What next for the SNP and Humza Yousaf?
When comparing England and Scotland, which merits the label of 'one-party state'?
Another interesting week in Scottish politics as the SNP-Green alliance breaks up and a no-confidence vote looms for First Minister Humza Yousaf. One positive result may be that lightly-informed English commentators stop referring to Scotland as “a one-party state” as they have done for the last three years and more. After all, it can’t be both an SNP hegemony and a coalition where ‘the green tail wags the dog’, can it?
This is a learning moment for the Scottish electorate, and perhaps for the whole of the UK, as we watch how a PR Parliament works - or doesn’t - in practice.
The SNP/ Green ticket is a winner under PR
I have ended a few dinner parties early by trying to explain how the D’Hondt system of proportional representation that Scotland uses works, but essentially it is designed to prevent one party getting an overall majority. In fact, the SNP has only once won an overall majority in the 25 years of the Scottish Parliament and that was an accidental result of its uneven support across the country at that time.
When you go to vote, you get two papers. Paper one is for the constituency seat where you live. Paper two is for the list seat for your region. Roughly two-thirds of the seats are first past the post constituency seats and the rest are list seats. If a party wins all the constituency seats in a region, it is impossible for it to pick up any list seats, which are handed out to the runners-up and smaller parties. So the common pattern of indy supporters voting SNP in the first vote and Green in the second has worked really well for the independence movement.
Ending this symbiotic relationship could create a challenge for the party at the next Holyrood election - Alex Salmond’s Alba Party will of course be hoping that they can break through as an alternative small pro-independence party and pick up some list seats. If support for the SNP falls that could also make a difference. It is always really hard to predict the result. But the next Holyrood election probably won’t be until 2026.
Next week’s vote is probably not going to lead to a snap Holyrood election
The Conservatives' motion is narrowly framed as being about confidence in the First Minister Humza Yousaf and not the government. Yousaf only needs to persuade one MSP to abstain and, because the Presiding Officer has the casting vote, that will give him a victory. That would be narrow - but it would be a victory in a PR Parliament where Unionists hold almost half the seats so I think he would hang on. No independence-supporting FM would get more.
Even if Yousaf were to lose the vote, that wouldn’t necessarily lead to a new election - though it might lead to a new First Minister. (The Labour Party is proposing a vote of no confidence in the whole government but that won’t pass, because the Greens won’t support that.)
The Westminster crew don’t gain from the relationship with the Greens
It is possible that the eject button to get rid of the Greens was pushed by the SNP’s Westminster group led by Stephen Flynn. They are facing a general election some time this year when they are predicted to lose many seats to Labour. There is no advantage to them in fighting a very difficult campaign on a first-post-the-post basis, from the position of being in bed with the Greens.
I was struck by this comment by Kevin McKenna in a sketch piece about a conversation with the Westminster leader: “I like Mr Flynn. He’s one of the very few politicians who can roll with the punches and not take it too personally….Still though, there was a Tony Soprano vibe running beneath the chat. Mr Flynn is known in this business as “an operator”. His Westminster predecessor, Ian Blackford still has nightmares of coffin lids being screwed shut on him.”
The need for pale blue water
Flynn and the other MPs may have felt the need to put some pale blue water between themselves and the Greens. On several occasions recently, Patrick Harvie and others have cast doubt on the Cass Review as a piece of scientific research. They could have responded to questions about this by commenting merely that decisions about the use of drugs such as puberty blockers should be made by clinicians. Disparaging the research and, by implication its author, is a deliberate courting of controversy.
The Greens have their opnions and they are entitled to express them - but to the extent that they are perceived to be speaking for the Scottish Government that is a problem, and one that has cut through to voters.
Similarly, the other Green Minister, Lorna Slater said recently that independence is not a red line for the party. Of course, it is only to be expected that a Green MSP would be prepared to work with any other party on issues of climate change. But again, if that stance is heard as being the view of the Scottish government, that muddies the waters for the SNP going into an election campaign.
Green ink from Andy
Former Green MSP Andy Wightman, who was forced out of the party for refusing to sign up to the party line on gender, put this succinctly on X yesterday morning, shortly after the Bute House Disagreement: “The key takeaway for me today is the FM's reference to needing to speak with one voice. The public do not understand excluded areas of BHA nor party/Govt divide. When they hear Green Ministers speak, many hear a Government voice - unsustainable going into an election.”
The esteemed land campaigner has also been on X a lot recently complaining that the ecohouse he is building has been inadvertently made illegal by his former colleagues. It must have been a bit of an ‘oops’ moment when they realised they had made his off-grid ecoboiler which runs on organic swede parings or something illegal.
“I am vegan, I drive an electric car, I don’t fly, I live much of the time off grid with solar power & wood fuel. I am pretty green, but obviously not the right kind of green,” Wightman complained. This issue has been taken as an another example of a perceived urban, anti-rural bias, which the SNP’s political opponents are trying to exploit.
What will this mean for the climate?
The Greens’ decision to hold a meeting at which party members would get a vote on the future of the Bute House Agreement - but not for a month - meant it became a sort of sword of Damocles held over the SNP. Perhaps they could have got their ducks in a row before the announcement was made about pushing back Scotland’s climate change targets. That is something they must have seen coming and it had to be dealt with.
Scotland’s 2030 climate target being unattainable is unfairly being blamed on the Greens. It is really to do with a lack of cross-party consensus. For example, Scotland’s bottle deposit scheme was killed by Westminster, which used its post-Brexit bigfoot powers to squash it. They did so after the Unionist parties went into overdrive about this fairly minor scheme to put 10p on a bottle of Irn Bru. They and the media magnified the voices of a few people who were opposed to it and we didn’t hear much from the many people in Scotland who thought it would be fine.
It is very difficult to see how any major changes can be introduced in this political atmosphere. Air travel for example is far too cheap. Airline fuel is not taxed - it costs a fraction of the fuel used to power a bus or a car. So as long as it costs £25 to fly to Bristol and £250 to go on the train - or so - people are going to fly. But any attempt to increase air passenger duty would no doubt cause the Unionist parties to thrash themselves into a spittle-flecked rage.
Scotland has harvested much of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to reducing carbon emissions - although there are still big gains to be made from insulating homes. The Parliament’s powers are very limited. It can’t borrow money to invest and its capital budget has been slashed. A greater degree of cross-party unity will be needed to make serious progress in the areas which are within its reach.
One party state? Try England
So many commentators based in England simply don’t understand PR and they judge everything by their standard of normality which is Westminster. The UK and the US are among very few advanced democracies that have a first-past-the-post system. it means that a party can gain a huge amount of power with a minority of the vote, as happened in 2019 in the UK. So there is a need for checks and balances - notionally that is provided by the upper house.
But the House of Lords, packed with Tory cronies like Boris Johnson’s tennis partner Ross ‘Baron’ Kemspell and moneymen like the scion of a Russian oligarch, Evgeny ‘Lord’ Lebedev, has no democratic legitimacy. It is unable to protect Britain’s constitution, which may be unwritten but is still supposed to exist.
Last week saw a deeply depressing milestone when the UK government passed a law that mandates British courts to say Rwanda is safe for asylum seekers - whatever evidence is put before them. That is clearly unconstitutional - but Britain’s feeble Parliament was unable to stand up for its time-honoured principles and precepts. England merits the label of a one party state far more than Scotland does.
Read ‘Five Points about the Safety of Rwanda Bill”
Clear, concise and to the point. Thanks Jackie.
Thanks for yet another excellent post, Jackie. I only recently had a wobbly on this growing urban rural thing, which we are also witnessing in Denmark, and which has burst out anew in the USA.
I remember when scottish ambitions for indy started to emerge seriously again in the 1980's 1990's, the votes and seats came first in the rural areas, and not in the big cities. I actually did the numbers at the time, but have lost the analysis. Scotland, like the rest of the UK, has become a very centralised democracy. Power has moved to the centre thanks to local government reforms, quangos, police reorganisation, and public transport provatisation, among others. Cities are where power and money lies. On green matters, i am with Andy on the matter of wood burning stoves. I am with you and SNP on the bottle tax. There is a strong urban bias in many "green" policies too. This is most of all demonstrated in planning, housing, land and taxation policies. It is very clear to most of us who bother to think of these things that it is mostly consumers and not producers who are the problem. You can tax farmers, but as they are price takers and not price makers, they cannot pass taxes on to consumers as large corporate monopolies do. Consumers neanwhile keep spending on cars, oil, plastic, air travel, and so on. Most climate-unfriendly consumption is by urban consumers, because they are richer.
Carbon taxes should be on climate-unfriendly consumption! That is absolutely clear. It is not happening, of course, because of politicians fears of a backlash. Meanwhile, the whole ship is sinking, and the lifeboats are becoming ever fewer.