The SNP’s new ally... pompous Patrick, the power-mad green zealot

Ex-youth worker and gay rights campaigner may be kingpin who makes or breaks Nats’ policies

WITH his wish-list politics and radical environmental demands, Patrick Harvie espouses every fashionable, Left-wing cause he can find.

In previous generations, he would have been rightly relegated to the fringes of the mainstream political world.

But in the forthcoming parliamentary term, the SNP faces the very real prospect of relying on the support of the Greens – who will exact a heavy price.

Renationalisation of the railways, decriminalisation of prostitution and cannabis use and a tax-grab for middle earners all featured in the party’s manifesto.

Mr Harvie, 43, a former youth worker with a gay support group, became adept during the term of the last minority SNP government at causing maximum disruption to further his party’s objectives. In 2009, the openly bisexual MSP found himself holding the fate of Scotland’s £33billion budget in his hands – and wasted no time in exploiting the opportunity to cause political turmoil.

The SNP was then reliant on other parties to get its Budget approved.

But when Finance Secretary John Swinney offered a £22million home insulation scheme in response to the Greens’ demand for a £100million-a-year, ten-year insulation programme, Mr Harvie said this was simply not good enough. On the basis of a relatively trivial disagreement over insulation, the Budget was sunk, forcing Mr Swinney back to the drawing board.

During the past five years as a more marginal force in the Holyrood chamber, the Greens were riven by personality clashes and a bitter internal leadership election.

Now, with discipline barely restored, Mr Harvie has emerged again as one of Holyrood’s leading power brokers.

In the run-up to the election, the Greens unveiled a radical election manifesto that would punish middle-income Scots, supermarkets and landowners.

The party set out a raft of Left-wing pledges, including a 43 per cent higher tax rate for those earning £43,000 or more – up from 40p – and a new property tax that would see a huge increase on some council tax bills. Under the Greens’ tax plans, everyone earning less than £26,500 would be better off and earners on £27,710 would pay an extra £24 a year.

Anyone earning more than £150,000 would pay 60 per cent tax, up from 45p at present.

For good measure, there would be a ‘basket of local taxes’ that could include an American-style local sales tax.

The Greens also want a levy on supermarkets if they promote ‘poor-quality food’, which has been dubbed a ‘pie tax’. Landowners were warned they could be forced to sell to tenant farmers, who would be given a ‘right to buy’, while councils could seize vacant land through ‘compulsory sale orders’.

OTHER policies in the Green manifesto included abolishing sanctions for a ‘significant number’ of benefit claimants who fail to do enough to find work, the possibility of nationalising the petrochemical plant at Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, and scrapping funding for new roads.

Inevitably, the party also advocates more electric cars and wind farms despite years of controversy over their cost-effectiveness and the way they have blighted the Scottish countryside.

Having claimed the credit for a moratorium on fracking, the Greens hope to secure an outright ban.

The achingly trendy Greens are also calling for a ‘women in media’ watchdog to ‘monitor and challenge the under-representation, gender stereotyping and sexualisation of women and girls’.

Yesterday Ross Greer, the party’s newly elected Europe and external affairs spokesman – and Holyrood’s youngest MSP – signalled that ‘finances’, fracking and private rental controls would be the party’s top priorities.

Mr Harvie warned recently that the SNP ‘need to be pushed’ to ‘go beyond their comfort zone’, boasting that the Greens ‘have a track record of making them do that’.

Despite the party’s supposedly ‘cuddly’ public image, the party advocates sanctions against the Israeli state, causing unease among the Scottish Jewish community.

This also puts Nicola Sturgeon in an acutely uncomfortable position – she recently warned that some Jewish families are preparing to flee Scotland to avoid anti-Semitism.

The Greens insist they are opposed to anti-Jewish bigotry but Mr Greer has been strongly criticised for voicing public support for Hamas, the Palestinian terror group.

It is also far from clear that Mr Harvie, who became Glasgow’s first Green MSP on May 1, 2003, has the sound judgment to occupy his position of newfound power within the Holyrood chamber. A vocal supporter of the SNP’s controversial Named Person scheme, he was one of two MSPs who accepted awards commemorating a gay rights activist who fought to legalise paedophilia.

It emerged in January 2007 that he and Lib Dem Margaret Smith, a lesbian, both received the Ian Dunn Memorial Award for Activism. Dunn, who died in 1998, was a gay rights activist in later life but in the 1970s co-founded an organisation that promoted sexual relations between adults and children.

THE award named after him was presented by gay rights campaigners to honour public figures who have worked to promote equality and tolerance of the lesbian and gay community in Scotland.

Mr Harvie was forced into retreat after his acceptance of the award was disclosed, saying he ‘condemned any stance which could be seen to excuse acts of child abuse’.

He called for the award (now discontinued) to be renamed but in 2014 it emerged that the MSP had never sent it back – a decision his spokesman at the time seemed unable to explain adequately.

Mr Harvie was also criticised when it emerged he was a senior figure in the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association.

The group believed ‘gay children’ were at risk in Catholic schools, claiming that the Catholic Church ‘hates them’ and is responsible for their ‘unchecked bullying’.

At the time, Mr Harvie was branded a ‘fascist’, determined to introduce ‘sexual anarchy’ into schools. Asked if he would quit the association, he said: ‘It would be absurd to leave an organisation because of one badly written press release.’

Despite these unedifying rows, in the run-up to the Holyrood election in 2007 there was a real prospect – thankfully never realised – that Mr Harvie could be handed a Cabinet post in the then Scottish Executive.

It was expected that the election would lead to a scramble among the main political parties to form a workable alliance, placing ‘fringe’ movements such as the Greens in an extremely powerful position.

Ultimately, the SNP formed a minority administration, but for four years Alex Salmond relied on the Greens to prop up key policies.

Now, with history repeating itself, Mr Salmond’s successor faces striking another similarly undignified alliance to allow her to govern effectively – but one which may leave her credibility broken beyond repair.