For planet’s sake end the coalition

Critics say Green Party ministers are enmeshed in “neoliberal capitalism and climate change denial”

Next month extraordinary general meeting of the Scottish Green Party is on a knife edge. There is mounting discontent among activists at the way the party has had to compromise its principles on trans rights and accept the abandonment of climate targets.

Their leader, Patrick Harvie, has threatened to resign if the 7000 odd green activists decide to scrap the 2021 Bute House coalition agreement with the SNP. But that doesn’t appear to have pulled the party into line. At least not yet.

For their part, a number of SNP stalwarts, like Christine Grahame MSP and Fergus Ewing, have said the SNP should get its retaliation in first and send the Greens packing. They accuse them of being responsible for most of the recent policy failures of Humza Yousaf’s government: everything from the Deposit Return Scheme for bottles and cans to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill;  the Hate Crime Act to the ban on wood burning stoves.

That is overstating it. It is the recent SNP leaders, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, who should ultimately be blamed for those policy disasters that have defined what is now being called  the Coalition of Chaos. You don’t blame the crew when the ship hits an iceberg, you blame the captain - who ideally should go down with it. (And might well do if the coalition continues.)

But it’s pretty clear that the arrangement is no longer working. The Greens did a creditable job twenty years ago in alerting the public, and politicians, to the issue of climate change. Their genial leader then, Robin Harper MSP, was a great educator who became something of a national treasure. His activists of course did what activists do: made alarmist claims, impossible demands and generally made a nuisance of themselves.  But voters were intrigued and most began to accept that the climate is changing and that fossil fuels are no longer a sustainable fuel source.

All the more regrettable then that the current Scottish Green Party leaders have condoned, in fact supported, the abandonment of the very fossil fuel reduction targets of which they were supposed to be the guardians.  I mean of course the Scottish government’s decision to scrap its “legally binding” plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland by 75% by 2030 on a 1990 baseline.   This was a target which, when it was set, the Greens insisted was too little too late.  They said only a cut if 80% would address “the climate emergency” that Nicola Sturgeon annnounced before COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021.

She was still a progressive icon back then, pre Branchform, and governments  took notice. The UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, called on others to follow her lead. So did the Pope and Jacinda Ardern. Plucky little Scotland, it was said,  the shaming the Tory UK and the world.

Not any more. The charity Global Juatice Now says it is “shameful” that the Scottish government is “shifting the goalposts” of emissions. Chris Stark of the independent climate change committee agrees saying it is a “dangerous moment” for the drive to Net Zero. The BBC ‘s environment editor, Kevin Keane, who broke the story, pointed out that the Scottish government was “the first in the world to declare a climate emergency” and was now the first to ditch it. The entire Net Zero project may be dead in the water.

So the participation of the Greens in the Scottish governing coalition may have significantly damaged the cause which is the party’s raison d’etre. Harvie and Slater, the joint leaders of the Scottish Greens have had to accept collective responsibility for the abandonment of crucial climate objectives - something  they would surely never have supported had they been out of government.  Far from it. Mr  Harvie would probably have staged a walk out of parliament had he not been locked into his £100,000 a year ministerial post. No wonder Green Party members are furious and demanding an emergency general meeting to decide whether or not to remain in the SNP-led coalition.

Harvie and Slater have tried to argue that the targets were always a diversion “what matters is accelerating policy”. But that is a feeble excuse.  The targets were the policy.  Now the Scottish government has abandoned annual and interim targets altogether, decoupling climate policy from any means of measuring progress.  The only target left is the overall one of reaching Net Zero by 2045 in Scotland - 5 years ahead of the UK.  But can anyone possibly take that seriously any more? Like Mr Harvie’s Heat in Buildings plan to scrap a million gas boilers by 2030 it will surely be abandoned as reality intrudes.

The Scottish Green Party should think long and hard at their EGM next month about whether it is still in their, or the planet’s interest for their leaders to remain bound by the coalition.  Is the arrangement serving their aims? Or have the Greens been captured by political expediency and environmental complacency? As the Bright Green collective put it, they are increasingly implicated in the SNP’s “embrace [of] neoliberal capitalism and climate change denial”.

The Scottish Green Party needs to liberate its leaders from the embrace of the nationalists in order to rediscover its voice. It’s time for the SNP and the Greens to go their separate ways.