My purpose in writing
this piece is not to cause distress to the Alec Salmond Fan Club. My
reservations about Mr. Salmond are clearly expressed in Settler Watch Lynn
and the Road to Devolunion; https://troostories.blogspot.com/. My purpose in this
piece is to tell of a well-intentioned attempt to support the pro-independence
claims of Salvo.
By trying to make something work you
find out more about it. After five months of frustrated effort I complained to
the High-Heid Yins of Salvo about their organisational structure and the way in
which it worked to waste the energy of anyone who genuinely believed that
Scotland should return to the fold of sovereign nation states.
On the 7th
May 2023 the Salvo Secretary, Jan Hendry sent an electronic document to those
who had joined Salvo in an area from Dundee to Forres. This document was a call
to form Salvo’s North-East Hub at a Meeting in Aberdeen. The document of 7th
May had a draft constitution attached and a list of positions to be filled by
willing Members.
The Meeting was organised and overseen
by Brian Allan who introduced himself as an activist with Aye Aberdeen. The
Meeting duly appointed four office-bearers. Leigh Dubbels took responsibility
for the Convener/Coordinator role; Wilma Bruce, Treasurer; Brian Allan,
Membership Secretary; Louis Mair (author), Minutes Secretary.
A few days later I looked in my in-box
for the document of the 7th May as an aid to writing a draft minute.
I found a similarly styled document dated 8th May. This document
also purported to have come from Jan Hendry. The 8th May document
had a significantly different list of office-bearers. No-one at the 9th
May Meeting had mentioned these alternative posts. I wrote to the Salvo
Secretary asking for clarity.
Some days passed before Jan Hendry
replied. I was told that my query had caused the Salvo secretary some
confusion; the document had been composed and sent by someone else. My next
attempt at writing the draft minute involved a more careful look at my
electronic in-box. I found the 7th May document but when I opened it
the list of Hub positions was not as I remembered it. My rough notes agreed
with my memory. I asked a friend if you could alter an e-mail once it was in
the recipient’s in-box. I was assured that this could not be done. I then wrote
to Jan Hendry to ask for clarity. The Salvo secretary told me that the
document had been edited. Jan Hendry was exceedingly vague about who had edited
the document which looked like an e-mail but was not an e-mail.
I cannot say with certainty who forged
the 8th May document. I can however speak five languages and
everything I know about literary criticism suggests that Brian Allan is the
prime suspect. I cannot say with certainty who edited the 7th May
document; once again I suspect that it was Brian Allan. My draft minute
contains Hub posts that cannot be traced in the paperwork.
In June 2023 the North-East
Hub’s Membership Secretary organised an admin-team meeting. Three of the four
Hub Officers were present with a fourth figure by video conference. It was not clear
what the Membership Secretary wished to discuss. The Convener/Coordinator was
keen to tell me that she had given up the Convener’s duties and was now a
Coordinator. It seemed probable that Leigh Dubbels had been schooled in this
confused piece of thinking. I suggested that Miss Dubbels should resign from
her post if she no longer wished to take the responsibility. I then asked Brian
Allan what post he held with Salvo’s central organisation. Mr. Allan said,
reluctantly, that he was a member of the “Core Group”. I had to leave to catch
a bus, forgetting to ask the name of the lady on the video-link.
Not long
afterwards I learned that a Researcher had been appointed and her name was Dot
Jessiman. This appointment was clearly not a Hub appointment. The name sounded
familiar and I found it in a circa November 1993 newspaper cutting. A Dot
Jessiman had been involved in a publicity stunt which benefitted Alec Salmond.
In 1993 Alec Salmond had achieved favourable press reports in both the Scotsman
and the Press and Journal over his association with New Scots for Independence.
This hollow sham was fronted by Dot Jessiman. New Scots for Independence was
never heard of again. Alec Salmond claimed to be leading the SNP towards
Scottish independence. The Scotsman and the Press and Journal are virulently
empire-loyalist newspapers. Dot Jessiman is currently a member of Alec
Salmond’s Alba Party.
I was unable to attend the
July “Admin Team Meeting”. It was around this time that Brian Allan claimed
that he had become the ‘Chair’, presumably of the Admin Team.
For the August Meeting the entire Hub was
invited and an agenda was sent out by Leigh Dubbels. Item 1 on the agenda was
the appointment of a Chair and a Secretary. This was achieved very promptly and
the Meeting moved on to the kind of chaotic discussion that had been a feature
of the May Meeting. The agenda was completely forgotten. Brian Allan
gave the Meeting a long ramble about the need to copy leaflets given him by the
central organisation. This led to the rapid appointment of two people who
seemed to have known that this was coming. They were designated Chief and
Deputy Clerk. It looked to me as though Brian Allan had created non-jobs for
two of his cronies.
In
September there was a “Bonfire of the Vanities” night on the 18th. The Aberdeen
clique around Brian Allan organised a bonfire on a river bank near the beach.
It is a spot where people often light fires and no-one who saw it would have
thought it unusual. I am not
sure how many bonfires were lit between Dundee and Forres by the 400 Members of
Salvo’s North-East Hub. I organised a bonfire on Tap o Noth, a prominent hill
near Rhynie. I took a photograph of this fire and on the 19th September I
shared my picture with the North-East Hub’s facebook page. My photo was
approved for others to see by Brian Allan (Admin); on the 29th September. If
you wanted to minimise the impact of a campaign that is how you would do it.
In August I had attended a North-East Hub Meeting. The Hub appointed Dave Greig to the position
of Chair. The new Chair was enthusiastic about his role which he saw as that of
a secretary, much in the way that Brian Allan understood the structure of
organisations.
As far as I
can re-construct the story of my exclusion from the September Hub Meeting it
runs as follows: the Chair, Dave Greig, wrote an invitation to all Members to
attend a Meeting on the 14th September. As he did not have access to the Hub’s
mailing-list he entrusted his mailing to Brian Allan to send out. Dave Greig
would have been pleased to receive a copy of his own mailing on the 11th, he
would have had good reason to assume that Brian Allan had sent the mailing to
all the Members.
However Brian Allan had deleted my name from
the mailing-list before informing everyone else about the Meeting. On the
afternoon of the 14th September Brian Allan seems to have phoned Dave Greig to
ask him to contact me by telephone to ensure that I knew about the Meeting.
Brian Allan had my telephone number, Dave Greig did not. Brian Allan knew that
I lived 25 miles away from Aberdeen, Dave Greig did not. Dave Greig sent me a
text-message telling me about the Meeting, three hours before it began.
I then
phoned Dave Greig and was assured that I had been told about the Meeting by
e-mail on the 11th September. I had been looking for something else on the 12th
and knew this to be untrue. Ten minutes after the end of my call to Dave Greig
I missed a call from Brian Allan. When I called him back he had nothing to tell
me.
By these
Machiavellian manoeuvres Brian Allan could claim that I had been informed about
the Meeting but I had chosen not to attend. To his lasting credit Dave Greig
resigned from the position of Chair shortly thereafter. I have previously been
involved with organisations which degenerated into cults of personality. They
were always unable to pursue their stated aims.
Salvo has a
constitution which mentions a Core Group, two Guardians and a number of
Stewards. How these people are appointed and the relationships between them are
not available in writing. In practice without some unseen power in the
background the organisation could not work. In pursuing the constitutional path
towards independence, Salvo does not work.
Salvo’s
published material does not challenge the great lie about the Holyrood
Assembly. There is no constitutional link between the colonial assembly at
Holyrood and our 1706 Parliament. There is no link between the Holyrood
Assembly and Scotland’s constitution. Tony Blair was being honest (for a
politician) when he likened the Holyrood Assembly to a Parish Council. Mr Blair
did not say ‘English Parish Council’ but his audience would have understood
him; hopefully at least one hundred Scots will also understand him.
The people
I interacted with and learned about during my five months with Salvo’s
North-East Hub were mostly supporters of Alec Salmond. The money to pay for
Salvo’s expensive glossy leaflets may well be coming from the generous pension
that a grateful Emperor of London pays to Mr Salmond. Like Aye Aberdeen, Salvo
seems, to me, to be a hollow sham that will attempt to divert our energy into
constitutional cul-de-sacs. Other similar new, improved and allegedly
pro-independence organisations are springing up at an alarming rate. If you
want to take part in a just struggle you should find out about them and be
quietly and politely sceptical.
