Inside Holyrood: Lib Dems go down the unpredictable route

THERE are many ways to choose a party leader and the Liberal Democrats have the most democratic, but most unpredictable, of all.

The party which lost Nicol Stephen as its leader last week will use a one-member, one-vote approach to replace him, with each of its activists given the chance to decide who will take over.

But the Liberal Democrats also use a single transferable vote (STV) – one-member, many-votes, one Lib Dem source described it as yesterday.

If the decision was just made by the party's MSPs, Tavish Scott would be the leader already.

But Lib Dem grass-roots members are a curious bunch. In the 2005 leadership election, Mike Rumbles, a maverick who was critical of his party's coalition with Labour, received 23.4 per cent of the vote, far more than analysts predicted.

If Mr Rumbles can secure 30 per cent or even 40 per cent of the vote this time, then he is in with a chance of winning, particularly as there are likely to be three or four leadership candidates.

The STV system means that no one candidate can assume the leadership, even if he or she has a clear lead, after only one round of voting.

There may be two candidates who polarise the electorate and another who doesn't, so it goes down to who gets knocked out first and where the second choices of that candidate are distributed, and so on until the required number of votes is accumulated.

However, here is another interesting aspect to this election: Mr Rumbles has made it clear he is amenable to a change in the party's policy on opposing an independence referendum, if that's what the party wants.

If Mr Rumbles was to become the party leader, and if the party changed tack and decided to support a referendum on independence, it would change the dynamics of the Scottish Parliament completely.

At the moment, Alex Salmond is proposing a referendum in 2010 but without any real hope of getting the policy through the parliament.

If, however, the Lib Dems changed position and supported a referendum, then the SNP would have enough votes to get it through Holyrood and then call a referendum.

So it is probably a sobering thought for Liberal Democrat activists that they may not just have the future of their party in their hands when their leadership voting papers drop through their letterboxes over the next few weeks; they may also have Scotland's future under their control too.