The unwelcome return of Independent Green Voice

There are just under 700 candidates standing in May’s election, with 29 different parties asking for your vote.

About two thirds of the candidates represent the six parties likely to make it into Holyrood next month.

The rest are a mixture of those committed to a particular cause — independence, animal welfare, communism, a particular brand of family values — and a handful of independents, including Jeremy Balfour and Ash Regan.

There were a few surprises in the final list of nominations, including the exit of former Labour MP George Galloway, who was due to stand for his Workers Party of Britain in Glasgow Southside.

“We're going all out for it and we've got a lot of support,” he told my colleague Rebecca McCurdy last year.

However, his name was not submitted to the returning officer and instead he is his party’s number two on the Glasgow list.

That is perhaps not a huge surprise given he is living in exile.

That is allowed. Candidates for the Scottish Parliament elections do not need to be resident or even registered to vote in Scotland. They just need to be a British, Irish, eligible Commonwealth citizen or another qualifying foreign national.

Mr Galloway revealed he was living in exile in an interview with conservative US political commentator Tucker Carlson late last year.

The move came after he was detained at Gatwick Airport last September.

Mr Galloway said: “I'm not going back to Britain until I know that that will not happen again, not least because of the health problem that it has given me after the first time.

“And they will not give me an assurance that it will not happen again. And if you think about it, why would it not happen again?

“Because it happened because of my broadcasts and the fact that the British state and… Keir Starmer, who leads it for the moment at least, do not like what I say on my podcast. Well, I'm still broadcasting every Sunday and Wednesday and I still have the same point of view. I’m not going back to Britain until I know that that will not happen again.”

It is, I suppose, hard — though not impossible — to live in exile and talk to the good people of Pollokshields about how often the blue bins are getting collected.

(And yes, I know blue bins are the purview of the council, but the collection rate is really patchy and someone needs to do something about it.)

Meanwhile, Reform has, by my reckoning, lost seven candidates in the two weeks since they unveiled their hopefuls. To be fair, as the party has said, a lot of their candidates came from outside politics and maybe did not appreciate the scrutiny they would be under.

Though, what did they think was going to happen?

One of the least welcome appearances in the list of candidates is Independent Green Voice.

They are, effectively, a fake party. They are not real. They do not exist.

It is a wheeze dreamt up by a pro-union campaigner who was kicked out of UKIP for being a Holocaust denier. Their “candidates” include the former treasurer of the BNP in Scotland.

Despite having no campaign, they won 2,210 votes in Glasgow and 1,690 in the South of Scotland in 2021.

Just to give that some perspective, parties that did campaign did far worse.

Reform UK, for example, managed just 543 votes in Glasgow.

As I have said in this column before, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that some — or even probably most — of those who ended up voting for Independent Green Voice probably meant to vote for the Scottish Greens.

Had the Scottish Greens won 115 extra votes in the South of Scotland and a little more than 900 in Glasgow, they would have been returned to Holyrood with 10 MSPs instead of eight.

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The Electoral Commission’s line here is that there is nothing they can do.

A spokesperson told me: “We are satisfied that there are clear and sufficient differences between Independent Green Voice's registered name, descriptions and emblems, and those used by other parties on the register."

I appreciate this is tricky and that the confusion over names is not unique to the Greens. The Lib Dems, for example, will probably lose some votes to The Liberals on the West of Scotland list.

But this is more than a name.

Maybe you don't like Ross Greer or Gillian Mackay or Patrick Harvie or Lorna Slater and think that this is okay or a bit funny. But it's not. Not really. And it should not be beyond the wit of our regulators and politicians to do something about it.