The Scottish Green party held its annual conference in Edinburgh this weekend, a sold-out affair of 450 delegates after a post-referendum surge has trebled its total membership to over 6000.
The mood was buoyant, bustling and very much facing forward: in his address to conference, co-convenor Patrick Harvie MSP warned that “obsessive focus” on the 45/55 divide from last month’s referendum wasn’t “relevant for us as individuals...helpful for the party and...damaging for Scotland”.
Both Harvie and former Labour first minister (and Reluctant No) Henry McLeish, who spoke on Saturday afternoon, warned that the Smith Commission’s timetable for agreeing more powers for Scotland was too rushed. Harvie called for more engagement from civic groups to avoid “a traditional political party stitch-up”; McLeish said leaving the final decision to Westminster would betray to legacy of the referendum.
Harvie also marked out fracking as the party’s next fight. Wishing Nicola Sturgeon well as new leader of the SNP, he added that she was “going to have to pick a direction...the SNP’s been a broad church for a long time”.
Amongst new members attending the conference, only one got a standing ovation. Former SNP MSP John Finnie’s defection to the Greens was not have been in the Douglas Carswell league of shocks to the system – that green yes Twibbon was a bit of a giveaway …
Other new members included 28-year-old illustrator Eilidh Muldoon from Edinburgh:
I joined the Greens the day after the referendum and it was very much a response to the result. I voted Green in the last general election, and my partner is already in the party. I’ve been really impressed by how laid-back it is here. The referendum was very much my political awakening and I was worried that I wouldn’t understand all the jargon. But it’s very friendly and I’m already putting names to faces. It seems like a real community.”
The Green party really upped its game over the referendum campaign in terms of bringing issues like equality and poverty to the top of the agenda. If we’d got independence I’d have wanted to actively campaign for those things; when we didn’t I thought ‘why not anyway?’. It’s a fantastic atmosphere today. The big issue is translating all this energy into something practically viable. People are still not used to taking charge.”
Later in the day, the conference voted to review its strategy for next year’s general election, both in terms of this increase in membership and the referendum result.
Though the fabled ‘yes alliance’ to unseat Labour MPs in next year’s general election wasn’t mentioned explicitly, the noises off are that the Greens aren’t keen on anything that will compromise their newly strengthened political identity.
But the post-indyref manoeuvring continues this weekend with the launch of the Scottish Left Project - a process, not a party, pedants please note - with the goal of harnessing the grassroots energy of the referendum campaign and providing “the best possible socialist challenge at the Holyrood elections of 2016.”
Backed by former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars and Cat Boyd and Jonathan Shafi of the Radical Independence Campaign, the group takes its inspiration from Spain’s Podemos party, which emerged out of the Indignados movement and now boasts 5 MEPs.
