Friend or foe?

Some of the infighting amongst the Yes parties sometimes reminds of the Danish proverb “Frænde er frænde værst”. Literally it translates as “friend is friend worst”, and the meaning is that friends often fight each other more than their enemies.

It seems to encapsulate the current state of the Yes parties perfectly. Instead of concentrating on fighting the Unionists, most of the Yes energy currently goes into infighting amongst the SNP, the Greens, RISE and Solidarity.

It makes sense on a certain level. Very few voters are undecided with regard to the independence question, so most voter movements are going to happen within the two main blocks. For instance, the SNP won’t gain many votes by attacking Labour, but taking list votes from the Greens could potentially make a huge difference. It’s true on the No side, too. The Tories aren’t going to overtake Labour at Holyrood by converting SNP voters but rather by convincing Labour and Lib Dem voters that they’re best placed to represent Unionism.

However, it’s a real shame. All of us Yes campaigners should be spending our energy on turning soft No voters into Yes voters, rather than arguing about the merits of splitting the vote or not.

I’m annoyed the electoral system used for Holyrood elections doesn’t allow for formal electoral alliances. In Denmark, two or more parties can declare a formal alliance, which means that they’re treated as one party for the purpose of working out how many seats they get; once that has been determined, the votes cast for each party determines how many seats it gets (using d’Hondt, the system used for European elections in Scotland). If we had such alliances here, all the Yes parties could form one such alliance, and it would then be in everybody’s interest to maximise the Yes vote. (Of course, all the No parties could also form an alliance, but I’m not sure a Labour/Tory alliance would go down well with many traditional Labour voters.)

However, the electoral system won’t change soon, so we all need to take a deep breath and make sure that we never do or say anything that will it harder to win the next independence referendum.

Of course, there’s is also another perspective on this, namely whether both the governing party and the main opposition party could eventually be Yes parties.

It’s my firm belief that in a democracy, voters at some point get fed up with any ruling party, no matter how great they thought it was originally.

However, if a ruling party is opposed by more than one party, it has a certain amount of influence with regard to choosing its own successor. It can ignore and ridicule one party while working constructively with another, and of course this makes a difference with regard to how voters perceive these parties.

At the moment, the SNP seems to focus very strongly on retaining all the voters who came from Labour after the referendum while ensuring that the Greens don’t split the Yes vote too much, and as a result the Tories seem to be growing, and I’m not sure I really like the sound of that at all.

I can’t see Labour recovering in Scotland for a generation, and the Lib Dems are in an even worse state. Logically the only alternative to a Tory opposition would therefore be a Green opposition.

Is this possible? Can the SNP and the Greens eventually sook up enough No voters to allow them to dominate Holyrood together? Or will the independence question continue to dominate so strongly that it will unavoidably produce one big Unionist party to oppose the SNP?

How the SNP should deal with the Greens ultimately depends on the answers to these questions.