THE leadership of the Scottish Greens have rejected calls to rerun a selection contest that led to an Edinburgh councillor becoming the party's top candidate for a Holyrood seat in the north east.
Maggie Chapman, a long-standing Leith councillor and party co-convenor, won the number one list place in the parliamentary region, which takes in Dundee and stretches north to Aberdeenshire. It offers her a strong change of becoming an MSP next May.
The result caused anger among some local members, who accused her being a "carpetbagger" and claimed she had an unfair advantage in part because a bizarre system - which ranks candidates alphabetically by the third letter in surnames - meant Ms Chapman appeared at the top of ballot papers.
Party chiefs held crisis talks at a meeting of its national council yesterday to discuss a petition to initiate a deselection process, but eventually dismissed the move.
A spokesman said: "After a wide-ranging and measured debate the party council voted overwhelmingly to use its powers within the constitution to reject such a ballot. A deselection ballot will not be going ahead.
"The party's national bodies will now be redoubling efforts to work with members in North East Scotland to tackle differences of opinion through discussion and identifying common ground, with the shared aim of posting the best-ever Green result in NE Scotland next May."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article