Questions of power bedevil radical politics. Is entry into government the only way to force change? Do the opportunities of power sufficiently compensate for the trade-offs required to obtain it? Where is the line between compromise and co-option, between pragmatism and power for power’s sake?
The Scottish Greens are confronted with these questions in the wake of the Scottish Government’s decision to drop a key interim target towards achieving Net Zero. On Thursday, Màiri McAllan, Holyrood’s Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy, confirmed that the devolved administration would not manage to reduce emissions by 75 per cent by 2030. McAllan said the target, oft-touted by the SNP-led government, was now ‘out of reach’. However, she reiterated the government’s commitment to Net Zero by 2045.
The statement was an acknowledgement of the inevitable. In March, the Climate Change Committee said the Scottish Government’s emissions targets were ‘no longer credible’, adding: ‘It isn’t enough to set a target, the government must act.’ But even though this spot of backsliding was coming, the response from the climate industry has been brutal, unusually so for Scottish politics, where the third sector is less openly critical of the SNP government than their counterparts in England are of the UK government.
Friends of the Earth Scotland characterised McAllan’s announcement as ‘the worst environmental decision in the history of the Scottish Parliament’. Stop Climate Chaos Scotland called it ‘the inevitable and damaging consequence of their abject failure to deliver the speed and depth of climate action needed’. Oxfam Scotland termed it ‘a reprehensible retreat caused by its recklessly inadequate level of action to date’. Greenpeace deemed it ‘like striking a match in a petrol station’.
But few are as furious as the rank and file of the Scottish Greens. Their party props up the minority SNP administration in Edinburgh and in exchange Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater get ministerial posts in Humza Yousaf’s government. Some want that to change. Chas Booth, a Green councillor on Edinburgh City Council, says there is ‘anger’ among party members and he has called for an extraordinary general meeting to discuss withdrawal from the Bute House Agreement, the compact under which the Greens sit in the SNP government.
There are other reasons for Greens to feel frustrated about their sojourn in office. Their deposit return scheme was kicked into the long grass after meeting opposition from businesses and the UK Government. The highly-protected marine areas policy – a fishing ban in some coastal waters – was abandoned. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill, a signal issue for the Greens, was blocked by the UK Government and the Scottish Government chose not to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court after losing in the Court of Session. The pause on issuing puberty blockers to children in light of the Cass Review is another sore point. It is not that the Scottish Greens have nothing to show for their pact with the SNP, but that they don’t have enough of what really matters to them.
This raises the question of leadership. Patrick Harvie has been party co-leader for 16 years now, long enough for a one-time radical to become a fixture of the establishment. Might a younger, more ideological leader be able to secure more influence for the party inside the Scottish Government? Might a new leader be able to improve the party’s polling, which now stands largely neck and neck with the Lib Dems? Might the Greens be doomed to suffer the same fate as the Lib Dems for compromising too much on their core values to maintain a coalition with a non-left party, one that is increasingly tainted by scandal and controversy?
Might the Greens be doomed to suffer the same fate as the Lib Dems?
These are all reasonable conclusions to draw, and capture some of the anxieties of Green members, but there are risks to going down these paths. Withdrawing from the Bute House Agreement would free up the party to fight for more aggressive climate justice policies than they can from the corridors of power. But it would also open them up to uncomfortable questions. Why, after two and a half years of the Greens in power, are Scotland’s climate targets going backwards? Can it all be blamed on leaders and the cost of living crisis, or is there something fundamentally dysfunctional about the Scottish Greens? If they can’t translate their agenda into outcomes from inside government, is there any point voting for them to be in the parliament?
And while ditching Harvie might seem like a long overdue transfer of power to a new generation, there is no guarantee whoever comes next would be an improvement. Whatever else might be said of him, he broke the party out of its electoral cul-de-sac as the ballot option for geography teachers and hemp aficionados and made it the only left alternative to the mainstream parties. If Harvie couldn’t keep the SNP to their own statutory climate targets, what would a less experienced, less battle-tested replacement do differently?
The Scottish Greens are approaching a crossroads. Not merely on climate targets or their effectiveness as a party of government, but in their ability to translate their radical ambitions to the political realities of the moment. Where Greens once had to slog against public apathy or conservatism, the electorate is climate-conscious and eager for action in ways unthinkable not so long ago. There are opportunities for Greens not only to become more activist on emissions and transition to a post-fossil economy but to clear some political brush in thornier areas like taxation, sustainable living, and transportation. While the Scottish Greens wrestle with the dilemmas of power, there is an electorate out there ready to vote for a party that will use power. The Scottish Greens will have to decide if they are that party.
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