The Disciplinary Committee hearing, which was originally due to take place in October, has at long last been rescheduled for December. Now, I fully appreciate that the circumstances over the last few weeks have not been normal or foreseeable. However, I would note that Alex Salmond's death has not prevented Alba from running full-throttled local by-election campaigns in recent weeks, so there was clearly no particular reason why a Disciplinary Committee meeting could not also have taken place. If it was decided to postpone the meeting for much longer than was really necessary, I would suggest the onus was firmly on the leadership to lift my supposedly "temporary suspension pending the hearing" while the delay dragged on, because by the time the hearing actually takes place, I will have been suspended from the party at the sole whim of Chris McEleny for around
two and a half months. That is entirely contrary to the principles of natural justice. Alba have continued to charge me on a monthly basis for membership that I have not actually had - I can't even access the party website. That's created real practical problems, because the party constitution, the Code of Conduct and the social media policy can only actually be found in the members-only part of the website, so I practically had to beg to be sent the full text of the Code of Conduct to give me a realistic chance of defending myself properly.
A few hours ago, I sent another email to the powers-that-be in Alba to make a number of points. I won't quote the whole email in case somebody tries to argue that doing so indirectly reveals confidential information. But what I am going to do is quote a few lines from my opening paragraph, because there's nothing confidential in them, and they contain a point that very much needs to be put firmly on the public record -
"As far as any patience on my part is concerned, my view is that the delay has been of such excessive length that it was self-evidently indefensible to leave me suspended from the party on one man's whim pending the delayed hearing. I appeal to you and Mr McEleny to belatedly do the decent thing and lift that suspension immediately. I have no doubt that appeal will fall on deaf ears, as all appeals for fairness, due process and constitutionality invariably do when Mr McEleny is making the decisions, but I would nevertheless like it noted that I have made that appeal and that I did not at any stage accept an arbitrary suspension of almost *two-and-a-half months* as remotely reasonable or acceptable."
Since Alex Salmond's tragic death, it has been claimed a number of times, and by a number of different people, that Mr Salmond was so profoundly affected by his own brief expulsion from the SNP in 1982 (for membership of the proscribed 79 Group) that he ensured that essentially nobody at all was expelled from the SNP during his combined total of twenty years as party leader. The one and only exception was apparently Bill Walker, the former MSP for Dunfermline, who was well on his way to being convicted on twenty-three charges of domestic violence.
And yet as someone who has served as an elected member of Alba's Disciplinary Committee since January, I'm as well-placed as anyone to know that expulsions have been taking place in Alba, and for much, much less serious reasons than domestic violence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that people have been expelled from Alba despite having done absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever, unless you count displeasing the leadership as a form of wrongdoing. That would suggest Alba is a fundamentally different beast from the Salmond-led SNP. It's much more authoritarian. Much more illiberal. That's a very odd path for a much smaller party to choose to go down, and I'm not going to pretend to fully understand why it's happened.
Until recently, I would have been cautious about making any reference to Mr Salmond's "no expulsions" policy in the SNP, because I didn't know for sure whether it was true. However it's mentioned as a key point in a recent article written by Professor James Mitchell, and while I often disagree with many of Professor Mitchell's views, I don't think anyone would dispute that he knows his modern Scottish political history - not least because he's witnessed much of it first-hand. So it's probably safe to assume the "no expulsions" policy was indeed a real thing.
In which case it's reasonable to ask why on earth I find myself in my current situation, and in particular why Yvonne Ridley boasted that she had inside knowledge that the Alba leadership made a secret decision to expel me from the party several months ago. For those who have not been following this saga, it's important to stress that I am not accused of violence, or racism, or any of the other very serious things that might normally lead to expulsion from a political party. Instead, I seem to be facing potential expulsion simply because the leadership bristled at
this blogpost I wrote in April, which criticised the undemocratic impulses that I had detected within certain quarters of the party. I would encourage you to read that blogpost and see if you can spot anything at all in it that would even begin to warrant the most severe sanction that any political party can impose on any member, and that would justify putting me in the same bracket as *Bill Walker*. I must confess that I am totally baffled, and deeply hurt.
On a separate matter, you might remember that I recently wrote a blogpost expressing my disquiet that the Alba leadership were taking a leaf out of the authoritarians' play-book by cancelling the party's internal elections, and by instead holding a plebiscite on extending the current NEC's term of office by several months. Members were practically instructed to vote Yes to the proposition, with no viable alternative option presented. I predicted that this North Korean style tactic would produce a North Korean style vote of 90%+. That turned out to be an underestimate - Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh apparently announced today that it was 94%. If anyone thinks that's some sort of "achievement" to brag about, they couldn't be more mistaken. Alba now finds itself in a very dark place, with Alex Salmond's death being used, frankly, as an excuse to put practically all aspects of the party's internal democracy and internal politics into the deep freeze for an indefinite period. I'm not sure there's any real intention to ever reverse that process, or at least not in full.
That said, I welcome the rescheduling of the disciplinary hearing, if only because I strongly suspect Yvonne Ridley's boast will prove to be well-founded. If expulsion has already been decided upon, it's better that it happens in December, rather than me being left in purgatory for several more months. And if the Alba leadership are hellbent on forcing me to make a fresh start in a new political home (and they would be forcing me to do that, because I didn't ask for any of this nonsense to happen), I look forward to finally getting on with that process by January at the latest, once my appeal is presumably rejected. To be honest, though, I'm still genuinely 50/50 about whether I will apply to rejoin the SNP in that circumstance, or whether I will try something completely new.
