The Lothian MSP Andy Wightman, who resigned from the Green group in the Scottish Parliament a few weeks ago over the trans issue, is running a Twitter poll asking whether he should stand as an independent candidate in Lothian at the forthcoming election (by which he presumably means the Lothian list). Although Twitter polls are unscientific and self-selecting, it’s not an irrational thing to do, because probably what he wants to know first and foremost is whether his keenest supporters are behind him and would campaign for him. At time of writing, the poll is running at 3-1 in favour of his candidacy, so I would imagine he’ll press ahead.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing for the independence movement? Mr Wightman is one of a relatively small number of people with enough of a personal following to have a realistic chance of being elected as an independent – but he doesn’t quite have the profile of a Margo MacDonald or a Dennis Canavan. If I was going to hazard a guess, I’d say the odds are maybe slightly against him. I could imagine him perhaps getting between about 2% and 6% of the vote, and he’d need to be at the upper end of that scale to be elected.
At the last election, he was one of two Green MSPs elected in Lothian on 10.6% of the list vote. If that vote is split this time, it would need to be virtually split down the middle to maintain the status quo with one Green MSP and Mr Wightman as an independent MSP. If, on the other hand, it splits 3% for Mr Wightman and 7% for the Greens, Mr Wightman would miss out and there would be only one Green MSP – which would probably cost us one pro-indy seat.
But of course it’s not as simple as that, because Mr Wightman has admirers from outside his former party who would consider voting for him as an independent even though they would never have voted Green. So it’s possible that the combined pool of potential Wightman and Green voters is wider than the pool of potential Green voters alone.
In any case, this is about more than just crude considerations of electoral advantage. Mr Wightman is by general consensus one of the most impressive MSPs, and the parliament would be of poorer quality without him. While other parties (most obviously the SNP) have suffered terrible public divisions over the trans issue, the Greens have maintained a fiction of unity and seemingly imagined that there would never be any political cost to painting anyone who disagrees with the official party line as a transphobe, a bigot, and unfit for civilised society. It may be no bad thing if they belatedly learn the hard way that such an intolerant stance does, indeed, carry a cost.
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