Is this the Scottish Green conference — or just an anti-Tory one? In his opening speech, co-leader Patrick Harvie laboured the point that he, er, just doesn’t like Prime Minister Rishi Sunak very much. Making some colourful accusations, Harvie didn’t hold back…
Starting with his favourite fixation, the Scottish government minister seethed: ‘Heat pumps have become the new hate symbol of choice for the extreme far right! The climate change deniers on the far right!’
‘Here in the UK, a Prime Minister desperately clutching anything he thinks might give his party a chance of clinging to power has once again chosen to copy the extremism of the far right!’ he raged at his modest conference audience. Decrying Sunak’s own conference speech as a ‘betrayal of current and future generations’, Harvie slated the UK’s ‘vacuous’ PM, noting that ‘a lot of that speech should just have been laughable.’
On independence, the Green co-leader swooped in on Scotland secretary Alister Jack:
Time and again over the last year, the Tories have laid waste to the idea of the Union as a partnership of equals… cheerleading from the the Scotland Office in the shape of Alister Jack, as he tramples over devolution with all of the finesse of a toddler on a sugar rush.
Gosh. Quite the image to behold…
Turning to other Tory speeches, ‘Hobbes’ Harvie went on:
Some of [Sunak’s] Tory colleagues were trotting out absurd conspiracy theories and he was reduced to inventing spurious, non-existent policies — and then immediately saying ‘I’ve scrapped it’. A vacuous prime minister with absolutely nothing real to say, not only betraying our future, not only betraying his own manifesto pledges, but debasing the office that he holds.
Ouch. We best believe that Rishi’s ears are burning. If he was indeed one of the, um, 47 viewers that tuned into Harvie’s monologue on YouTube.
Perhaps the Greens should focus less on others and more on their own policies. After all, their recycling scheme has already been shelved and Harvie appears to be moving towards a U-turn of his own on the 2030 gas boiler ban. The Scottish government has pushed the publication of its ‘Heat in Buildings Bill’ consultations back until the end of this year and Harvie has put out muddled messaging, saying on Friday that ‘the long-term plan is to get rid of gas boilers from the vast majority by 2045’. And while the Green co-leader promised today that ‘by the end of this Parliament, there will finally be a formal alternative put forward to complete the long overdue replacement of council tax’, there is no clear idea yet of what that alternative may be.
Is it any wonder Harvie is obsessed with hot air…?
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