ALBA - Unofficial Forum

Greetings from sunny Birmingham, where I am currently on a bus on the motorway.  This is my second attempt to take advantage of the time on the journey to post about the result of the Scottish Green leadership election.  I fell asleep during my first attempt (not a snide comment - I literally fell asleep), and I thought that was fate telling me to abandon the idea.  But I've been moved to have a second go after seeing Stew's post on the subject.  What a remarkable lack of curiosity he has.  He takes endless delight in sneering about the 90% abstention rate as if it can somehow be explained entirely by a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates, seemingly without it occurring to him how phenomenally improbable that notion is. 

Something very strange is happening here - members of political parties are generally far less apathetic than the public at large, not far more so.  A lack of interest simply can't plausibly explain a 10% turnout.  Have the Greens been massively exaggerating their membership numbers?  Did they fail to adequately advertise the leadership election to members or to properly explain the voting process?

For what it's worth, although the new Greer/Mackay leadership will not resolve the Greens' biggest problem (their identity politics extremism), I think they may have marginally boosted their chances of electoral success by narrowly ousting Lorna Slater.  Anecdotally, she really grated on people.  I don't think that's anti-Canadianism (if such a thing exists), because there are plenty of very attractive Canadian accents, but she just comes across as very hectoring and humourless.

As for Stew's ongoing fantasies about next year's Holyrood election producing some sort of Green Armageddon, again I think that's wide of the mark.  If Polanski wins the English Green leadership race and goes into an electoral pact with the Jeremy Corbyn/Zarah Sultana party, it becomes very difficult for the Scottish Greens not to consider a similar arrangement, which might actually help them prosper.  My main concern would be the implications of that for their pro-independence stance.