Events are rapidly overtaking the Scottish National Party. Last Thursday Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband and for more than two decades the party’s Chief Executive, was arrested and charged in connection with a fraud investigation into the SNP’s finances.
Then this week, with the Scottish Government still off-balance from that disastrous development, the Scottish Greens announced that they were going to put the future of the Bute House Agreement, their coalition deal with the Nationalists, to a membership vote. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, Humza Yousaf tore it up himself.
All of a sudden, the Scottish Government is without a Holyrood majority. Nonetheless, I suspected it would stagger on: it’s one thing for the Greens to leave office, I thought, but quite another to line up with the unionist parties to bring down the First Minister in a vote of no confidence, which is expected next week.
Yet that is exactly what they’re planning to do. Yousaf’s fate now rests in the hands of Ash Regan, a one-time SNP leadership challenger who has since defected to join Alex Salmond’s Alba Party. The odds of her voted to save the skin of the self-appointed heir to Sturgeon (who described her defection as “no great loss”) are… slim.
If he loses, the Scottish Parliament has 28 days to nominate a replacement before an election has to be called. The question is, who on earth could it be? The obvious first choice for the Nationalists would be Kate Forbes, the right-wing MSP and former finance minister who ran him close in last year’s leadership contest. The problem is the Greens despise her, and it’s mutual.
To avoid an election, the SNP would presumably need to find someone sufficiently inoffensive that the Greens are prepared at least to abstain, allowing the Nationalists’ Holyrood plurality to outvote the unionist parties. That would presumably not go down well with much of its membership, angry as they are already at the perception that their coalition partners were the tail wagging the dog.
Perhaps it is just a decade and more of watching them shrug off scandal after scandal, but I honestly expected the Scottish Government to stagger on in one form or another. It was one thing, I thought, for the Greens to leave office – quite another to actually line up with the pro-Union parties to bring down a pro-independence government.
Moreover, as both they and the SNP have profited hugely from the polarisation of Scottish voting patterns around the constitutional question since 2014, it seemed very obviously in their interests to try and keep the illusion going, as Alex Massie sets out:
“Until now, the long-term point of the SNP-Green coalition was that it might embed a pro-independence majority at Holyrood. A coalition government asking to be re-elected as a coalition government armed with an explicit mandate to demand a second independence referendum is a very different proposition to a “parliament of minorities” which just happens to have more members in favour of independence than against it.”
With the wisdom of hindsight, however, it isn’t obvious that the SNP/Green alliance could ever have survived the Nationalists’ tanking poll ratings. Like a so-called zombie company that can only survive on near-zero interest rates, their symbiotic relationship was an artefact of extremely favourable political conditions.
This is because the Scottish Greens owe their current strength in Holyrood to gaming Holyrood’s badly-designed electoral system, in which voters get one ballot for a constituency (elected via First Past the Post) and then a second ballot for regional lists, which are supposed to make the system more proportional by weighting votes for different parties differently depending on their performance in the constituencies.
In both 2016 and 2022, the SNP swept the former; last time round they won 62 out of 73 constituencies. As a result, even if all their voters backed them again on the second ballot, it wouldn’t be worth very much.
But they didn’t have to: instead, the Greens pitched themselves as the pro-independence party on the lists. Separatist voters duly split their tickets and in two elections the Greens quadrupled their parliamentary strength, from two MSPs in 2011 to eight in 2021, securing a pro-independence majority in Holyrood in the process.
It’s a good trick, if you can pull it off. But it only works so long as the SNP enjoys the unprecedented hegemony in the First Past the Post constituencies it has had since the referendum.
Once the tide starts going out, however, the calculation changes. With a revived Scottish Labour looking as if it might win up to 20 constituencies (or more), and the Tories also optimistic about a handful where they are the main challenger to the Nationalists, the SNP suddenly needs its voters to stick with it on the regional ballot.
That means persuading them not to vote Green – and since its a proportional election where the Greens can actually win (depriving Nats of the normal default argument of big parties), that means actually attacking them.
The Greens are in the same boat: if they don’t want to be banished back to the fringes of the Scottish Parliament, they need to induce pro-independence voters who previously leant them their vote to boost the number of separatist MSPs to make a positive choice to vote Green at the expense of the SNP.
All that means that whoever the Nationalists nominate as first minister in the event that Yousaf loses next week’s vote, strategic considerations mean their partnership with the Greens is probably not salvageable in the medium-term. All the less reason, then, to try and buy them off with a second-rate choice. It may as well be Forbes – and if it is, it seems almost certainly to mean an election.
The post How the SNP’s tanking poll ratings doomed its alliance with the Greens appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Henry Hill
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.