Scottish Greens lag in polls even after referendum boost

The Scottish Greens were included by the Scottish National Party (SNP) last year alongside a phalanx of other political and non-political organisations which backed the independence referendum campaign.

The unity was, largely, a mirage. Six months on, the SNP has sought to capture all of the Yes vote for itself, conflating its needs and identity with that of the independence movement.

Leading Scottish Green Party figure Patrick Harvie, a member of the Scottish parliament, is unsurprised. The Yes Scotland campaign was the SNP's idea, it was only later that it was persuaded to broaden its membership. Once that happened, the SNP reverted to old habits, using Yes Scotland to back its own White Paper – "the most detailed party manifesto ever produced", including elements such as lower corporation taxes that the Greens opposed.

Harvie rates Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon, telling 3,000 people gathered for an anti-Trident protest in Glasgow at the weekend that he was delighted "to stand beside the most dangerous woman in Britain".

"She is a pretty straightforward person. She has apologised in [the Holyrood parliament in Edinburgh] for things that have gone wrong. That's not something that her predecessor ever did," he said. He has little time for Alex Salmond, finding him bullying and domineering, even if he credits him with taking the SNP from being a marginal party in Scottish politics "rather like where the Greens are today" to the centre stage.

In truth, the Greens have little hope in the Westminster elections next month. Last Friday, for example, it published its list of candidates for the regional part of next year’s Holyrood campaign.

In the 1999 elections, the Greens won one place in the Holyrood parliament. The high point came in 2003 when it won seven. However, its strength fell back to two in the subsequent two elections.

Surge in members

Currently, the Scottish Greens stand at about five to six per cent in Scotland in Westminster polls, roughly half of the figure it secures when people are asked questions about Holyrood, which runs under PR voting rules.

The referendum brought a surge of new members, rising from 1,500 before the campaign began, to 1,700 on referendum night and 8,000 today: “We used to meet in the back-room of a pub in Glasgow, the Griffin on Bath Street,” says Harvie.

The party’s Glasgow branch moved to a local cricket club, but still had people “squeezed like sardines” in a room at its first post-referendum meeting, with more spilling out onto the steps outside.

Some delayed joining after the referendum because they disagreed with the party’s support for the Yes campaign, but they did so, nevertheless, because they liked the rest of its message, he says.

However, the party is currently being squeezed out of the public debate, to an extent, because so much of the focus lies in the bitter battle that exists between the SNP and Labour.

Scottish Labour’s troubles have been a long time coming, he argues: “I take no great pleasure from the state that Labour is in. People who want to vote Labour deserve a functional Labour Party but they don’t have it right now.”

Labour’s decision to form a united “Better Together” campaign with the Conservatives proved the last straw for many Scots, he believes, even if he accepts that by running separate campaigns they could have lost the union.

However, the reasons for co-operating with the Conservatives do not matter to many Scottish voters: “They had one job for Labour: to stand up to the Tories. Then they saw this.”

But Labour’s grip on its vote had been weakening for years: “People didn’t feel that there was anything inspirational coming from Labour. They just felt they were less bad than the Tories.”

Labour’s fall next month seems to be accepted even by their own, he argues: “Labour people I know convey a sense of fatalistic paralysis, that there is nothing that they can do.”

Such a fall, if it happens, offers fertile ground for the Greens in the Holyrood campaign a year later: “Whatever you think of the SNP, it is very unhealthy to have politic dominated by one party. People have to be held to account.

SNP discipline

“We have had Labour hegemony. We look like we are entering into a period of SNP domination that is stronger than anything that Labour ever enjoyed,” says Harvie, arguing that the SNP already display excessive internal discipline.

The House of Commons may be dysfunctional, but Conservative and Liberal Democrats MPs try to hold their own ministers to account. In Holyrood, the SNP government has gone for long stretches where none of its members of parliament rebelled, or even abstained. “The whips get everything their own way. I hear phrases like, ‘We are all Team Scotland’,” says Harvie. “They don’t understand the difference between being a parliamentarian and being part of the government.”