This is a remarkable thing.
The Scottish Greens, who until last year were a party of government, claim to have 7,600 members. This month they conducted an election to choose two people as their “co-conveners”, from a list of four candidates, and almost 90% of the party’s members decided that they didn’t want any of them.
The voting went as follows:
Gillian Mackay: 322 votes (4.2% of eligible members)
Ross Greer: 298 votes (3.9%)
Lorna Slater: 264 votes (3.5%)
Dominic Ashmole: 66 votes (0.9%)
None of the above: 6,650 votes (87.5%)
That means that “none of the above” got 21 times as many votes as the most popular candidate. Even for a party riven by a bitter civil war that’s an astonishing outcome. For perspective on that 12.5% turnout, when the SNP chose a new leader in 2023 just under 70% of members cast a vote, and when Alba chose a replacement for Alex Salmond earlier this year just over 50% picked either Kenny MacAskill or Ash Regan.
In every case the votes were tight, so it wasn’t apathy over a coronation – Humza Yousaf eventually beat Kate Forbes by just 52-48, the same margin as between MacAskill and Regan, and the three serious challengers for the Greens were also only a handful of points apart, with the shares breaking down as 34-31-28.
Ross Greer, who was groomed for years by Patrick Harvie as his successor, has over 44,000 followers on Twitter but could only find 317 people willing to cast even a second-preference vote for him. He now co-leads a political party knowing that 96% of its members couldn’t even be bothered clicking a box on a screen for him.
(Which in fairness is a remarkably similar figure to the 95% of Scottish adults who won’t give even a list vote to the Scottish Greens, and the 93% of voters who didn’t vote for Greer in West Scotland in 2021. And he can draw some comfort from the fact that his 298 supporters are still about six times as many people as showed up to the party’s last annual conference.)
But if you can get just one in 140 Scots to vote for you, and then a mere 300 of your own party’s members, you too can be a party leader in the Scottish Parliament on a salary of £75,000. (You don’t get extra for leading a mini-party like the Greens, you need 15 members to get an additional £25,000 allowance.)
To be honest we’re amazed more people haven’t formed parties. It’s a pretty low bar to a very well-paid job in which you really don’t have to do very much. (As a list MSP, you can just fob people off to their constituency representative or one of the other list members. The Scottish Greens in particular have a long track record of simply ignoring the concerns of constituents whose politics they don’t agree with.)
It remains to be seen how many Greens make it back to Holyrood next year. The rise of Reform and Jeremy Corbyn’s new party will put the squeeze on them from two very different directions, and we remain of the view that there’s a significant likelihood the Greens could take a battering.
And when even 90% of your own members don’t think you’re worth two seconds to click a button on a screen, maybe that’s what you deserve.
