Ross Greer is for Palestine, trans rights and riling up the Daily Express, making him the ideal candidate to lead the Scottish Greens. At an event in Glasgow today, the West Scotland MSP put himself forward as a successor to Patrick Harvie, who is standing down after 17 years at the helm of the environmentalist party that occasionally takes an interest in the environment. Under Harvie’s leadership, the Greens have prioritised cultural and identity politics over economics and ecology, helping to push the Gender Recognition Reform Bill through Holyrood and press for free bus travel for asylum seekers (an idea pinched by the SNP-run Scottish government).
The pragmatic radicalism on offer from Ross Greer is a wiser course to take
Harvie and co-leader Lorna Slater became the first Green ministers in British history when they joined Nicola Sturgeon’s devolved administration in its final two years. The alliance was not politically productive (the gender bill was blocked by Westminster and a bottle recycling scheme came to nothing) and it ended badly (Harvie and Slater were abruptly booted by Sturgeon’s successor, Humza Yousaf) but the exercise proved the Greens could misgovern just as well as any other party.
Greer cut his teeth working on the Yes Scotland campaign during the 2014 independence referendum. Since entering Holyrood in 2016, he has made a name for himself as a gammon-baiting, woker-than-thou, omnicause progressive, with a lanyard for every occasion and every liberation. He’s fond of the Soviet anthem, the chant ‘We’re selling the Falklands when Thatcher dies’ and taking his Scottish parliament oath with a raised fist. He calls Churchill a ‘white supremacist’ and ‘mass murderer’, his dream dinner date is the IRA revolutionary Michael Collins, and he recently tried to remove all references to ‘His Majesty’ in Scottish public bodies and legislation. In other words, he’s adorable.
However, despite Greer’s gift for leftist posturing, he has earned himself the enmity of a faction known as the Glasgow group: Green councillors and activists who reckon the far-left party could be a lot farther left. Greer understands that an ideological lurch would kill the golden goose. The Greens have a growing voter base of young, urban, precariously middle-income graduates to supplement their more traditional support among the comfortably retired, the guilty affluent, and assorted cranks. This Deliveroo-Waitrose alliance is essential to the party’s development and, on current polling, will give them their best result yet at next year’s Holyrood elections.
That is unless they trash all the work they’ve done and cascade down a purity spiral, narrowing their own ranks and pushing away hyper-progressive, theoretically social democratic voters who identify with the Greens’ culturally leftish messaging but would suffer materially from meaningfully socialist fiscal policies. At his launch, Greer stressed the importance of being more than ‘a party of protest’ and while he hammered home the need to tax the ‘super rich’, he struck a more nuanced note when questioned on raising additional revenue from higher earners.
In common with most other parties in British politics today, the Greens are economic populists and have settled on wealth taxation as a way of costing expensive policies (e.g. universal free bus travel) without having to confront hard questions about income tax. Telling the electorate the brutal truth, that if they want quality public services taxes on basic and middle-earners will have to rise, would go down like a dose of strychnine on the doorstep.
Keeping their voter coalition together requires the Greens to stick to Zohran Mamdani-style vibes-based progressivism. They need to make a great deal of noise about taking on the rich and powerful but pursue a melange of populist fiscal reforms and high-status social policies that might inconvenience the rich and powerful here and there and will definitely upset the traditional-minded among their number. One thing these policies certainly will not do is alter the fundamentals of the economy in a decisively egalitarian direction.
People vote Green for one of two reasons: to prove that they’re good people or to stick it to those they resent. The principal business of a Scottish Green leader is to maintain and, with any luck, expand these electoral blocs. Sharper ideological definition is likely to have the opposite effect, which is why the pragmatic radicalism on offer from Ross Greer is a wiser course to take. Skelp the super-rich but keep the middle earners and modestly wealthy on board by selling them leftist vibes at centrist prices.
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