How Green party dogma damaged Scotland

Was there ever in British politics a contingent so defined by failure as the Scottish Greens? As Scotland’s answer to the Monster Raving Loony Party, they should have been dismissed long ago as a cohort of cranks.

Instead, the ruling SNP, needing pro-independence support for its minority administration following the 2021 election, brought them into government.

Now that the power-sharing Bute House Agreement has been terminated by first minister Humza Yousaf and the two Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater have been kicked out of the cabinet, the party is reduced to what it was: seven MSPs elected with a scanty mandate through the flawed regional list system.

As a final act of recklessness, the Greens plan to back a motion of no-confidence in Yousaf, lodged by the Scottish Conservatives, which could end the SNP leader’s career as early as next week.

This, arguably, would be the second FM scalp for Harvie and Slater, if we blame the demise of Nicola Sturgeon primarily on her gender recognition legislation, a political miscalculation of massive proportions with Green fingerprints all over it.

Many Scots won’t mind about the Greens’ role in destroying the SNP and will welcome the beginning of the end of a regime that has been in power far too long.

But when the full tally of the Greens’ “achievements” is chalked up, the country will see it has been duped by diehards exerting influence way beyond the 4.7 per cent of the vote they scraped together in the Scottish election.

The tipping point in the coalition with the SNP came a week ago as the Nationalists abandoned their net zero target to reduce emissions by 75 per cent by 2030, deemed “no longer credible” by the independent UK Climate Change Committee.

Although Harvie and co were dismayed, the party has become as much a cheerleader for the transgender lobby as for the environmental cause and it is on the former hill that it will ultimately die.

When the Scottish government was forced last week to pause the prescription of puberty blockers in the wake of the Cass review into transgender services, Harvie, who refuses to accept the report’s findings, was beside himself. This was another major setback for one of Scotland’s chief drivers of controversial, science-denying, women-baiting, trans dogma.

Traditional Scottish Greens – including the party’s former leader and first Green MSP Ross Harper – have been bewildered by the extremist direction of the current leadership and have distanced themselves from it.

One of the party’s most respected MSPs, Andy Wightman, quit in 2020 over its “alienating and provocative” stance on trans rights. He accused the party of being “very censorious of any deviation from an agreed line” as he stood up for women’s rights.

Wightman’s warnings then about the behaviour and preoccupations of his colleagues were ignored and Sturgeon saw in Harvie and Slater staunch allies for her ultra-progressive social agenda.

The flagship gender self-ID reform, which would have made Scotland the only country in the UK to introduce self-identification without a medical diagnosis, eventually came a cropper when the Scottish Secretary, Alister Jack, vetoed it on the grounds that it would impact equality laws across Britain.

Harvie has also championed the deeply contentious Hate Crime Act, hitting out at “people on the right” (typically, women who disagree with radical trans ideology) who fear it threatens free speech. 

The Greens have not only shown themselves to be out of touch with mainstream thinking on cultural matters, but are woefully divorced from Scotland’s economic reality, not least with their mission to stop North Sea oil and gas production.

Voters in the Highlands have suffered the consequences of Green intransigence, particularly on road upgrades, with dualling of the hazardous A9 delayed under their watch and lives lost as a result. 

The veteran SNP politician Fergus Ewing has fallen out with his party over the A9 row which he attributes to the “Green tail wagging the dog”.

“Instead of focusing on people’s priorities, we seem to be focused on their [the Greens’] pet projects,” he said last year.

Rural Scotland has also been patronised by blinkered urban Greens who tried to ban vital (to Scotland) fishing and fish farming interests from 10 per cent of Scotland’s seas with the now junked Highly Protected Marine Areas bill.

And policies such as the recent ban on wood-burning stoves in new homes will hit badly needed housing developments in remote, off-grid regions of the country.

But it is the Greens’ sheer incompetence as well as its outlier mindset that has done so much damage to Scotland.

If Harvie is to be remembered for weaponising a medical review that seeks to safeguard children, Slater’s legacy will be the disastrous bottle return scheme which hammered businesses and is estimated to be costing the taxpayer £186 million.

As a movement that doesn’t believe in economic growth, or any kind of growth, that would sacrifice people’s livelihoods for its eco fantasies, and espouses fanatical theories on sex and gender, the Scottish Greens belong on the fringes of public life, like any other swivel-eyed cult.

But it is Scotland’s great misfortune that they were invited into the heart of government and allowed to impose their crackpot catechism on the whole country.

Now they have been expelled, it is probably too late for the SNP to recover. But with the experiment in far-left zealotry over, Scots can look forward to being once more a “broad church”, as Ewing puts it, accepting that people can co-exist in the middle ground with different views.