Explain the Scottish Green councillor defections to Your Party

Last week a number of councillors and members resigned from the Scottish Greens and switched to Your Party. Greens and Green-curious comrades are miffed, considering the popularity of the new English & Welsh spokesperson, Polanski. For those building Your Party, sentiment has been mixed. In Glasgow, this felt like a vote of confidence. South of the border, Your Party hopefuls were more worried that this spelled the beginning of an unproductive tension between the two left parties. In England, the new spokesperson Polanski is giving the Greens' existing policy platform a sexy shine, and people wonder what the hell is going on that folk in Scotland are walking in the other direction.

These rough notes summarise what some comrades in Scotland understand of the situation, with substantial input from recent ex-members of the Scottish Greens, founding members of Your Party Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Scottish rs21 members.

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What’s the situation with the Scottish Greens?

For those unfamiliar with the Scottish political context and the Scottish Greens in particular, I would caution analysing Scottish affairs through the lens of English political party relations — they're very different national context.

For starters, the Scottish Greens are a separate, sibling party to the English & Welsh Greens. In Scotland they were until recently a party of devolved government, and disgruntled Scottish Greens point to their signing off on austerity and privatisation projects. The Scottish Greens to their credit did, also, achieve some political victories — for example around tenants' rights, welfare payments, public service fees, decarbonisation.

They are no longer in government following a breakdown in relations with the SNP in April 2024. They have 7 MSPs out of 129. In August the Scottish Greens were polling nationally at 4-6% for the 2026 Scottish Parliamentary elections, and for the list seats where their MSPs come varying at around 8-16% with an average around 10%. Their 8,000 membership is dwarfed by the rapidly declining SNP (~58,000) and the totally discredited Scottish Labour on ~12,000. A reported 40-60,000 people registered support for Your Party in Scotland earlier in the year, although membership figures have not been reported since.

Some left-wing Scottish Greens are giving up hope in the party

But while the Scottish Greens are (in a small way) riding the wave of the English Greens, the experience for existing members on the left wing of the party has been different. Some no longer believe that it's possible to shift the party to the left, due to a number of factors:

• ⁠The expulsion of Leftwing green activists.
• ⁠Lack of an organised left-wing fraction within the ScotGreens. 
• ⁠The failure of Leftwing greens to market their positions to the public or other green activists (especially opposition to NATO and coalitions with the SNP).
• The failure of the radical left in internal elections.

Poor internal political leadership, culture, dynamics in the Scottish Greens

When Left Scottish Greens talk critically about the internal life of the Scot greens, they report:

• Internally, the Scottish Greens have clamped down on dissenting debate.
• Very small % vote in internal elections.
• Disciplining and sidelining and exiting of socialists.

And members who leave the party consistently cite Ross Greer—the Scottish Greens' leader seen by some as a divisive or even "bonapartist" figure—as their main reason for leaving.

Separately, in relation to Your Party's aim to build a working class socialist party, some Green and recently-ex-Green members characterise the party as having a pretty middle class culture that is fairly trade union-alienated.

Here's a video by Scottish Green councillor Anthony Carroll pondering about the kind of culture change he thinks is needed in his party, following the resignation of his colleagues.

The end of the Scottish Greens as the party of the Scottish left alternative?

So I'm told, there’s been tensions between the mainstream and the left of the Greens for a long time.

After the 2014 independence referendum there was a real possibility the left would have split to a socialist party had there been a credible option. But with the failure of RISE to step up to the mantle, and the continued decline of the SSP, the Greens were seen by some as the only viable vehicle on the (perceived) left. Involvement of left Green activists in other grassroots campaigns, particularly Living Rent, was noticeable.

But evidently, Left Green members are making strategic choices about which party platform they commit to for socialist campaigning—rather than a deep, life-long commitment to the Green Party movement itself. The current shift of left Greens to Your Party has an antecedent in some who shifted to Labour/Momentum when that emerged, also. It's unclear how many shifted back to the Greens after the 2019 Corbynist collapse, but I certainly think we can talk of this phenomenon over that longer time frame, and certainly ex-Momentum Scottish Greens are now in Your Party.

Mixed feelings about Your Party

This isn't a black and white situation. Quite a few greens have jumped over to Your Party without being very optimistic. After all, the political leadership has done the proto-party an immense disservice and put a terrible taste in the mouth of members and those following along to evaluate which party to join.

If they are optimistic, reasons they report include:

• A nascent culture of experimental public assemblies
• A 'loose' culture with more space for political debate, contrasting with previous experience.
• A lack of bureaucracy—perhaps better understood as excitement to participate as founding members in the process of building this malleable, fledgling party from scratch
• The alluring prospect, although now diminished in the immediate term, of a mass membership party

So what?

It will be interesting to see what Left Scottish Greens who remain with the party, like Maggie Chapman, will do. She is certainly firmly on the left of the Scottish Greens but is possibly more embedded than those who have left.

In terms of Your Party's prospects, it'd be foolish to be uncritically optimistic given the leadership's absolute failings. But if the goal is to widen the platform for socialist politics and prevent fascist government, it is likely a valuable project. Collaboration between the two parties, Your Party and the Greens in Scotland and in England both, will be critical.

I still think there's potential value in the project on its own terms, though. It’s one thing to elect a new spokesperson like Polanski. It’s another to do something fundamentally new: establishing a mass socialist party made of the building blocks of working class communities, institutions and movements — like the trade union movement and the many networks of everyday organised solidarity and mutual aid that keeps the working class just afloat through austerity, inflation and the relentless 'cost of greed' crisis of capitalist impoverishing. Although the individual supporter base has shrunken in the short-term in response to the founding process fiasco, the coalition that could engage in building this party isn't going anywhere.

On this front, I was inspired by a rally on Friday 24th when 450 people gathered in Maryhill, Glasgow, to hear Frances Curran (ex-MSP), Dan Hutchison (one of the ex-Green councillors), Zarah Sultana, two trade unionists from the militant United Hospitality trade union branch, and an incredible food bank solidarity organiser from Castlemilk, to talk about the necessity of mobilising many, many more people to a practical, participatory socialist politics in these proto-fascistic times. I recognised comrades from the Palestine solidarity movement, Living Rent, the climate justice movement and many other wings of socialist struggle there and thought to myself: any political process that gathers these people to work together is worth supporting, regardless of which (or both, or neither) platforms end up being their best bet come election time.