Humza Yousaf admits parties like the Scottish Greens & Alba could split the pro-independence vote at the general election. 🗳️ He said: “With the greatest respect to my Green colleagues, they are not going to win a Westminster seat”

21 comments

1. > He warned pro-independence voters who are considering voting Green “they are not going to win a Westminster seat”.

   > Speaking on BBC Good Morning Scotland, Mr Yousaf said: “There is only one party that’s by far the largest advocating for the cause of independence – that’s the SNP.

   > “So if you believe in independence and want to advance the cause of independence, I would urge people to vote for the SNP.”

2. Democracy comes second?

3. Shocker as politician suggests people vote for his party over rivals.

4. I mean any party could get a seat if they get enough votes. If a party is worried about losing votes they should maybe focus on why instead of crying, doing essentially nothing to stop it and hoping for the best.

5. Apart from the fact that a vote for the SNP is no longer a vote for independence. That said, neither is a vote for the greens.

   It’s the SNP who have split the vote by abandoning independence. Not to mention the malevolence, corruption and incompetence.

   Who cares about Westminster anyway! They should have withdrawn from that cesspit ages ago.

6. We never left the SNP, the SNP left us…

7. But the Greens did successfully split the vote in Edinburgh and get Ruthie in for the Tories. Well done.

8. Oh dear.. Except… Unlike the Greens, ALBA have never run against the SNP on the constituency vote but only on the list. So they have not split the independence vote in a negative sense, just given it an option for a different style of representation.

   The Greens, as Wings notes, are increasingly deprecating their independence commitment with one eye to a possible coalition with Scottish Labour. So he’s conflating two quite different problems. Quite distorted from Humza as you would expect.

   ALBA is strictly a problem for the SNP. The Greens are a potential problem for independence, both splitting an independence vote in the constituencies, and with an apparently wavering commitment to the whole idea.

9. Once upon a time there was no way that voting SNP would elect an MP, until it happened. Voting for the English Green party never used to elect an MP, until Caroline Lucas got in.

   It’s quite right that every party that wants to contest an election can. The SNP do not have a right to every single pro-independence voter any more than the Tories have a right to every pro-Union voter.

   And honestly I’d rather see Scottish politics not reduced to a single damn binary issue every time. We’re more sophisticated than that.

10. Votes are earned, not given.

11. My old Grandad regularly trundled down to help at the SNP local office in 80s Labour Glasgow when voting SNP was a joke to everyone around him.

    The SNP are where they are because of people voting for them when it seemed pointless.

12. What happened to voting for the candidate that will do the best job for your constituency?

13. Turn it on it’s head, with the 3 pro-union parties having their vote split (total >50%) allowing SNP to win, is that a problem?

14. Ooft, turning on his mates already.

    If this is how he treats his mates, wonder how he will treat us when we go against the narrative..

    Oh yeah, prison time

15. Notwithstanding that “leader of party wants you to vote for them, particularly in unfair electoral system” is not news… that only matters if you think there’s a path to independence that necessarily relies on X number of seats in Scotland going to pro-independence candidates. If that were true we’d have been independent by now.

    As it stands, there will be a centrist Labour majority. Whether there’s one SNP seat or fifty will not change anyone in Labour’s minds about the desire for independence because *they don’t care*. There are zero repercussions for them if they just ignore Scottish *or* UK parliamentary democracy, and the past decade has shown that.

    The only parliamentary road to independence is Labour *demonstrably* showing that they cannot make life tangibly better for people in Scotland, and that being highlighted by SNP, Green, and sure even smaller parties like the SSP and Alba, such that more and more people lose faith in the Westminster duopoly.

16. Surely the case for independence is the support of independence from the population, which is different to support of the SNP from the population.

17. Stop standing total roasters like Cherry and Mason if you want progressive people to vote for your party.

    Stand a few more total roasters if you want to woo the voters considering Alba?

18. This is their way of saying, ahead of time, “it’s not our fault that independence is just a pipe dream now. Honest! It wasn’t us that fucked it out of consideration by polarising our public and costing ourselves large swathes of our supporters, it was those pesky Greens.”

    Pathetic. To think I used to respect the SNP as well. Now I just want to leave the country.

19. It’s true. SNP don’t want that to happen they could agree to stand in a joint ticket with the Greens or have some sort of deal with the greens to endorse each other in different seats rather than stand themselves.

    Not really fair or just to demand they don’t stand. If they are enough of an issue make a solution to it.

20. Good riddance to anyone that votes for humza in the first place lol. He does everything but put the Scottish people first anyway
    M

21. He isnt wrong, this is THE reason why everyone with any sense despises First Past the Post, if we have basically any other system you could for for the Greens then the SNP then Labour or whoever you want without fucking over the party you think will win/ want to win more than the other people.

    The political left always falls into the trap of splitting the vote, how many seats down south are defined by a couple of % points where voting for the Greens guarentees a Tory win by stealing votes from Labour. Meanwhile the Tories Reform, Ukip, Brexit etc all fully understand that this is how their system works and gladly play around it to block left leaning parties from winning anything.