Has Patrick Harvie woken up on the wrong side of the bed? On BBC Scotland this morning, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens appeared to take aim at just about anybody he could think of — including his own coalition government.
Lashing out at the Scottish nationalists, Harvie slammed their council tax freeze. The Greens have ‘made clear we weren’t told in advance’ about the proposal, Harvie seethed, and ‘don’t think the process was well handled’. Ouch. That’s certainly something coming from a pro-environment party who couldn’t even enact their own recycling scheme…
Next in the firing line was the Westminster government. Harvie harped on about Sunak’s decision to U-turn on green policies and his pushback on the phase out of gas boilers. ‘We were so angry,’ announced Harvie about the UK government ‘ditching’ policies in this area. Yet when pressed on what motions would be discussed at his own party’s conference in Dunfermline this weekend, the two that Harvie named — council tax and the Israel-Palestine conflict — suggest the Green party may also have taken its foot off the, er, zero-emission pedal.
And to complete the trifecta, the interviewee then turned on the presenter. Harvie told Laura Maciver to ‘check the facts’ after she suggested that the Greens were looking to outlaw gas boilers by 2030. Harvie protested this ‘simply isn’t true’ after, um, admitting it wasn’t too far off their ‘gradual’ plan to get rid of the things. When pressed on affordability concerns surrounding heat pumps, Harvie burst out that ‘people in right-wing politics and the media are misrepresenting the costs!’ This came only minutes after his admission that he still owned a gas boiler himself. Rules for thee, but not for me…
Nasty, brutish and short – another media round well done for ‘Hobbes’ Harvie. With more and more mutterings in the SNP about ending their agreement with the Greens, is the pressure now getting to him? If this morning is anything to go by, the answer is affirmative…
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