I've no idea whether today's announcement means that a meeting of the group has already been held in my absence.

I would urge all Alba members who believe in the type of thoroughgoing constitutional reform that would make the party fit for purpose to attend the National Assembly and to insist as best they can on real change.  I intend to be there and to make a pro-reform contribution, although obviously that will be contingent on the truth or otherwise of Yvonne Ridley's boast of having inside knowledge that a decision has been taken to expel me from the party on baseless, trumped-up charges about a breach of confidentiality rules.

December could well be the last chance for the rank-and-file membership to seize back control over the reform process.  It's a statement of the obvious that my own unconstitutional removal was part - perhaps a small part, but nevertheless a part - of a set of tactics intended to ensure that any reform package is as superficial and limited in scale as possible.  Unless members put up a real fight at National Assembly and then at conference, the opportunity to make the needed changes will be lost and may never come round again.

Regardless of what the Constitution Review Group proposes (and remember that group now has a majority of leadership-appointed members, with elected members firmly in a minority), I would suggest the minimum that the Alba membership should be insisting upon is the following:

1) All members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), with the exception of Ash Regan as leader of the parliamentary group, should be directly elected by the whole membership on a one member, one vote basis.  During the Blair/Brown government, I saw a Labour minister on TV making an atrocious defence of an unelected House of Lords.  He argued that in a democracy, it's not necessary for every position to be elected - for example, in some American jurisdictions, judges are elected.  We don't do that here but we're still a democracy, he said.  Well, OK, it may not be necessary in a parliamentary democracy for judges to be elected, but it surely is necessary for parliament to be elected.  The same principle applies to Alba.  The NEC is the governing body of the party, and if the membership doesn't elect it, the party doesn't have a fully-fledged internal democracy.  At present around 95% of the members are in practice deprived of the right to elect ordinary members of the NEC due to the discredited 'pay-per-vote' system.  

I suspect the main reason that the leadership prefer a restricted franchise is that it ensures that a far greater percentage of those able to vote in NEC elections are the equivalent of a 'pay-roll vote', ie. not actually paid employees but people firmly under the leadership's influence. Anecdotally, I've been left in no doubt that people were told who to vote for last year. The system maximises the chances of the leadership getting a pliant NEC that will mostly do as it's told and not challenge anything or ask awkward questions.

But the even bigger danger is that the pay-per-vote system turns Alba into "the best democracy money can buy", ie. it potentially allows wealthy individuals to purchase a place on the NEC by buying voting rights for lots of people and then telling them to vote as a bloc.  Whether this has already happened in past years is something that can only be speculated about.

2) Other key committees, such as the Conference Committee and the Disciplinary Committee, should also be elected by the whole membership on a one member, one vote basis.  The main pushback I've heard against this is that it would somehow be 'overkill'.  People have said things like "I support the NEC being fully elected, but can't you have too much of a good thing?"  Well, it might not be the end of the world if the Finance & Audit Committee is not directly elected, but in many ways the other committees are more powerful than the NEC itself (in practice), and if they're not elected, the democratisation process will be hopelessly incomplete.  The Conference Committee is the gatekeeper of what can and cannot be debated at conference, so if the members don't control the Conference Committee, they have no ability to determine party policy.  At present the leadership appear to maintain control of the Conference Committee by swamping its meetings with people whose right to be there is highly dubious even under the existing constitution.  And if an increasingly authoritarian leadership is taking more and more disciplinary action against rank-and-file members, those members need protection against arbitrary treatment, and the most effective protection of all is for members to choose for themselves the composition of the Disciplinary and Appeals Committees.

3) Committees should select their own conveners, rather than have conveners imposed on them by the leadership.  The Alba constitution is closely modelled on the SNP constitution, so in the places where the Alba constitution is actually less democratic than the SNP, it raises a red flag for me and makes me wonder why.  As I understand it, the SNP's Conduct and Appeals Committees are independent from the NEC in their composition, but that is not the case in Alba, where the NEC (in reality the leadership using the NEC as a rubberstamp) appoints two members to the Disciplinary Committee and designates one of them as convener.  And even though nobody on the NEC is allowed to be a member of the Appeals Committee, the NEC still appoints the convener of the Appeals Committee, which is a ludicrous contradiction.  And in case you're wondering, no, the NEC did not appoint a convener from within the Appeals Committee's own ranks, they appointed a convener from outside who was not elected by anyone. That hopelessly compromises the committee's independence.  All committees should be trusted to choose their own chairs.

4) The "Enabling Act" should be removed. Like the SNP constitution, the Alba constitution permits rules to be drawn up that have the same force as if they were in the constitution itself.  But the SNP constitution adds the caveat that this is only the case insofar as the rules do not conflict with the text of the constitution. That caveat appears to be missing from Alba's constitution.  Why?  In theory, this is a weakness which could be exploited as a sort of 'Enabling Act' allowing the constitution to be overridden.  That's got to be sorted.

5) The General Secretary's veto powers over the disciplinary process should be abolished.  As Alan Harris' guest post set out, under the current system, the General Secretary can simply veto all complaints he doesn't approve of, and the Disciplinary Committee is not even made aware that those complaints ever existed.  But for complaints that the General Secretary allows through or sets in train himself, he is free to go all in, and demand certain outcomes and penalties.  That is not a fair, just or independent system, and unsurprisingly it is not producing fair, just or independent results. The Disciplinary Committee must be an independent, fully elected body that investigates all complaints without interference from the General Secretary or the party chair.

6) Something has to be done about the unelected nature of the party chair and General Secretary positions.  We have the weird paradox that most national office bearer roles are directly elected, but by far the two most powerful office bearers are not elected by anyone.  Presumably the leadership must be worried about those positions falling into the "wrong" hands, but given the huge power these two people wield over party members, I believe it is unsustainable for party members to have no say at all.  My suggestion is a compromise by which the leader would propose their preferred party chair and General Secretary, and the party membership would then either accept or reject those nominations via affirmative ballots.  However in an ideal world I do believe both positions should be directly elected.

Additionally, although it's not something I've personally prioritised, I know the biggest concern for many members is Alba's unsatisfactory approach to policy formation, which could potentially be addressed by the creation of a Policy Development Committee, or an elected Policy Development Convener.

Keith Brown's statement is not a long-overdue sign of realism - it's a sign of abject surrender to Westminster

Well, what a bind we're in as a movement.  Yesterday's Opinium poll was better than anyone could really have dreamed of at this stage and offered huge grounds for optimism that the SNP might well win a fifth consecutive term in government - which, if it happens, is going to be an almighty jolt to a political and journalistic establishment that had convinced itself that the tide has gone out decisively on the SNP and that a Sarwar-led government at Holyrood is a racing certainty.  And make no mistake, an SNP win would be a huge boost for independence, if only in the sense that if it didn't happen, the setback for independence would be enormous.  But there just doesn't seem to be any direct way forward from an SNP win to independence, because the SNP leadership are hoisting the flag of surrender, and they're doing it in plain sight.

A few people welcomed the depute leader Keith Brown's admission that Westminster will never grant another Section 30 order, as if it was a long-overdue sign of some realism creeping in.  But it's actually the total opposite, because he went on to clarify that independence can never be won without a referendum.  By "not playing by Westminster's rules", what Brown really appears to mean is that we have to totally surrender to Westminster's rigged rules, ie. we have to accept that something as prosaic as mere electoral mandates for a referendum or for independence are no longer sufficient and that we'll need ridiculously overwhelming levels of public support that simply aren't attainable in the real world.

In truth, if we really did stop playing by Westminster's rules, it would mean saying "sorry, but we don't need an unattainable supermajority, actually, in a democracy we just need a simple majority, and we're going to seek an outright mandate for independence via a scheduled election, which is something that you have no power to stop us doing".  That is so obviously the best and only way forward that it's surely inevitable that the SNP will have to embrace it sooner or later, but at the moment it looks very much like "later".   It's as if we're all left twiddling our thumbs until it happens.  Goodness only knows how many more years and leadership changes it will take for the penny to finally drop.

In the meantime, we do have a party in Alba that "gets it" and that will be offering voters a chance to vote for independence outright on the Holyrood list.  But the problem is that there seems to be quite a low ceiling on potential support for any radical independence party, and Alba will need to max that support out if they are to win any list seats at all and thus be in a position to do anything to move us forward.  In order to get that maximum support they'll need to be as broad a church as possible, they'll need to be welcoming, tolerant and inclusive.  They'll need to be a 'shining village on a hill' that everyone looks up to longingly and can't wait to visit.  

I don't think it should be controversial to point out that Alba are actually doing the opposite of that.  They're becoming an ever more narrow sect that lives inside a forbidding fortress.  Freedom of speech and dissenting views are being cracked down on, both by direct means and by fostering a climate of fear in which people feel they have to self-censor.  No attempts are being made to build bridges with the significant number of people who have already felt they had no choice but to leave the party, including Eva Comrie, who was probably the most popular figure in Alba other than Alex Salmond himself.  Other people who wanted to stay in Alba have been expelled, and that will presumably continue to happen.  (Indeed if Yvonne Ridley's boast has any truth to it, I could be next in line, although I'm no closer to finding out, because - as I predicted last week - Alba are deliberately "throwing a deefie" and totally ignoring my emails, even though I copied them to the General Secretary, the Deputy General Secretary, the party chair and the party leader.)  

On their current trajectory, Alba are likely to get between 1% and 3% of the list vote and to win no seats at all, which will simply be of no use to anyone.

If there was fundamental change in either the SNP or Alba, we might start to get somewhere, but how is that going to happen?  I've made no secret of the fact that I would welcome Kate Forbes as SNP leader, not least because I think she's the most electable person they've got, but I can't see any evidence at all that she would abandon the do nothing approach on independence.

And are there any signs of life outside the SNP and Alba?  Not that I can see.  The ISP have apparently gone down a very peculiar path by adopting abstentionism for Holyrood as well for Westminster, which rules them out of serious consideration as a vehicle for independence.  I was tickled to discover that Peter A Bell has set up his own political party, although perhaps I shouldn't be too dismissive, because if Alba do expel me, I could be needing a bolthole before too long.  (I know, I know, he'd never let me in!)  I suppose as a last resort some people might consider setting up yet another new party, but by God, that would be a long and hard road and might be wholly counter-productive.  It would be much better to get the existing parties into some kind of shape, but how to even begin achieving that is a massive conundrum.

SNP become clear favourites to win a fifth term in 2026 as stunning new Opinium survey gives them a significant lead over Labour

It's rather fitting that the day that marks the passing of a generation since the independence referendum has brought word of what could turn out to be a landmark polling moment that puts the SNP firmly back on track to win a fifth term in power at the Holyrood election of 2026.

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election (Opinium, 5th-11th September 2024):

SNP 32%

Labour 25%

Conservatives 14%

Reform UK 11%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Greens 7%

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 32%

Labour 25%

Conservatives 12%

Liberal Democrats 8%

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 30%

Greens 25%

Labour 25%

Conservatives 12%

Liberal Democrats 8%

I know the Green figure on the list looks wildly implausible, and it probably is wrong, but at the moment the only place I can find the Holyrood numbers is on John Curtice's What Scotland Thinks site, and 25% for the Greens is what it says.  I can't see any sign of the numbers in the Opinium datasets or on social media, so if anyone can point me in the right direction, please do.  It may in reality be a combined figure of 25% for the Greens and the assorted 'others'.  But even if that is the case, there doesn't appear to be any reason to doubt that the SNP are several points ahead of Labour across the board, which is an extraordinary achievement at a stage of the electoral cycle when Labour should be still enjoying their honeymoon with the electorate.  I've said this before, but if this is as good as it gets for Labour, they've got a major problem on their hands.

So when, you might wonder, was there last a poll as good as this one for the SNP?  On paper the answer is as recently as January, when the Ipsos / STV poll gave the SNP a Westminster lead over Labour of 39% to 32%.  However, that's not really comparable, because Ipsos telephone polls have tended to be more favourable for both Yes and the SNP than most polls from online firms.  For the most recent online poll as good as today's, you'd have to go all the way back to September of last year when another Opinium poll had the SNP nine points clear.  And in case you're wondering, it's doubtful that there's an Opinium house effect at play here, because the Opinium poll during the general election campaign had Labour ahead, albeit admittedly not by quite as much as in the election result itself.

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UPDATE: If Wikipedia is to be believed, the What Scotland Thinks version of the numbers is indeed wrong, and the real figures on the list are: SNP 30%, Labour 25%, Reform UK 12%, Conservatives 12%, Greens 8%, Liberal Democrats 8%.  It appears that Reform UK also have a remarkable 12% of the constituency vote.  That means the seats projection works out as SNP 47, Labour 33, Reform UK 16, Conservatives 16, Greens 9, Liberal Democrats 8.  The pro-independence parties would be well short of a majority between them, but it's a struggle to imagine Labour forming a government from such a distant second place.  You'd imagine they'd want to limit any full coalition to just themselves and the Liberal Democrats, with the two right-wing unionist parties providing deniable support from outside.  But the problem is that a Labour - Lib Dem coalition would still have fewer MSPs than the SNP, so it would just look all wrong and I doubt it would happen in the real world.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.  The fundraiser page can be found HERE, or direct donations can be made via Paypal.  My Paypal email address is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Ten years on, some personal recollections of the referendum

It's exactly a generation ago today that the independence referendum took place, and as everyone and their auntie seems to be publishing mini-memoirs of their own experiences during the campaign, I thought I might as well briefly join in the fun.

There were three main aspects to my own involvement.  One was Scot Goes Pop itself, which exploded in popularity as people searched for polling news and analysis.  I always thought it was really interesting that there was no big increase in Scot Goes Pop's traffic levels during the 2011 Holyrood election campaign, even though that was one of the most important and dramatic elections in Scottish history and I was constantly blogging about polls throughout it.  And yet even in autumn 2013, a whole year before the referendum, I was already seeing an exponential increase in reader numbers.  People were really hungry to know whether there was a chance Scotland might become an independent country.

Secondly, there was the syndication on Yahoo of some of my columns for the International Business Times, which as I always point out, probably means I was the most-read pro-independence blogger during the indyref campaign, albeit just through the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time.  I have a friend who is rarely impressed by anything I do, but she actually did look momentarily impressed when she glanced at the Yahoo homepage and saw one of my articles staring back at her!

And thirdly, there were my two appearances on BBC Breakfast during referendum week, one before the referendum, and one after.  For obvious reasons the one beforehand was much more nerve-wracking, because there was the slight danger that if I had said or done something really stupid, it might have had a detrimental effect.  But it went OK in the end.  When I was asked by Naga Munchetty why I thought Scotland should be independent, I made a point of starting by saying "well, Scotland is a country", which was something I thought hadn't been said enough on TV and radio during the campaign.

I did feel very slightly stitched up, though, because the item was supposed to be two bloggers, one Yes and one No, giving their own personal views about independence.  In practice, Dunc "don't call me Dunc" Hothersall was always inevitably going to be my opponent because he was the only unionist blogger in the known universe, and he was there as a de facto Better Together spokesman.  He had obviously been thoroughly briefed on exactly what to say, and indeed he was deep in conversation with Kezia Dugdale when I arrived.  Whereas I genuinely was there independently and hadn't been briefed by the Yes campaign at all. But I did my best. The irony is that I had made up my mind in advance that the one thing I definitely wasn't going to do was criticise the BBC live on air, but Duncan effectively forced me into it, because Better Together had clearly instructed him to make a song and dance about the "mob" protesting outside the BBC Scotland building in Glasgow.  I replied that it was a peaceful protest from people who had a legitimate complaint because "the BBC, not BBC Scotland but the BBC in London, haven't exactly covered themselves in glory over the last week". When I said the words "in London", Duncan started beaming and pointing at Naga Munchetty, as if to say "yeah, he's talking about you, hun".

It wasn't even remotely premeditated, but looking back I'm glad I said what I did, because it at least flagged up for viewers that the concerns were there. And arguably there's not much point complaining retrospectively about the BBC's bias during the campaign if you didn't raise the issue at the time when you had the golden chance.

When I made the return appearance two days after the referendum, Duncan was supposed to be there again, but for some reason he was replaced by the Tories' Mark Brown, who actually struck me as a decent bloke. I chatted to him before the filming started, and he seemed as genuinely keen as any Yes supporter that the promise made in The Vow of a more powerful Scottish Parliament was kept.  And after the interview, he gave me a bearhug and bellowed "WE ARE BETTER TOGETHER JAMES".

Incidentally, when I was first contacted by the BBC producer about the second appearance, probably at about 3pm on Friday 19th September, he asked me if I could help to put him in touch with anyone senior from the Yes campaign, because he had been baffled to discover that the entire Yes Scotland organisation seemed to have already disappeared in a puff of smoke.  The significance of what he said didn't really register with me at the time, but it's arguably something we've been suffering from ever since.