Not easy being Green? Harvie sets out to prove Kermit wrong
IT’S not easy being Green, Kermit the Frog famously sang, but the Green life has become less of a struggle for Patrick Harvie and his party.
Buoyed by a tenfold increase in membership the Greens hope they are on course for their best-ever election.
Mr Harvie is the face of the party, though he is only co-convener –they don’t do leaders.
He fronts up the biggest, most professional and best resourced campaign the Greens have had as they bid to get at least eight seats and target wo in Glasgow.
With his bike chained up outside the campaign HQ, Mr Harvie is putting in the carbon neutral miles on the campaign trail and he is not alone. He said: “For us this is a transformational election. It’s the first election we’ve been able to campaign on a scale we have been lacking. Our membership is nearly 10 times the size at the last Holyrood election.
“We’ve got groups out campaigning day and night. More than we’ve dreamed of in the past.
“I’m hoping that sense of getting the message out there on that scale will make a difference.”
He rails against specula- tive developers and rogue landlords taking cash out of communities and at the “wasted” millions spent on new motorway miles in Glasgow.
More land for housing is a priority and wants to take on those who are a block on local ambition.
He said: “Councils and housing associations should be able to buy land for housing at its current use value instead of seeing its value increase hugely because you approve it for housing.
“This is how this country used to operate until the 1950s it’s the way a lot of other European countries still operate, you buy land for housing at is current use value, that can cut something like 30% off the overall cost of build that new affordable housing the country needs.
“Rather than lining the pockets of landowners who are very often speculative investors we could be spending that money on providing quality homes.”
Unscrupulous private landlords are also in his sights, ripping off people unable to afford to buy and out of the social housing sector.
He said: “We clearly need rent controls in the private rented sector to stop people being exploited.
“We’ll be advocating a full national rent control system as well as moving to protect people from the bad behaviour of the minority of abusing landlords and letting agents whose old tricks are still going on even though they are supposed to be made illegal.”
Transport, as you might expect is high on the Green agenda and Mr Harvie is angry when he thinks of the cash spent on the M74 completion.
He said: “The public transport we’ve got is unreliable and expensive. Even compared to Edinburgh it’s expensive. The condition of our roads is poor yet huge amounts of money goes into building new roads. For the M74 price tag you could have had the Glasgow Airport Rail link, Crossrail, subway modernisation and a new fleet of publicly owned buses to run a regulated bus service.
“And you’d still have had change for the walking and cycling infrastructure.
“You could have transformed the whole city’s transport infrastructure. Instead what we got is five miles of urban motorway on concrete stilts.”
The Greens are all about community and think global act local is as relevant a slogan for the environmental movement now as it ever was.
He said: “Huge chunks of our economy from energy to financial services to retail are dominated by a tiny number of giant multi nationals and we want to see a flourishing of a huge number of smaller businesses.
“Too much emphasis is about finding small businesses that are about to grow into something massive.
“Small businesses that are successful as small business should be celebrated in their own right.”