The unpalatable truth about Patrick Harvie
Politics Notebook #24: The Scottish Green chief is standing down as party leader but staying on as an MSP.
Patrick Harvie is resigning after 17 years as co-leader of the Scottish Green Party, and there are broadly two ways to assess his career.
The first is to look at what his leadership achieved for the planet and Scotland’s stewardship of its wee corner of it, which we might assume is the main priority for a party calling itself the Scottish Greens.
Let’s consult the timeline:
August 2021—Harvie takes the Greens into a government which has just marked three consecutive years of missing its emissions targets.
October 2021—The Scottish Government misses its renewable heat target.
December 2021—The Scottish Government misses its renewable electricity target.
December 2022—The Climate Change Committee (CCC) warns that Scotland’s progress on reducing CO2 has ‘largely stalled’.
March 2023—The Daily Record reveals 14,008 recorded incidents of sewage being dumped in Scotland’s rivers and lochs in 2022, up from 10,799 the previous year. Figure is said to be a significant underestimate: only four per cent of outflows are monitored in Scotland, compared to 90 per cent in England.
June 2023—The Scottish Government misses its emissions targets for the eighth time in 12 years.
June 2023—The Scottish Government delays its bottle recycling scheme after failing to secure buy-in from business and the UK Government.
November 2023—The Scottish Government postpones plans to phase out fossil fuel boilers. The announcement is made by Zero Carbon Buildings Minister… Patrick Harvie.1
February 2024—The Scottish Government is missing its annual heat pump installation target by 20,000, Audit Scotland reports.
March 2024—Scottish Water documents 21,660 incidents of sewage-dumping in 2023.
March 2024—The CCC savages the Scottish Government’s commitment to reducing emissions. In a scathing report titled ‘Scotland’s 2030 climate goals are no longer credible’, the committee finds ‘no comprehensive strategy’, laments ‘a significant period without sufficient actions or policies’, and criticises the devolved government’s ‘handling of plans to close the Grangemouth refinery’.
April 2024—The Scottish Government scraps its target of reducing emissions by 75 per cent by 2030. Friends of the Earth calls it ‘the worst environmental decision in the history of the Scottish Parliament’. Greenpeace likens it to ‘striking a match in a petrol station’.
April 2024—In a surprise outbreak of good judgement, Humza Yousaf kicks Harvie and his party out of government.
You could have left the engine running on a Jeep Grand Cherokee for the past four years and still have done less harm to the climate than someone who voted Scottish Green at the last election.
We’ll call this the idealist interpretation of Patrick Harvie’s legacy, starting as it does from the assumption that the point of politics is to put your principles before the voters, secure their endorsement, then set about making the necessary changes.
There is, as I said at the outset, another way to review Harvie’s tenure, one we’ll call the realist analysis. This asserts that politics is not about principles but about power: getting it, using it, holding onto it. Power is an end in itself. You exercise it not in the fulfilment of any electoral contract with the voters but in furtherance of the priorities you esteem above all others. The hallmark of the successful politician is ruthlessness, not romanticism.
By this second metric, Patrick Harvie is one of the most successful politicians of the devolved era. He took his party into government for the first time. He and co-leader Lorna Slater became the first Green ministers in British history. He obtained a degree of influence over the Scottish Government many orders of magnitude greater than the seven votes his party brought to the table.
It was Harvie who caused the SNP, the party of ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’, a party whose entire fiscal premise for independence rested on fossil fuel revenues, to turn its back on the North Sea sector, a major employer in a region where its pro-development stance had all but welded voters to the SNP.
It was Harvie who helped persuade the SNP to embrace rent controls, a policy of economic self-harm that tends to drive rents up by increasing scarcity in the lettings market. It was Harvie who lured the SNP into backing a ban on gas boilers and a deposit return scheme which alienated homeowners and small businesses respectively.
And it was Harvie who was a driving force behind the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, one of the most dangerous, divisive and destructive pieces of legislation introduced at Holyrood. That Bill, with its origins in gender identity ideology, queer theory, and other postmodernist junkthought, required the Scottish Government to adopt policies not only at odds with reality but with mainstream public opinion.
The SNP clung to the doctrine of self-identification, even as it alienated voters, divided the party, prompted MSP rebellions, inspired a feminist backlash, and led to late-night parliamentary sittings, the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon and a doomed courtroom battle with the UK Government. It took decades — generations — for the SNP to secure executive power on a national level, and it was willing to put it all in jeopardy for a temporary alliance with Patrick Harvie and an ill-conceived project to deny the biological reality of sex.
That is power in action. You needn’t agree with Harvie to acknowledge his achievement. He took a fringe party into the heart of government, dragged that government out onto the fringe, and no one in a position of authority tried to stop him because he had convinced them he was indispensable.
Got power? Yes.
Used it? Yes.
Held onto it? For 32 months, which isn’t a bad innings in these turbulent times.
Many moons ago, I called him ‘the eternal bit player of Scottish politics’, but he went on to get second billing and while the reviews from his critics were less than glowing, his turn ran for two and a half years.
Harvie’s sojourn in office was a time of failure and indolence on climate policy and the environment, but those appear to be secondary concerns. The Greens revealed themselves to be cynical power-seekers who put The Current Thing ahead of what most voters believed their mission to be. But it was Harvie who got them there and Harvie who etched their crank objectives onto the Scottish Government’s policy agenda.
As he heads for the backbenches, his political opponents will pour scorn on Harvie but they would do better to learn from him. He proved that he understood power and how to wield it better than most party leaders of the devolved era. There is a notion out there that Harvie is an affable nerd who divides his time between hypothesising the chief exports of Gallifrey and pottering about outside Faslane with a Thermos of tea hoping a protest will materialise. But he’s savvier than that. The truth about Patrick Harvie is that, however unpalatable his politics, he turned out to be a more adept player of the game than anyone realised. That will be his legacy.
Nothing Patrick Harvie ever said or did upset me as much as the missing hyphen in his ministerial title.
Well, yes. He is savvy, perhaps even savvier than the Great Leader herself, but in both cases what did they do with the power that they so well clung on to? Absolutely nothing.
Spot on as usual Stephen. Let’s hope part of his political legacy is contributing to getting this SNP government out of office. Fingers and toes crossed 🤞 😊