Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Sturgeon’s coalition deal is a masterstroke

Sturgeon alongside the Scottish Greens co-leaders (Photo by the Scottish government)

The deal struck between Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Greens takes Scotland’s devolved government into new territory. For one, it is the first time a Green party has been part of a ruling administration anywhere in the UK. For another, it is a different kind of governing alliance from that which we’re used to in Britain (though less so in Northern Ireland). It is not quite a full-blown coalition like the Cameron-Clegg government — the pact, published this afternoon, outlines areas where the two parties will continue to express separate positions — but nor is it a mere confidence and supply arrangement like the one Theresa May secured with Arlene Foster after the 2017 election.

Two Green MSPs will take up ministerial posts, albeit as junior ministers, and the government will pursue a joint programme. The set-up is remarkably similar to that agreed last year in New Zealand between James Shaw’s and Marama Davidson’s Green party and the minority Labour government of Jacinda Ardern, who is known to be one of Sturgeon’s political heroines.

The opposition is none-too-pleased. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar forecasts ‘disaster’ while the Scottish Tories’ Douglas Ross is positively blood-curdling, calling the pact ‘a nationalist coalition of chaos focused on splitting up the country and dividing Scotland with another bitter referendum’. (That’s what I like about Douglas Ross. He makes me sound like a columnist for The National.) In one sense, the co-operation framework simply puts down in black and white a practice that has been apparent for years now, and especially since the SNP returned to minority government after the 2016 election.

Sturgeon has learnt more from David Cameron than Jacinda Ardern about how coalitions work

Patrick Harvie, one half of the Greens’ gender-balanced co-leadership (don’t ask), has never hidden the fact that his vision for the party is as a more progressive analogue of the SNP, an outfit with identity politics of the nationalist and gender varieties, rather than the environment and climate crisis, at the heart of everything it does.

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