Regrettably I haven’t been elected to the Alba NEC. This is not a surprise given that there were eighteen male candidates with only four spots available, however it’s still a big disappointment after I came so close to being on the NEC as of right with 49.5% of the vote in the Membership Support Convener election. I now dearly wish I had done the extra bit of campaigning that might have got me over the line in that vote, but how much to do is always a “how long is a piece of string” question. I can console myself that I still have an elected position on the Appeals Committee.
If I’m being honest, I think it’s a matter of some concern that ordinary party members are only being informed of who the successful candidates were, and not of the actual election results. Even I as a candidate will only be told my own result and the stage at which I was eliminated if I request that information by email (which I have done). For the life of me I can’t understand the logic of the secrecy. If not many people voted, I suppose there might be some mild embarrassment in revealing that, but come on, Alba is supposed to be setting a new standard, not falling straight back into the bad old ways of the SNP.
To the extent that we know them, the results are actually quite startling. I had always assumed that Barrhead Boy had such a huge following among Alba members that he would be a shoo-in at every NEC election, but in fact he initially wasn’t elected and was only bumped up to fourth place due to Craig Murray withdrawing after the election was over. I’m also a bit surprised that Craig only came fourth given his very high profile. I think this can be partly explained by the issue I was raising throughout the campaign – the vote was restricted to the small minority who registered for the conference, and was thus really about who organised well, rather than about who party members actually wanted on their governing body.
The one heartening thing is that because I raised that issue so persistently, other candidates started saying the same thing, making it less likely that it will just go away. And for that reason I probably did achieve something by standing. Many thanks to everyone who voted for me – even if I still don’t yet have a clue how many people that was! And many congratulations to the eight successful candidates (four male, four female).
