Cranks, crackpots and hypocrites... the REAL problem with the SNP’s little green shadow
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.
Tantrum
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 chamber.
Opponents branded it a ‘stunt’ but it was closer to a tantrum. Incapable of sitting for a few minutes and listening to a couple of 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 grass roots 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 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 newspaper 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) 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 Conservatives. (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 ideological fixations 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 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 were at last a party of government. 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.
Hectoring
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, the Scottish Greens have nothing to say to you.
Today all the independents are gone and with them their independent thinking. The Greens have become a fixture at Holyrood and now boast seven seats, nearly twice as many as the Lib Dems. Yet they are a political shadow, lingering in the light of a much bigger party and being 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.
I wouldn’t vote for such a party. 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.