There are many stories about the referendum. Yet as journalists become ever more hooked on a daily diet of fanfares and milestones, too many quieter developments have been left to one side. One such story, much neglected in the wider media, is the effect that the movement has had on the fortunes of a small party currently finding a loud voice for itself within Scotland.
The engine room of the Scottish independence movement is powered by imagination. In the last two weeks of the campaign, this has reached beyond the task of modelling, theorising and articulating, into something more tangible. One group that find themselves on the cusp of such a rare opportunity are the Scottish Greens.
Tonight Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, is talking to a packed crowd in Leith. Her message is about the excitement the prospect of a new Scotland is generating in the south: where alienation from the closed shop of Westminster politics is just as strong.
‘If you walk round the halls of Westminster and you see all those statues of dead white males…and you actually think about it, nothing has really changed in Westminster since women got the vote. There has been no real reform in Westminster since then. So they’ve got almost a hundred years of pent up debate for reform,’ says Bennett.
The case in point for tonight’s talk is public ownership. Despite the widespread popularity of this policy (even amongst Tory voters) the distortions of British politics mean that the Greens are the only party who support it. Their single MP, Caroline Lucas, is currently preparing a private members bill on rail re-nationalisation.
Tonight also sees the Scottish Green’s co-convener Patrick Harvie taking part in a vigorous TV debate about how Scotland might best be defended in the 21st century. Rarely has a British television audience seen such a muscular rebuttal of imperialism. This is politics at its most vital, north and south of the border. Yet it is remarkable that fight backs against nuclear re-armament and privatisation are now often led by this, still electorally insignificant, party.
From my experience, the Greens are not a difficult bunch of people. Few organisations can claim such an open, rational and educated support base, or such a deliberative way of doing politics. However, tonight’s gathering can’t resist an uproarious applause when Bennett slams the British media’s blindness to the party. Something that clearly still rankles when contrasted with the manner in which the British media seemed to trip over each other to document the rise of UKIP.
Leith is natural green territory. A mixed income area that totes its substantial working class kudos with abandon: it is also the domain of cafe bars, start ups, cyclists and hipsters. If it wasn’t for the terrible public transport, pockets of ghettoised social housing, and the juxtaposition of gentrification with poverty, this would be the kind of community where Green politics thrives all over Europe. Comfortable with its sense of place and ready to embrace European models of managing urban space, this is one corner of Scotland where, if you squint your eyes, models antithetical to the British way really do look possible.
The Green Yes campaign’s tagline: ‘seize the opportunity’ neatly sums up the success with which the party has occupied the space offered it by the independence movement. The platform is clear and unambiguous: independence is a means to deliver a more equal and sustainable society.
Polls have suggested that the Greens might stage something of a break through to become the third party at the next Scottish Parliament elections in 2016. When dealing with the abstractions of how Scottish politics might be altered after the referendum, the improved fortunes of this party offers at least one tangible outcome. If their MSPs were to hold the balance of power in a new parliament the results could be transformative.
A Green Party gathering is like an inversion of mainstream party politics. Every speaker on the panel is a woman, families cluster at the back of hall keeping half an eye on their kids playing in the corner. People are here to talk, not to be talked at by a superior shipped up from London.
The difference is more than superficial and is, I think, relevant to the success of Green Yes. ‘Our Scots got independence in 1990’ has become Bennett’s favoured response when journalists ask her position on the referendum. Unlike other parties that operate across the UK, the Green Party of England and Wales has a long standing commitment to endorsing the position of their northern counterparts on any Scottish issue.
If there is a resurgence in the party’s fortunes: many within it might worry that they’ve been here before. The Scottish Parliament in its ‘rainbow’ incarnation in 2003 saw 7 Green MSPs returned. Since 2007, their electoral performance has yet to show a significant recovery.
A decade on however, everything in Scottish and British politics is in flux. What Bennett describes as the ‘creative constitutional chaos’ that would result from a Yes vote, points to a situation where static or incumbent formations need to worry as much as those seeking a revival. Newer, more nimble political forces stand to gain as a result.
To a party that has long placed significant emphasis on both unilateral nuclear disarmament and constitutional reform, it seems only natural that if the Greens are present when these age old structures are prised open, they stand to benefit. As Bennett points out the simple act of inscribing Britain’s constitutional mores would expose many as obsolete and absurd:
‘If we were to write down some of the ways that things are currently done, like the fact that there’s a guy called the Remembrancer who is the only non-MP allowed on the floor of the House of Commons, and he’s the representative of the City of London and exclusively there to represent the interests of the financial sector… If you actually write that down…it’s going to explode off the page.’
If the Greens are able to foster the kind of bite and urgency that the independence movement seems to have provided them with, they could come to fill the long vacant space on the left in British politics. Though events like tonight contrast positively with the worst of right-wing populism the ability to galvanise voters around a clear narratives is key. Yes, it seems, has gone some way to provide that.
But it is not easy, however right-on the issues and however democratic the structures, to broaden the base of an organisation where it often feels like a PhD is a prerequisite of membership. If this is to be a party defined by its radicalism, not its members’ enthusiasm for recycling, or their collective intellectual clout, it has to be seen to reach out beyond its political comfort zone to the great swathes of progressive voters now switched on to politics by the referendum.
For now, bringing government and economic structures closer to home chimes with Green principles, hence the very tangible excitement about the prospect of constitutional chaos erupting in the near future. If the party is to emerge invigorated once the dust has settled it must lose no time in seizing the opportunities that independence presents.