The sensationless Patrick Harvie band
The Scottish Greens are an inert, do-nothing party. Scotland needs an alternative.
This is the text of my Scottish Daily Mail column for Monday, June 6, 2022.
Like many young people, I experimented at university.
It’s unavoidable. Student life combines the heady rush of sudden adulthood with the juvenile thrills of rebellion. Peer pressure and the allure of the forbidden conspire to encourage illicit behaviour. Plus, it was freely available and everyone else was doing it.
I’m not proud of it. I knew it was wrong. But I went along with the crowd. And that’s how I came to cast my first vote for the Scottish Green Party.
I was young, I was impressionable and I’m sorry to say I did inhale. I sucked up all the soapbox patter: only the Greens cared about global warming; only the Greens would stand up for our natural environment; only the Greens offered an alternative to poverty, injustice and war. If it’s any consolation, the high wore off pretty soon and mercifully none of them got elected.
I was reminded of this youthful transgression last Thursday during tributes at Holyrood to Her Majesty the Queen on her Platinum Jubilee. While Nicola Sturgeon delivered a panegyric to the Sovereign (I'm starting to suspect the First Minister is a closet monarchist), Green MSPs got up from their seats and left the debating chamber.
Opponents branded it a 'stunt' but it was closer to a tantrum. Incapable of sitting for a few minutes and listening to some kind words about a woman who has given 70 years of service to her country, Green MSPs stomped out in the manner of toddlers denied the latest shiny toy to catch their eye.
Far from a principled protest against inherited privilege, it was a spot of performance art, carefully choreographed with headline-writers and the party's unhinged grassroots in mind. No doubt the walkout went down well with the latter but the rest of the country saw a sour, petty little strop.
Whatever your view on the constitutional monarchy, leaders across the globe spent the weekend commending the Queen for her duty, dedication and the deftness with which she has guided the monarchy through the last seven decades. Through decolonisation, the societal upheavals of the Sixties, the political polarisation of the Eighties, Britain's transition from churchgoing monoculture to secular wellspring of multiculturalism, and into the Information Age. It is an epic story and the Queen its protagonist.
Others are capable of acknowledging this. A poll published yesterday in Ireland’s Sunday Independent showed Her Majesty more popular in the Republic than the leaders of all the main Irish political parties. It is a remarkable finding given the bitter history between our two countries and all the more remarkable for what it underlines: the Irish people showed the Queen more respect during her jubilee celebrations than the Scottish Green Party.
I suspect a good many people vote for the Scottish Greens on the same factors that motivated me all those years ago. When you vote Scottish Green, you’re not voting for tangible policies but for a vague sense of niceness. Greens are for nice things (trees, polar bears, clean oceans) and against nasty things (climate change, developers, polluters) and so if you vote Green, you must be nice too. Voting Green is how you collect cosmic virtue points for caring about things you would rather not consider in practical terms. Show you care and the Greens will think about the problems for you.
There is no cause in Scottish politics in which I am more invested than in debunking once and for all the enduring myth of Green niceness. The Scottish Greens are not nice. They don’t care more than others. They are not just a radicalised version of the National Allotment Society. They are a shower of cranks, crackpots, enemies of progress, deniers of biology, disregarders of free speech, demolishers of the Enlightenment — dour-faced fundamentalists who exude a fug of moral superiority and suffocating certainty as toxic as any carbon emission.
The Scottish Greens pose as radicals but in practice they are more conservative than the Scottish Conservative Party. (In their defence, that wouldn't be hard.) They are contemptuous of growth, resentful of development, uninterested in entrepreneurship and unmoved by the plight of workers whom their modish prescriptions would deny a livelihood. They preach that the economic system, like the management of the climate, is structurally unjust but they propose no transformative reforms and not a whiff of an alternative. They want to change the world by keeping things more or less as they are.
Scottish Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater have now been ministers for almost a year. Theirs was a historic opportunity for Greens to wield executive power. No longer an eternal sit-in, they at last had a seat at the table. What have they achieved in that time?
A bottle return scheme kicked into the long grass. A moratorium on incinerators dunted down the line. A Climate Change Committee report that rebuked the Scottish government over the speed of its response to the crisis, concluding that 'action is not happening at the scale or pace required'. A Friends of the Earth Scotland critique of the government’s lack of ambition on low emission zones and the time it took ministers to set them up. A Scottish Government owned agency — Scottish Water — that dumps human waste in Scotland's rivers 30 times a day. Some of these issues predate the SNP-Green coalition but the existence of that coalition has not prompted meaningful progress in the areas concerned.
After years spent lecturing and hectoring everyone else, the Scottish Greens finally got into government and this is what it looks like. They're the worst thing to happen to the environment since the hole in the ozone layer.
Patrick Harvie must take the lion’s share of the blame, for it was on his watch that the Scottish Greens morphed from the ethical ecology movement represented by his predecessor Robin Harper into an effective adjunct of the SNP. If flags and pronouns are your thing, they’ve got you covered, but if you are interested in outcomes, in material improvement of people’s circumstances, they have nothing to say to you. The Scottish Greens have never been so alive electorally nor so moribund politically.
Another broken promise of devolution is the failure to deliver a ‘new politics’, that brave dawn babbled about by establishment media and academics. A rejuvenated civil society, a more proportional voting system, even the design of the debating chamber — all were heralded as an opportunity for a more diverse, pluralistic politics.
The start was mildly promising. The 1999 election brought the UK its first Green parliamentarian, alongside Tommy Sheridan in the Socialist interest and ex-Labour independent Dennis Canavan. The subsequent poll, in 2003, appeared to make good on the ‘new politics’, returning a rainbow parliament of Greens, Scottish Socialists, a party for senior citizens, a campaign to save Stobhill Hospital and a re-elected Canavan was joined on the independent benches by Margo MacDonald.
Where did it all go wrong? The Sheridan scandal tore the Socialists apart, of course, but the 2007 election which swept the SNP into power also cast aside the minor parties and independents. They went from 17 seats between them to just three. The SNP, going through its latest social democratic phase, had coopted the votes that previously went to the Left.
Today all the independents are gone and with them their independent-thinking. The Scottish Greens have become a fixture at Holyrood and now boast eight seats, twice as many as the Lib Dems. Yet they are a political shadow, lingering in the light of a much bigger party and immensely grateful for the dim flickers of relevance and marginal power.
Since the Scottish Greens have volunteered to be annexed by another party, there is a gap in the market for a new Green-Left party of the kind common across Europe. A party that aspires not to serving as Leftist window-dressing for a triangulating government of the centre but to providing a Left-wing critique of that government. A party, in short, that would offer an alternative.
I wouldn't vote for such a party. The centre is where I find my answers. But I would welcome the emergence of a Green-Left outfit as a necessary and invigorating challenge to the stasis and sclerosis of Scotland under the SNP and its little green shadow.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on June 6, 2022. Feature image © Ric Lander by Creative Commons 3.0.
Well said, Stephen. Bear in mind the Greens are where they are because SNP voters game the list system. Slater came fifth out of five in her constituency vote! That they’re part of the “government” running Scotland is a joke. Sturgeon thinks it adds to her mandate for a referendum when instead she should perhaps ask herself why Scottish voters wouldn’t give her her own voter majority? Perhaps because she’s an incompetent control freak who is ruining my country.
Can you imagine a Scotland where The Greens were in control of the SG and Pratrick Harvie was FM . Taken to the extremes of their policies , Scotland would be a desolate place with no private vehicles , no oil or gas for heating or cooking , Electricity only in the winter months when the wind blew and no heavy industry . The only thriving industries would be the manufacture of bicycles, the production of wooden plates , cups and utensils , the construction of Viking Galleys because steel making and its use would be banned for obvious reasons and horse drawn omnibuses and carts would make a comeback . Meanwhile, instead of saving the planet they will have hastened its demise …..no jobs , no income , no food.