The Scottish Greens have to broaden their appeal beyond middle-class urbanites by talking to voters in industrial towns facing wholesale job losses, a Green leadership candidate says.
Gillian Mackay is one of four Scottish Greens bidding to win two co-leader posts after Patrick Harvie, the UK’s longest-serving party leader, quit as co-convener earlier this year.
The pro-independence Scottish Greens are Holyrood’s fourth largest party, with seven MSPs, and could play a key role in the devolved parliament after next year’s elections.
The Greens prop up the Scottish National party government in Edinburgh, which does not have a majority at Holyrood and is expected to form a minority administration again next year. Recent polls place the Greens as high as 15%, suggesting they could win several more seats.
Mackay said her area around Falkirk had been devastated by industrial decline, including the closure of Grangemouth oil refinery earlier this year, yet the Scottish Greens historically had failed to connect with local voters.
The Scottish and UK governments knew Grangemouth would close, affecting several thousand jobs in the region, but had failed to put in place an industrial strategy to guarantee green jobs, she said.
Two factories owned by Alexander Dennis making electric buses were also expected to close within weeks and their jobs to shift to Nottinghamshire. Farmers and workers dependent on the oil industry around Aberdeen also felt excluded.
That meant the just transition from fossil fuel industries to sustainable jobs had failed, Mackay said.
“The Green narrative of green jobs and green industry actually needs to have teeth,” she said. The party was very good at the “high-level” policy but poor at making it meaningful to people directly affected.
“What matters to our voters is what they see, feel and hear in their communities and I don’t think we’re quite cutting through at that level.”
Voting for the two co-convener posts opened on Wednesday, with about 7,500 party members eligible to vote before a result is declared on Friday 29 August.
Alongside Mackay, the candidates are Lorna Slater, Harvie’s current co-convener, who had a torrid time as a Scottish government minister in the Greens’ power-sharing deal with the SNP, Ross Greer, a backbencher, and Dominic Ashmole, a party activist in the Scottish Borders who is vying to become a councillor for the first time.
Unlike Green party elections in England and Wales, Scottish rules make it harder for two candidates to run on joint tickets, because their names cannot appear on the ballot paper as joint candidates.
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And, for the first time, the Scottish Greens have dropped a rule that requires the party to elect at least one woman as co-leader, after legal advice partly influenced by the UK supreme court ruling on the Equality Act’s definition of a woman.
Greer, who has called for free travel on all of Scotland’s buses, is widely seen as a favourite to win one of the two posts. With Ashmole considered a rank outsider, the contest for the second post is between Slater and Mackay.
Given her almost three years as a junior minister, Slater is presenting herself as the more experienced continuity candidate. She has told party members she believes co-conveners are their delegates and are not in overall control.
Her critics point to the intense controversy surrounding her failed attempt to introduce a wide-ranging deposit return scheme for drinks containers in Scotland before the rest of the UK.
Greer, an architect of the Bute House power-sharing agreement with the SNP, believes the party needs stronger political leadership and has to be much clearer on its core policies, on poverty, climate and nature. “We need to nail down which voters we’re trying to speak to and what we’re trying to achieve,” he said.