The sinister reality of water melon* politics
*That’s green on the outside, red on the inside. And with Patrick Harvie’s cabal of class warriors and cranks determined to extract ever-greater concessions for propping up Nicola Sturgeon’s minority government, it’s Middle Scotland who are paying the pri
GLOBAL temperatures are rising. The effects of climate change are felt every day. We are busy choking our oceans and scarring our beaches with needless, wasteful plastic. Now would be a good time to have a party that stood for ecological justice and a step-change in how we use our precious resources.
Instead, we get the Scottish Greens, the only environmental party that appears to want to talk about anything but the environment.
Led by Dunbartonshire youth worker turned eco-nationalist Patrick Harvie – he is a nationalist first and an environmentalist a distant second – the Scottish Greens would rather hug a Saltire than a tree.
If not concern for the environment, what are they motivated by?
Their world view is one of militant selfrighteousness and towering, unshakeable certainty. They are proud of a programme that would deliver a final, fatal blow to the North Sea oil and gas sector. They are unapologetic in opposing, with sciencedenying obscurantism, the shale industry that would throw a lifeline to energy workers. They excoriate Margaret Thatcher for callously shattering industrial communities in the name of capitalism, while pining to do the same in the name of Gaia.
In a Green-run Scotland, our nuclear weapons would be surrendered and key industries nationalised; fossil fuels would be shunned and wind farms inescapable; taxes would be suffocating and spending uncontrollable. State intervention would dramatically narrow the sphere of individual liberty and petty prejudice would shutter Catholic schools and drive expressions of religious faith out of public life altogether. Scotland would be a gloomy, unproductive mire – but at least all those one-way flights would contribute to the economy.
Read their manifestos and policy papers and the Greens’ true identity reveals itself. They are kale-crunching collectivists, jobkilling jacobins, hypocritical humgruffins, panjandrums of piety, economic demolition merchants, giddy prophets of doom – the sort of insufferable prigs who give decent misanthropes a bad name. They pose as progressives but yearn for mediocrity, modesty and managed decline. What they see as a prelapsarian paradise, the rest of us would recognise as a cave.
THANKS to support from the Greens, the SNP’s new income tax structure will come into effect from next week and those careless enough to earn more than £33,000 will be slugged in the pocket. Scotland will become the highest-taxed place in the UK, with a top rate of 46 per cent for those on more than £150,000. In an ideal world, the Greens would go even further and drag the additional rate up to 60 per cent.
They also oppose SNP attempts to cut air passenger duty and want the holiday tax to remain in place. They wish councils to have more say over non-domestic rates, limiting the scope for ministers to intervene and save businesses from confiscatory hikes. Not only that, they would hand local authorities the power to raise tourism and sales taxes.
Mr Harvie could not make his contempt for Middle Scotland clearer if he nationalised M&S and slapped a tax on garden centres.
This week, the Greens launched another daring but thankfully thwarted heist on the nation’s wallets.
They want to scrap the local government levy and replace it with a residential property tax, which they argue would be more representative of land value than earned income. So, on Wednesday they tabled a motion in the Scottish parliament calling for the council tax to be replaced with ‘a progressive alternative’ and for the Government to set up a cross-party group by the end of May to get the process rolling. The SNP politely declined and, in a sign of how little they thought of the Greens’ proposals, teamed up with the Tories to deliver a crushing defeat at decision time. There are undoubtedly problems with the council tax and, after loudly promising to abolish it, the SNP decided on a sticking plaster instead. The Greens want to rip off the plaster at full pelt and tip a bag of salt into the wound. When they last released costings on a local property tax, they calculated that Band E ratepayers would be charged almost £600 extra per annum within five years, while those in Bands F and G would have to find an additional £1,000 and £2,000, respectively.
What their blueprint would do is punish those who purchased their homes before the housing bubble and have seen them appreciate in value since. Many are pensioners who did not enter the property market to be casino capitalists. They bought their house because they wanted somewhere to call home and raise a family, something they could pass on to their children and because it was simply the done thing. It’s hardly their fault they took out a mortgage at the right time.
While the value of their property is higher than the purchase price, they have seen their savings dwindle since the global financial crisis and many have been drawing on rainy day funds to meet monthly bills.
These are not wealthy people but the so-called JAMs – Just About Managing. They did the right thing, worked hard, provided for themselves and a home of their own was the well-earned fruit of their labour. For this
they are to be punished. And the further squeezing of their already tight incomes is to be proclaimed ‘progressive’. Such is the perverse logic of Green ideology.
When the SNP rebuffed it this week, Patrick Harvie’s party summoned ominous rhetoric about its willingness to endorse future Scottish Government Budgets.
It was a fearsome threat, issued a mere 35 days after the Greens held the future of the SNP’s last Budget in their hands and decided to back it. Derek Mackay bunged them a few extra quid for councils but offered nothing in the way of fundamental reform. The Finance Secretary did not even have to fudge the subject to win their support. His Budget boasted that the council tax, as tinkered with by the SNP, ‘protects household incomes, makes local taxation fairer and ensures local authorities continue to be properly funded while becoming more accountable’.
There spoke a man fresh from the traumatic ordeal of facing Patrick Harvie across a negotiating table. It seemed David had boldly marched over to Goliath, tapped his ankle and asked if he’d like a shot of his sling.
To outsiders, it may sound like this was a bad week for Mr Harvie’s party but they will consider it a victory. After all, that is the point of the Scottish Greens: to go down to noble defeat secure in the knowledge that they are more ethical than the rest of us.
The Greens only occasionally function as an independent political party and the rest of the time behave like a faction within the SNP. Their threat not to support the next Nationalist Budget should be taken with a pinch of organic low-sodium salt. If she needs them, Nicola’s Little Helpers will come to the rescue.
Mr Harvie has convinced himself he is a kingmaker, though he would doubtless object to such monarchical terminology. In his reading, the Greens are a progressive force, anchoring the SNP’s triangulation, where possible, in compassionate and socially just policies. To everyone else, he has the hollow ring of a shill.
Although they can be useful when the SNP wishes to push through punishing tax hikes, the Greens often struggle to get a hearing. Holyrood’s notably ineffectual but oddly insistent virtue patrol is left with no option but to stamp its feet and table petulant motions, as it did this week.
Right-wing critics slate the party as ‘watermelons’ – green on the outside, red within. But they are more like a shucked oyster: appealing to look at but empty inside. Even those at ideological odds with the party recall fondly the days when they were led by the colourful, personable Robin Harper, who took the unconventional view that the Greens should focus on environmental and social policy rather than chasing a Nationalist fantasy of erecting borders between UK nations.
If they were truly interested in advancing the cause of progressive politics they would team up with Scottish Labour, now led by Left-winger Richard Leonard, to present a united front for radical politics in Scotland. Instead, they have hitched their yurt to the SNP, a technocratic party of the managerial centre that makes occasional forays into social democratic territory but becomes quickly disoriented and retreats to safe ground. The Greens have allowed Nationalism to pervade their party to such an extent they cannot see the contradiction in propping up a government with which they have nothing in common but constitutional fixation.
FOR this, Mr Harvie deserves much of the blame. It was he who was happy to go along with the SNP’s terms of independence, chirping only a little dissent here and there over currency or oil or Nato. Even when Alex Salmond showed little enthusiasm for working with him, reliable Mr Harvie remained steadfast.
During the referendum campaign, he declared: ‘Greens are not Nationalists. Greens are brought together by a different agenda.’ The same day he launched Green Yes, the party’s own drive for separation. If the agenda was different, the goal was the same. Green principles were sublimated into the Nationalist movement to break up the United Kingdom, despite warnings from experts that the economic consequences of independence would fall hardest on those who had the least.
Fighting the corner of the poor, and resisting a jingoistic project that was ready to sacrifice their financial well-being for the stirring flutter of a flag, should have been the obvious stance for a Green leader to take. For Mr Harvie, though, an echo of someone else comes more naturally than a voice of his own.
HE set what reservations he had aside and dutifully did the bidding of the SNP. It is an indenture neither he nor his party has managed to free itself from since. Like Dobby the House Elf from Harry Potter, Mr Harvie is ‘bound to serve one house and one family forever... and the family will never set Dobby free’.
Of course, the Greens are so much more than economic vandals and amateur power-brokers – they are also mesmerically self-satisfied.
Their cant is matched only by their humbug. The Greens lecture others on the importance of gender balance while boasting of their own egalitarian candidate selection. Yet who gets the winnable regions and who is stuck on the hopeless spots on the party’s lists? One need only glance at their parliamentary group to answer that: five men, one woman. Of course, they will remind you that they have a gender-balanced leadership team – Mr Harvie shares the convenership with Aberdeen University rector Maggie Chapman.
But who is put forward as the public face of the party? When the broadcasters bid for a Green leader for their current affairs programmes and election debates, which of the two are they invariably given? The Greens’ idea of gender balance is that Mr Harvie makes the decisions and does the telly; while Miss Chapman gets to wave and say a few words from the conference stage once a year.
This is hardly the only area where Mr Harvie’s words and deeds are to be found at variance. At First Minister’s Questions on Thursday, he casually referred to ‘the UK Government’s Brexit extremists’. It’s a favourite insult in his repertoire. He has branded Donald Trump a ‘dangerous extremist’ too.
No such label is applied closer to home. At its autumn 2015 conference, the Scottish Greens voted for terror group Hamas to be removed from the banned organisations list, endorsed economic, cultural and academic boycotts of Israel and demanded
that the Law of Return, which gives Jews the right to live in Israel, be scrapped.
They called for the Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901 to buy land for Jews to live on, to be stripped of its charitable status.
Zionism, an overwhelmingly adopted resolution proclaimed, was ‘a racist ideology based on Jewish supremacy’. Israel was accused of ‘apartheid’ as well as ‘colonisation and ethnic cleansing’.
Those are pretty extreme statements yet they are the policy of the Scottish Greens, the perch from which Patrick Harvie scolds others for their bigotry.
Mr Harvie is more a connoisseur of posture than policy. He would rather be righteous than make a practical difference to people’s lives. He revels in criticism from this newspaper.
His Twitter profile describes him as ‘the voice of the irresponsible, Left-led, anti-family, antiChristian gay whales against the bomb coalition’. Anyone that attached to their press clippings should be regarded with suspicion. And he is an irresponsible voice – but the only coalition he leads is between the SNP’s agenda and the voting behaviour of the Scottish Greens.
Despite his best efforts, he is not wrong about everything. Mr Harvie may be a strutting anticapitalist – but there are areas where Centrists and even some on the Right would find themselves in agreement with him.
While other politicians gushed about Amazon bringing jobs and investment to Dunfermline, Mr Harvie rightly questioned whether this was the kind of company for which we should be rolling out the red carpet.
Nor is he wrong about the limitations of economic growth. Pounds and percentages are important but they are not the be all and end all of life.
Rampant profiteering can be as damaging to families, communities and the environment as any misguided government policy. One need only look to the GKN takeover for proof of that.
When Mr Harvie rails against multinational companies that dodge tax, rip off customers and exploit employees, he might be surprised to be greeted by a hearty ‘Hear, Hear’ from this newspaper. He shouldn’t be. Although he may reach such conclusions through tortured logic and student common room theoretics, they are nonetheless common sense. It makes one wish he could sound like that more often.
He can’t – because the Greens’ appeal is not to sense but sentiment. It is a party you can vote for without knowing a single one of its policies and still leave the polling booth with a warm, virtuous glow. They are not selling social transformation or climate protection but a feel-good factor that assuages the conscience of the guilty rich every time they hop into their 4x4 or jet off to their weekend gîte in Provence.
Well-heeled radicals can afford the cost of Green politics, including a hike in their council tax.
The rest of us are left wondering if we really need another party to boss us around, rub our noses in their sanctimony and demand more of our money for the pleasure of it.