The Scottish Green Party isn't working

The Scottish Green Party isn’t working.

I don’t mean politically, but rather organisationally. In my sixteen years as a party member, almost all of which have been spent as an office-bearer, I have never seen our structures and the volunteers holding them up being put under so much pressure.

This can all be fixed, but to start we need to be honest about the problems.

I know far, far too many people who have been made ill by their time as a national office bearer in this party. We churn through good and capable people and we’re lucky to get a single full term out of many of them before they feel forced to step down or resign.

It’s certainly not a coincidence that both occasions on which my GP sent me to the hospital just to make sure those chest pains were not a heart attack were during my time as co-chair of the party’s Executive. (Fortunately for me, they were stress-related but not serious).

This is unsustainable. A small (and dwindling) number of deeply committed people are holding this organisation together. That is no exaggeration. I can think of at least three individuals without whose sacrifices we would have been at existential risk for one reason or another in the last year alone.

Unless we somehow buck the trend this year, we will once again finish our internal elections with many vacancies still to fill.

It should not be this hard. A radically democratic organisation cannot survive like this. Something needs to change.

The reasons why things are not working are varied. They are both structural and cultural. Broadly though, the key problems I think we need to address include:

Too many meetings: We expect far too many volunteers to attend far too many meetings. If you want to convene a committee that’s at least ten Executive meetings per year (realistically more like 12-15), plus four for Council (realistically 5-8) and the AGM, before even getting to your own committee’s meetings. Then there’s the time required to prepare your papers for each meeting, read all the other papers and complete your actions from the last meeting. 

It’s a cottage industry of report-writing. I’m convinced there are more productive and more democratic ways to run this party.

Volunteering to convene the likes of Standing Orders Committee or Elections & Campaigns Committee is easily equivalent to a part-time job. That can’t be right.

A reluctance to say no: As a group of well intentioned and extremely motivated people, there is always more we want to do to improve our party and to change Scotland for the better. But as an organisation of 7,500 members with half a dozen staff and a very heavy reliance on volunteers, there are clear limits to our capacity. 

Those limits do not stop people coming to almost every meeting with proposals for something else we should start doing. Most of these proposals are good ideas that it would be great to implement, but we cannot do them all.  

As co-chair I led the process of developing our 2022-27 organisational strategy. That document, extensively consulted and collaborated on, should be what every new proposal is judged against. And we should be willing to stop doing the things which aren’t contributing towards its key objectives. 

We are already operating well beyond our capacity and that isn’t working. Mistakes are being made. Trying to do more will only make that worse, it’s time to accept that our national party structures must do less and do it better.

An unforgiving culture: Despite our Code of Conduct making clear that we forgive mistakes and focus on solutions, overstretched volunteers are held to impossible standards and missteps are often assumed to be deliberately malevolent rather than honest mistakes. 

This is by no means how the majority of active members behave, far from it. The problem is that the minority who do treat volunteers and staff this way are too often allowed to do so without consequence themselves (despite the best efforts of our Conduct & Complaints Committee). 

There is an automatic assumption in some corners that someone must be wrong and ill-intentioned simply because they are a senior office bearer, committee convenor or staff member. One effect of this is that other capable and competent members see this behaviour and simply do not stand for these important roles, robbing the party of what would be valuable contributions.

Indecisiveness masquerading as inclusion: Once a decision is made, we should move on and implement it. That’s democracy and we are (supposed to be) a democratic organisation. Far too often though, important but contentious issues will be talked to death, over and over again, without a decision being made. Or that decision will be immediately reopened at the following meeting. 

This is profoundly anti-democratic, prevents us from making progress on all sorts of issues and it takes a heavy toll on the volunteers who need to defend both the proposals and themselves from the same criticism over and over again, despite having already secured clear majority agreement.

So, how do we break this cycle?

This all sounds incredibly negative. I’m laying it out in stark terms because I’m not sure that most members are even aware of the scale of the problems at a national level within the party. And I’m shining a spotlight on it now though because I know that it can all be solved.

That will take a combination of structural and cultural reform and it certainly can’t all be done in a single year - but it needs to start now.

Over the next few weeks I’ll put forward some of the specific changes I think are needed. This needs to be a broad and open debate amongst members of our party though, so if you have your own ideas please get involved in the conversation!

Scotland desperately needs the kind of transformational change offered by Green politics. Our party urgently needs to be capable of delivering that change.