Vote James Kelly #1 for Alba's Membership Support Convener to kickstart a conversation about moving to a democratic one-member, one vote system for electing the NEC

First of all, many thanks again to everyone who nominated me - there was a late flurry at the end which got me well past the required twenty mark.  So now I want to share my thinking with you for putting myself forward for Membership Support Convener, and how that thinking has crystallised over the last couple of years by simply observing the way things have panned out within Alba.  

As you might remember, when we were all starting with a fresh slate in 2021, I stood as a candidate for ordinary member of the NEC and was lucky enough to be elected. During that election process, a number of people complained to me about two things: a) that ordinary NEC members were not being elected by the rank-and-file membership but only by the small minority of members who effectively paid a premium fee to register for conference, and b) that other crucial elements of internal party democracy were being stripped back, for example by not having direct elections for party chair or party treasurer.  I certainly agreed with the point about NEC members and made clear that I would be supportive of a change to election by one-member-one-vote.  In all honesty, though, once I was actually on the NEC it was a very new experience for me - when I was a member of the SNP I had never held internal office even at branch level, so there was a process of adjustment as I got used to how everything worked, and raising what I knew would be highly controversial and unwelcome points slipped down my list of priorities.

But I think what happened last year puts beyond all doubt that the current election system is not fit for purpose and has to change.  National Office Bearers on the NEC (including the position I am currently standing for) are elected by all Alba members - but that doesn't count for much if there is only one candidate for each position and no election is held.  That is exactly what happened in 2022.  Not a single vote was received by the Leader, the Depute Leader, the Women's Convener, the Equalities Convener, the Organisation Convener, the Membership Support Convener or the Local Government Convener.  It's highly likely that all or most of the people who took or retained office would have been elected anyway - but the bottom line is that members had no choice to make.  With glorious irony, though, there then followed an extraordinarily competitive election for ordinary members of the NEC, but most Alba members had no say in that either.  From memory, it was only something in the region of 5% of the membership who were both eligible to vote as conference attendees and actually did so.  To add insult to injury, there were severe problems with the vote, so even some of the people who tried to vote didn't succeed.  There were separate ballots for female and male candidates, and some people submitted their form without twigging that they'd only voted in one of the ballots.  They then weren't able to make any changes and were effectively stuck with an unintended partial abstention.  As one of the unsuccessful candidates (I managed mid-table respectability in sixth place out of eleven on the male ballot, thus missing out on one of the four spots available), I didn't raise any complaint because it seemed highly unlikely to me that the glitches made any difference to the final result - all candidates would have been affected equally.  But from a voter's point of view, that sort of episode just isn't good enough.  If you have to pay extra to be able to vote, you certainly have every right to expect that your vote will be recorded.

So we ended up with an Alba ruling body that quite simply was not elected by the membership.  Half the people on it simply 'emerged', while the other half were only elected by a very small premium-paying selectorate.  That's part of the reason I felt it was important to stand for one of the National Office Bearer positions this year, because if I ensured that there was a minimum of one challenger to the incumbent, members would at least have some kind of choice for one spot on the NEC.  But I also felt it was important to give the whole Alba membership an opportunity to express support for one very simple proposition - that the entire ruling body of the Alba Party should be elected by the whole membership.  There is no justification for members being denied their right to choose the ordinary members of the NEC as well as the National Office Bearers.  Any party that does not allow its members to elect the ruling body is not a truly functioning internal democracy.  Frankly, I think the current system only looks vaguely justifiable to people (or to some people) on the basis that it's "slightly more democratic than the SNP, at least on paper", but that's not really good enough.  There's not much point in starting a new party unless the intention is to lead the way and create something genuinely superior to what has gone before.

I hesitate to use the phrase "de facto referendum" (ahem), but if I am elected Membership Support Convener on the basis I have just set out, I would claim that as strong evidence that the party membership as a whole is not satisfied with the current arrangements for electing the NEC and that there needs to at least be a conversation about moving to full one member, one vote (with the exception of the position of parliamentary group leader, who I would agree needs to be on the NEC as of right).  And hopefully I might help to start that conversation even if I am not elected, but obviously the more votes I receive, the more likely that will be to happen.  My own personal view, actually, is that all of the party's national committees should be elected by the whole membership, but the really important thing is that the ruling body should be democratically elected.

Our occasional commenter Keaton has made the point a number of times that even if the people arguing that Alba needs to totally replace the SNP as the leading party of independence get their way, Alba would then just turn into the SNP Mark II as a result of careerists joining the gravy train, and we'd end up back to square one with independence on the backburner.  What is the only protection against that danger?  The membership having total democratic control over their own party.  A party with constitutional structures that allow it to be "managed" by the leadership of the day will always be vulnerable to a takeover by cliques or vested interests, as we have seen in the SNP in recent years.

More broadly, I think I would bring a distinct perspective to bear as Membership Support Convener, because I am one of the people who due to personal circumstances haven't been able to attend in-person events regularly, so I know what it feels like to be part of an "invisible membership" who are on the outside looking in as an 'in-person core' effectively get on with (to all intents and purposes) being the party.  The other day I saw an NEC candidate being castigated on the basis that "we never see this guy, who the hell does he think he is putting himself forward?"  That attitude is a massive part of the problem.  There are a million and one good reasons why some people simply aren't able to pound the streets at by-elections or attend in-person LACU meetings, and telling those people they have no contribution to make is incredibly alienating, not to mention ableist.  This is 2023, folks, technology has advanced, and there are many ways that people can make a contribution if you would just allow them to do so. As Membership Support Convener, my first priority will be to re-engage that wider "inactive" membership and make them realise they have a genuine stake and a role.  Even if you truly believe that only in-person active members have any value, the goal should surely be to increase that base of active members, and you're not going to do that by saying to people "this is our party, not yours, so butt out".  It's also not the way to stop inactive members from ceasing to be members at all.

I think it's fair to say that internal online communications between the party and the membership have at times left a lot to be desired, and I have heard the word "shambolic" being used.  I'm no more perfect than anyone else, and I'm sure I would make mistakes and sometimes people would still feel dissatisfied, but nevertheless I do feel confident that with fifteen years of experience as one of Scotland's leading pro-independence bloggers, I would be able to find creative ways of engaging the party membership by email communications, and hopefully I could help ease some of these ongoing problems.  

The vote opens on Friday, and there will be a preferential voting system.  Obviously I'd ideally like you to give me your first preference vote, but if you don't want to do that, you also have the exciting opportunity to give me your second or third preference vote, and I'd be equally grateful for that!

More analysis of the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election outcome

Just a quick note to let you know I've written an analysis piece for The National about the by-election result and the changes I think the SNP will need to make in response.  You can read it HERE.

One of the most idiotic self-inflicted wounds in UK political history: in a by-election that might never have been held if the SNP hadn't campaigned for it, Yousaf suffers crushing defeat that calls his future as leader into question

Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election result:

Labour 58.6% (+24.1)

SNP 27.5% (-16.7)

Conservatives 3.9% (-11.1)

Liberal Democrats 2.9% (-2.3)

Greens 2.0% (n/a)

Reform UK 1.3% (n/a)

Scottish Family Party 1.0% (n/a)

Scottish Socialist Party 0.8% (n/a)

Independence for Scotland Party 0.7% (n/a)

Trade Union and Socialist Coalition 0.6% (n/a)

Independent - Daly 0.2% (n/a)

Volt UK 0.2% (n/a)

Independent - Love 0.1% (n/a)

Independent - Cooke 0.0% (n/a)

I'm sometimes accused of being robotically hostile towards Humza Yousaf and never giving him credit where it is due, but I can honestly say that at the start of the night, when the gossip was about a narrowish Labour victory margin of around seven or eight points, my planned title for this blogpost was "Damp squib for Labour: they win Rutherglen but with underwhelming swing".  When it started looking as if the margin might be more like fifteen points, I was going to say it was the nightmare outcome, because the result was bad enough for the SNP to suggest that they were on course for defeat at the general election, but not quite bad enough to shock them into rethinking the leadership question.  But I can only react to the numbers that are actually in front of us, and they are truly shocking for Yousaf.  Very few people saw a 30+ point Labour victory coming.

It should never be forgotten that this was a needless by-election that the SNP played a key role in bringing about.  There was previously a pro-independence MP in place and she would have stayed there until the general election if the recall petition had failed, which came closer to happening than expected.  It's impossible to know whether the SNP swung the balance with their decision to actively campaign alongside Labour to persuade people to sign the petition, but the possibility can't be ruled out.  If so, the SNP leadership were the authors of this calamity in a very literal sense.

I've seen people trying to argue this morning that all that's happened is that Labour have turned out their voters from 2019 whereas three-quarters of SNP voters from 2019 stayed at home.  I mean, come on.  Differential turnout will have been a factor but it simply doesn't occur at that scale.  There will have been plenty of Labour voters who didn't show up for this low-turnout election, meaning there will have been a substantial shift of votes from SNP to Labour, and indeed from Tory to Labour.

It's a sign of just how poor the politicians were at 'reading' this result in advance that the Greens were suggesting it would show them on course for a second list seat in the region.  Instead they ended up with 2%, which wouldn't be winning them anything at all on the list.

If Yousaf survives this setback and remains leader (and it would be far better for the SNP if he doesn't) it's now essential that he brings his rivals Kate Forbes and Ash Regan back into the Scottish Government in senior positions, and introduces a more collective style of leadership.  Factional rule with a B Team government has been tried, and unsurprisingly it has failed.  But above all else Yousaf needs to start convincing voters that a vote for the SNP in the general election will directly lead to Scotland becoming an independent country.  Anecdotally, the reports from Rutherglen suggested that pro-independence voters were drifting to Labour because they felt that independence was no longer really on offer to them.

Possible benchmarks for Rutherglen?

No matter what the result tonight, someone will pop up and say "oooh, you can't read too much into by-elections, voting patterns are different for by-elections".  Which spectacularly misses the point, because by-elections are important not because of what they show about public opinion, but because of the effect that they have on public opinion.  The most celebrated by-election results, like Hamilton 1967 and Govan 1973, produced extraordinary nationwide snowball effects that fed into successive general election results.

However, to produce a snowball effect, a by-election result would need to have the "wow" factor, and because there's such a strong expectation that Labour will win tonight, I'm not sure a narrow Labour victory would be enough to produce a game-changing form of momentum.  To get a sense of where expectations lie going into the by-election, I ran an unscientific Twitter prediction poll the other day, which produced the following results - 

SNP win: 30.2%

Labour win by 0-9 points: 43.0%

Labour win by 10-19 points: 18.6%

Labour win by 20+ points: 8.3%

I suspect the high percentage for an SNP win comes from people who aren't aware of the basic arithmetic of the situation, ie. that Rutherglen is an unusually favourable seat for Labour and that the SNP would generally only win it if they're in landslide territory nationally, which plainly they aren't.  Nevertheless there does seem to be a genuine perception that the SNP have reeled Labour in somewhat and a big Labour margin of victory is no longer on the cards.

That means the expectations game has produced dangers for the leaderships of both parties.  If the SNP win (which I really can't see happening), it could be the beginning of the end for Labour's chances of a comeback in Scotland next year.  But if Labour win by more than 20 points, which I'd suggest is a more plausible surprise than an SNP win, it could now be a sufficient shock to the system to raise big question marks over Humza Yousaf's future as leader.

Final push for nominations in the Alba internal elections

Apologies for another post about the Alba Party's internal elections, but there's no point leaving a job half done.  As you probably know, I'm putting myself forward for two positions: Membership Convener and Ordinary Member of the NEC.  I would need twenty nominations from current Alba members to make the Membership Convener ballot, and I would need ten nominations from current Alba members to make the NEC Ordinary Member ballot.  Nominations will close on 6th October (ie. Friday), so it's all getting a bit urgent.

To crank up the tension further, I've just drawn up a list of people who have told me either by email or by commenting on the blog that they've nominated me for both positions, and I would appear to have exactly twenty nominations, which would be plenty enough to get on the Ordinary Member ballot, and just barely enough to get me on the Membership Convener ballot.  However, I only know the names of eighteen of those twenty people, so I can't check for duplication, and I also can't be totally sure that all of them have validly nominated me.  The situation is thus still a bit dubious and I would need a few more to be confident of really having twenty.

So if you're a current Alba member and you'd like to nominate me, the email address to send nominations to is:  conference@albaparty.org

As far as I know you just need to give the name of the person(s) you're nominating and the positions you're nominating them for.  Ideally if you could also copy that message to me, or send me a message afterwards so I can keep count of the nominations as best I can.  My own email address is:  icehouse.250@gmail.com

You might remember that last year every single one of the National Office Bearer positions had just one candidate standing, and therefore not a single election for those positions took place.  I'm hoping to help play a small part in ensuring that members at least have a choice this year.  (There were of course very competitive elections for the NEC Ordinary Member positions last year, but those are only elected by conference delegates and thus the vast majority of members didn't have any say.)

Uniquely in world history, the SNP have a majority fringe

Three names mentioned by Good Morning Scotland this morning who support of Fergus Ewing.

1. Joanna Cherry
2. Alex Neil
3. Kate Forbes

All three are members of the fringe 'malcontents' group we identified months ago. Others included Ash Regan, Michelle Thomson and Angus MacNeil.

— MSM Monitor (@msm_monitor) September 28, 2023

So, rather helpfully, we have six exact names of people belonging to this fringe malcontent group.  Of course one thing that all fringe malcontent groups, all over the world, have in common is that they have very little support, but it's usually not possible to measure in precise detail just how pitifully small their support is.  In this particular case, though, we have a rare opportunity to do just that, because remarkably, no fewer than two of the six leading members of the fringe malcontent group actually stood for the SNP leadership only six months ago, so let's refresh our memories of just how dismally they performed.

Kate Forbes took just 40.7% of the first preference vote.

Ash Regan took just 11.1% of the first preference vote.

In combination, that suggests the fringe malcontent group commands the support of a mere 51.8% of the SNP membership.

Oh wait, that's an outright majority, isn't it.   I'm sometimes accused of being overly-pedantic, but I'm not aware of any version of the English language in which the majority of an organisation can be described as its "fringe".  Maybe it's the Humza cheerleaders who are the real fringe malcontents, who knows.

*  *  *

For members of the Alba Party: I'm currently seeking nominations to stand for Membership Convener and for one of the ordinary member slots on the NEC.  If you're a current Alba member and might be interested in nominating me, you can find the details HERE.

Is there any excuse at all for Humza Yousaf removing the whip from the newly-crowned MSP Of The Year?

Although I think Humza Yousaf should step down in the very obvious interests of both the SNP and the wider independence movement, I'm certainly not someone who will just reflexively oppose something because Yousaf was the person who did it.  In the case of Fergus Ewing's highly controversial suspension from the SNP, there is one nagging doubt I have that might theoretically mitigate in Yousaf's favour, and it relates to the long-standing convention at Westminster that an MP will automatically forfeit the whip if they vote against their own government on a motion of no confidence, or indeed if they abstain on a motion of no confidence without a valid excuse.  Fergus Ewing of course voted in favour of a motion of no confidence in the Green minister Lorna Slater - so is that somehow equivalent to voting in favour of a motion of no confidence in the government?

I don't think it is, actually.  I did make the point repeatedly during the SNP leadership election that the argument that "electing Kate Forbes would be dangerous because SNP MSPs would refuse to install her as First Minister" was a piece of absolute nonsense, because those MSPs would know that abstaining or voting against their elected party leader in the First Minister election is tantamount to voting on a motion of confidence to bring down the SNP government, and they would lose the whip for doing it.  But that's different from the vote on Slater, because the fate of the government really does hinge on the outcome of a First Minister election - if the SNP leader doesn't win it, you get a unionist First Minister who will attempt to form a unionist government.  By contrast, if you vote to remove one low-ranking minister from the government, the same government can simply continue with a new minister.  It's true that the Greens might walk out of the coalition if they were not allowed the ministers of their choice, and therefore the composition of the government might change from SNP-Green to SNP-only.  But that would be a decision made by the Greens, and wouldn't be a direct consequence of the vote.  

So I don't think the logic for suspending Ewing stacks up.  The Slater vote is being used as a convenient excuse to punish him for a wider range of rebellions on matters of conscience that would not in any normal government warrant the withdrawal of the whip.

*  *  *

Thank you to members of the Alba Party who have already nominated me for the positions of Membership Convener and ordinary member of the NEC. There were a flurry of emails yesterday from people receiving acknowledgements of their nominations, so the email address seems to be working and the nominations are being monitored.  I need ten nominations to be on the general NEC ballot, and twenty nominations to be on the Membership Convener ballot.  So far, and by a very rough count that may not be entirely reliable, I reckon I have about sixteen nominations for both positions.  So I should (touch wood) be on the NEC ballot, but it remains to be seen whether I'll get the handful of further nominations required to get on the Membership Convener ballot.  If you're a current Alba Party member and are interested in nominating me, you can find the details HERE.

Vote for pro-independence parties increases in Girvan & South Carrick by-election

Girvan & South Carrick by-election result on first preferences (21st September 2023)

Conservatives 47.5% (+19.7)

SNP 28.1% (+3.3)

Labour 18.0% (+9.2)

Liberal Democrats 3.9% (n/a)

Alba 2.5% (+1.4)

This is technically a Tory gain from the SNP, but as ever in STV by-elections, that's completely meaningless.  The popular vote in the ward last time was won by an independent candidate with 31.4% of the vote, and there was another independent who took 5.6%.  So to make sense of yesterday's result, you'd need to know which party those voters would have plumped for in the absence of independent candidates.  Assuming the answer is "the Tories", the sudden 20-point jump in the Tory vote may be largely artificial.

That said, the Tories are supposed to be struggling at the moment, so this result could be taken as an indication that, in some regions at least, the Scottish Tories can still successfully use anti-SNP sentiment as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The crumb of comfort here is that the total vote share for pro-independence parties has increased (albeit helped by the absence of the non-partisan candidates), as has the SNP's vote share.  Alba can claim to have more than doubled their own vote share, but obviously 2.5% is not going to be any sort of game-changer for the party's credibility and looks very much like their past results throughout the country - which again poses the question of whether it would have been better for Alex Salmond to take the bull by the horns by standing in the Rutherglen parliamentary by-election himself and seeking the type of breakthrough result (10%? 20%?) that might have finally shifted the dial on how people view Alba.

An appeal for nominations for Alba's forthcoming internal elections

This is a message for readers who are members of the Alba Party.  As you may know, nominations have opened for various internal elections within the party, and I'd like to put myself forward and seek nominations for two positions - 

Membership Support Convener (this position is mostly referred to as 'Member Support Convener' in the Alba constitution, but is also referred to as 'Membership Support Convener' and elsewhere as 'Membership Convener' - it's all the same thing)

and

Ordinary member of the NEC (National Executive Committee)

To stand for the Membership Support Convener position I'd require nominations from twenty individual Alba members (or one Alba LACU).  To stand for an ordinary member slot on the NEC, I'd require nominations from ten individual Alba members (or one Alba LACU).  So if you do decide to nominate me, I'd be grateful if you could nominate me for both positions - although, of course, that's at your own discretion, and if you think I'm suitable for one role but not the other, you do also have the option of nominating me for just the one.

If I recall correctly from what happened in 2021, if someone is nominated for both an office bearer role and an ordinary NEC member position, the office bearer election takes place first.  If they are successful in that election, their name is then removed from the list of candidates for the ordinary NEC members.  But if they are not elected to the office bearer role, they then continue as a candidate for the ordinary NEC member election.  So that's why ideally I'm seeking to be nominated for both positions.

I've held off for a few days from putting out this call for nominations, because I had written to Alba asking for clarification on exactly how nominations should be submitted.  There hasn't been a reply yet, so I think the time has now come to get cracking.  I'll just have to give you my best guess on how the nominations process works.  It looks like it's probably the same system that was used in 2021 (but not in 2022), ie. that members should send an email to the Alba conference address with details of the person(s) they wish to nominate and the positions they wish to nominate them for.  The email address to send nominations to is listed on the Alba website as:  conference@albaparty.org

[Update: The first person who attempted to nominate me said the above email address was not recognised.  I've just sent a test message to the address myself, and so far I haven't received an error message, so I'm still assuming the address is active, but if you run into any problems let me know as soon as possible and I'll query it as a matter of urgency.]

Once you've emailed Alba with your nominations, I'd be grateful if you'd then also email me letting me know you've nominated me, and also whether you've nominated me for both positions or just one.  Apologies for doubling your trouble in this way, but there are two important reasons for asking you to do this: a) so I can judge how near or far away I am from the thresholds of ten and twenty nominations, and b) just in case I've misinterpreted how nominations are supposed to be submitted (for example if I find out at the last minute I was supposed to send over a list of names myself).  My own email address is:  icehouse.250@gmail.com

Nominations are open until 6th October.  Many thanks in advance to any members who do decide to nominate me, and the best of luck to anyone else throwing their hat into the ring for these internal elections.

What would happen in the Rutherglen by-election if the YouGov poll is exactly right?

Last week's YouGov poll was the first relatively good poll for the SNP for several months, although the reporting of it was accompanied by a flat statement from John Curtice that the swing back to the SNP wouldn't be enough for them to hold the Rutherglen & Hamilton West constituency in the forthcoming by-election.  Although that's true, it doesn't tell the full story. 

The 11-point national lead for the SNP in the YouGov poll suggests there has been approximately a 7.5 point swing from SNP to Labour since the 2019 general election.  If that swing is applied to the Rutherglen seat, it's enough to put Labour ahead, but only by around five points.  In other words, if the YouGov poll is exactly right, Labour should be regarded as favourites in Rutherglen, but the contest should also be regarded as competitive.

Now in practice I would expect Labour to win the by-election by more than five points.  The YouGov poll may well flatter the SNP a bit, because it's out of line with what other polls have shown recently.  And there are difficult local circumstances for the SNP - they stupidly participated in the prolonged demonisation of their former MP Margaret Ferrier, thus grotesquely allowing sleaze-ridden Labour to present themselves as a new broom.  Labour's status as an opposition party in both Holyrood and Westminster makes it a lot simpler for them to attract protest votes.  And there have been other miscellaneous problems for the SNP such as the paid leafleters story.

But nevertheless, the YouGov poll is the closest thing the SNP have had to a genuine glimmer of hope since the sorry saga of this by-election started.