Alba is now the party where women are told to wheesht I know there's quite a bit of concern in the Alba Party, including even among many who are normally loyal to the leadership, about just how far Zulfikar Sheikh has gone in his latest frenzied outburst. Telling a woman in no uncertain terms to shut up is not a great look in a party that has previously embraced the slogan "women won't wheesht", and in any case Denise Findlay is not just any woman. Less than eighteen months ago, she was still the Alba Party's elected Organisation Convener, she was one of Alex Salmond's closest allies, and she worked tirelessly for the party - often at her own monetary expense.
For the uninitiated, Zulfikar is the husband of the unelected Alba Party Chair Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who is widely known to have given an ultimatum to Mr Salmond that effectively forced him to breach the party constitution by nullifying Ms Findlay's re-election as Organisation Convener in October 2023, and then re-running the election two months later without her as a candidate. So if Ms Findlay should be hearing anything from the direction of the Sheikh family, it's a long-overdue apology, not this type of open harassment and abuse.
I suspect the Tas Talks director doth protest too much here. Probably what triggered him was the suggestion that Mr Salmond "handed over" Alba to Tas. But if it was really true - as Zulfikar furiously claims - that Alba is no-one's to hand over, it wouldn't even have been possible for Tas to invoke proprietorial rights and get Ms Findlay's re-election nullified. The result would simply have stood, Ms Findlay would have remained Organisation Convener, and she would almost certainly still be a leading figure in the party to this day. The reality is that Alba has been private property from day one, and the members who were promised an internal democracy have been played for mugs.
Needless to say, Zulfikar's latest rant is yet another clear breach of Alba's Code of Conduct and social media policy, which expressly forbid the "targeting of individuals", regardless of whether those individuals are current Alba members. If consistency is applied, Zulfikar would now be facing expulsion proceedings. But as we've seen repeatedly, members of the Alba elite (chiefly Zulfikar and Shannon Donoghue, but others as well) are in practice free to regularly breach the Code of Conduct on social media without ever facing any consequences. It's rule number one of capitalism: the rules don't apply to the owners.
Source: Alba is now the party where women are told to wheesht (//)