Scottish Greens

[EH75]

5 minutes ago, Pato said:

What do folk think about this story? 

There must be rules about this sort of stuff? I presume I couldn't register a "Scottish Nationalist Party"? Like, how close to the name/slogan etc of a current party are you allowed to get? Or is it just up to someone to decide if it is OK when you register your party/candidate? 

[Caledonian1]

1 hour ago, NotThePars said:

If someone's not sufficiently switched on to spot the diff then idk really what else can be done especially in hindsight.

My mum (91 and half years old) almost voted for them.......lucky I was there to help her....others may not have been so fortunate

[D Angelo Barksdale]

There is an element of people needing to be more careful in where they mark their X, but for me, it's a blatant attempt to mislead voters and a rather desperate attempt to prevent a pro independence majority in the parliament.

That it got cleared by the electoral commission is baffling.

[HTG]

44 minutes ago, Henderson to deliver ..... said:

There is an element of people needing to be more careful in where they mark their X, but for me, it's a blatant attempt to mislead voters and a rather desperate attempt to prevent a pro independence majority in the parliament.

That it got cleared by the electoral commission is baffling.

It's exactly this. The boy is a right wing nutjob. Under no circumstances should the party name have made the ballot sheet. 

[KingRocketman II]

aye, we discussed this very issue early last month under "unusual candidates in this area" and the potential for confusion was highlighted:

wiki describes the party as:

Independent Green Voice is a minor environmentalist political party in Scotland. First registered with the Electoral Commission in 2003, it is led by Alistair McConnachie.

It opposes debt slavery and calls for the establishment of a not-for-profit "Public Investment Bank" to replace the "debt-based money system".^[2] The party is also opposed to Public Private Partnerships, and would restore the link between pensions and average earnings.

In the 2003 Scottish Parliament election, McConnachie stood in Glasgow Kelvin and received 1,300 votes (5.9%). In the 2005 UK general election, he stood in Glasgow South West, and received 379 votes (1.2%).

McConnachie is also the party's treasurer and nominating officer.^[3] Prior to establishing the party, he was the Scottish organiser for the United Kingdom Independence Party but his membership was not renewed in the summer of 2001 amid allegations that he was a holocaust denier.^[4]McConnachie responded to these allegations at the time of the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary election^[5] when the party stood in the Glasgow regionand received 496 votes (0.2%)

And also lists its ideology as British unionism.

However is the name of the party not a little misleading that may dupe some (I don't know older or less discerning) voters? If I was a rabid right wing moon howler like this guy and wanted to tap into say the Liberal Democrat vote (an envious demographic group I concede), would I be able to set up a party and register it as say, the Scottish Left Liberals? 

[Sherrif John Bunnell]

Without wanting to get a bit Linekery, that second ballot paper could be doing with being thinned down a bit before polling day.

Maybe a round of diiddy party pre-qualifying?

[Dunfermline Don]

I am thinking of forming a Scottish Conservation and Onionist party for the next election on a policy of safeguarding rare vegetables. Do you think it will be approved! [emoji848]

[Dunning1874]

11 hours ago, Pato said:

Someone apparently tried to register 'The Literal Democrats' and was knocked back, but this was deemed suitable.

I can appreciate people saying it's up to people to make sure they vote correctly, but I heard so many people saying they wanted to vote green this time who didn't normally, I think it's likely that at least some of them ended up voting for the wrong party & if the electoral commission is about to stop this exact thing happening, then they need to make some kind of change.

The Literal Democrats wasn't just an attempt to be registered; it actually happened in the 1994 European election with the candidate taking 10,000 votes in a Liberal Democrat held seat, which was then won by the Tories by 700 votes.

That led to the introduction of legislation that required political parties to be registered and explicitly forbids copycat names or logos. So no Literal Democrats, Conversatives or Labor, no white rose on a red background but tilted at a different angle with a slightly different shade of red. Even aside from obvious attempts to game it like the above it affects parties which have split; so for example the Communist Party of Britain are the only party allowed to use any variation of a hammer and sickle. None of the other trillion Communist splinter groups can do so. The Electoral Commission have a legal duty to enforce this.

The party having the name Independent Green Voice isn't the issue; they've stood with the name since 2003 and the Scottish Green Party don't have a monopoly on the word Green. The issue here is the logo, which the Electoral Commission approved a change to six weeks before the election.

The previous Independent Green Voice logo:

The new Independent Green Voice logo:

How the logo looked on the ballot paper:

It was undeniably a deliberate attempt to mislead voters by making the word Green more prominent for anyone scanning the ballot.

In allowing this change the Electoral Commission have broken the law:

[ICTChris]

This is the Scottish Green Party logo for comparison.

 

The guy who ran as a Literal Democrat tried to run in the WInchester by-election as "Gerald McClone" against Gerry Malone but wasn't allowed to do that.  He ran as a 'Literal Democrat' and got a few hundred votes and then in the next election as a Liberal Democrat top choice mark here to win and got about 50 votes.

 

[Detournement]

Jim Sillars had the Scottish Labour Party and there have been Independent Labour on ballots recently as well so it's not a completely new thing. 

There was also a Liberal Party of crackpot right wingers in this election as well. The number of weird right wing parties just shows how much cash from the super rich is up for grabs for all these arseholes.

[ICTChris]

Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party used to run on the lists in the Scottish Parliament elections.  In 1999 they got 55,000 votes in total, more than the SSP, 2003 they got 28,000, 2007 they got 14,000 again beating the SSP and 2011 they got 16,000 and got more votes than all other left parties combined.  They seem to have jacked it in after that.

This is a party who, as far as I know, never campaigned and probably had about a dozen members in Scotland through that entire period.  You can't prove it but I'd bet that most of their voters were meaning to either vote Labour or for the SSP.

[ICTChris]

11 minutes ago, Detournement said:

Jim Sillars had the Scottish Labour Party and there have been Independent Labour on ballots recently as well so it's not a completely new thing. 

There was also a Liberal Party of crackpot right wingers in this election as well. The number of weird right wing parties just shows how much cash from the super rich is up for grabs for all these arseholes.

I'm sure I've posted this here before but the Liberal Party are the continuing version of the old party who didn't want to merge with the SDP.  They used to have a presence in Liverpool locally but don't seem to anymore.

They used to run a candidate in Leith constituencies, a guy called John Hein.  He was a paedophile rights activits who was a member of PIE and was also involved in laundering the money from a huge fraud committed by criminals in Moldova - he and his partner ran a firm that set up Scottish Limited company's which were used to clean the proceeds.  He died last year.

ETA, they seem to have expelled the guy who was going about giving Nazi salutes and wearing a yellow star.  

Edited May 11, 2021 by ICTChris

[coprolite]

A recent example from these parts

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/neil-mcevoy-plaid-cymru-electoral-17867103

[Salt n Vinegar]

3 hours ago, ICTChris said:

I'm sure I've posted this here before but the Liberal Party are the continuing version of the old party who didn't want to merge with the SDP.  They used to have a presence in Liverpool locally but don't seem to anymore.

They used to run a candidate in Leith constituencies, a guy called John Hein.  He was a paedophile rights activits who was a member of PIE and was also involved in laundering the money from a huge fraud committed by criminals in Moldova - he and his partner ran a firm that set up Scottish Limited company's which were used to clean the proceeds.  He died last year.

ETA, they seem to have expelled the guy who was going about giving Nazi salutes and wearing a yellow star.  

Nice to see that they have some  standards!

[ICTChris]

Green MSP Alison Johnstone has been elected Presiding Officer.  All the other continuously represented parties have provided a Presiding Officer so probably fair that it's a Green, although it does deprive them of an eighth of their Parliamentary group.

In slightly less pertinent Green news, this is Ross Greer taking the oath today.  He is really out of proportion.  ALso, that is a tiny, tiny fist.  Is he related to Trump?

[Salt n Vinegar]

1)There are 31 Conservative members of the Scottish Parliament. 

2) In respect of the election of the Presiding Officer, there were 28 "no" votes, 2 abstentions and one spoiled paper. 

Question.... Which Tory spoiled their voting paper and what do P&B forumites think it contained? 

[ICTChris]

2 minutes ago, Salt n Vinegar said:

1)There are 31 Conservative members of the Scottish Parliament. 

2) In respect of the election of the Presiding Officer, there were 28 "no" votes, 2 abstentions and one spoiled paper. 

Question.... Which Tory spoiled their voting paper and what do P&B forumites think it contained? 

[GordonS]

 

On 10/05/2021 at 21:25, NotThePars said:

If someone's not sufficiently switched on to spot the diff then idk really what else can be done especially in hindsight.

All that can be done now is a discussion about tightening up the rules.

My sister in law isn't the brightest, she lives in Clydesdale constituency and intended to vote SNP-Green. She wasn't sure which of the two Greens on the paper was the right one, so she voted SNP-SNP.

It's easy to say "well, voters should know" but voting needs to be accessible, it needs to cater to people who aren't engaged in politics and are below average intelligence for this kind of thing. For a lot of voters if they see the words Green, Labour or Liberal they're not going to know enough to tell them apart, and it's really difficult to reach them and educate them.

Maybe a solution might be to have the parties that already have representation in parliament at the top of the ballot paper, and then the rest. The issue in this case was that the psycho's party was above the SGP in alphabetical order and that has a really, really big impact. You see it in council STV votes too. Voters will look down the list and as soon as the reach the word they're looking for, they'll put a cross in the box.

[NotThePars]

1 minute ago, GordonS said:

 

All that can be done now is a discussion about tightening up the rules.

My sister in law isn't the brightest, she lives in Clydesdale constituency and intended to vote SNP-Green. She wasn't sure which of the two Greens on the paper was the right one, so she voted SNP-SNP.

It's easy to say "well, voters should know" but voting needs to be accessible, it needs to cater to people who aren't engaged in politics and are below average intelligence for this kind of thing. For a lot of voters if they see the words Green, Labour or Liberal they're not going to know enough to tell them apart, and it's really difficult to reach them and educate them.

Maybe a solution might be to have the parties that already have representation in parliament at the top of the ballot paper, and then the rest. The issue in this case was that the psycho's party was above the SGP in alphabetical order and that has a really, really big impact. You see it in council STV votes too. Voters will look down the list and as soon as the reach the word they're looking for, they'll put a cross in the box.

Yea fair, it was a bit of a flippant response.

[G51]

21 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

Green MSP Alison Johnstone has been elected Presiding Officer.  All the other continuously represented parties have provided a Presiding Officer so probably fair that it's a Green, although it does deprive them of an eighth of their Parliamentary group.

In slightly less pertinent Green news, this is Ross Greer taking the oath today.  He is really out of proportion.  ALso, that is a tiny, tiny fist.  Is he related to Trump?

Greer is a ridiculous looking human tbh.

Leftists are supposed to be shaggers. The movement must disown him.