The SNP hasn’t wanted for its woes lately but now there is fresh trouble on the way. Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, tells the BBC it is ‘unlikely’ that her party will vote for the next Scottish government budget after the Nationalists unveiled £500 million in cuts aimed at balancing Holyrood’s books. Many of the services reduced or scrapped in SNP finance minister Shona Robison’s announcement last week were originally put in place by the Greens when they were in coalition between 2021 and 2024. Humza Yousaf’s decision in April to end the governing pact brought a vote of no confidence and the announcement of his resignation four days later.
Appearing on the Sunday Show, Slater said her party had ‘worked really hard within government’ to get funding for ‘things like Zero Waste Scotland, all the net zero, transportation, active travel’. Among the Robison cuts which the Greens are opposing are the scrapping of an all-off-peak rail fares pilot, reductions in the budgets for nature restoration and active travel, abandoning a £2 million scheme to provide free bus travel to asylum seekers, and a £460 million raid on the ScotWind wealth fund. Slater told the BBC: ‘The SNP have now rolled back on all of that, so it doesn’t look like they’re wanting our votes, so they need to get the votes from another party in the chamber.’
Her appearance follows a number of terse criticisms of the SNP government in the Holyrood chamber last week. Replying to the programme for government, the Scottish parliament equivalent of the King’s Speech, Slater accused First Minister John Swinney of ‘selling out the future of our young people’ by cutting net zero funding and said his government’s ‘cowardice’ meant it had ‘given up’ on creating a fairer, greener Scotland for future generations. She branded as ‘delusional’ the idea that the Scottish government could ‘deliver all the same things while spending less money’ and characterised the withdrawal of the ScotWind cash as ‘emptying the pot… while slashing net zero investment and continuing to give handouts to big business’.
Slater also raised the absence of a bill banning conversion practices from the programme. Under the SNP-Green coalition, ministers promised sweeping legislation that would have criminalised both ‘gay conversion therapy’ and attempts by parents to talk their children out of undergoing gender transition, which would also have been classed as conversion. Gender identity ideology and associated policies and legislation are central planks of the Scottish Green platform. Slater warned Swinney not to ‘cower to the reactionary forces of the right’. The following day, she used first minister’s question time, the first since Holyrood returned from summer recess, to attack him for backtracking on a promise to provide free school meals to all primary-aged pupils in Scotland. The free meals pledge was another coalition-era policy and breaking it was a ‘betrayal’ that showed all the work done by the Greens in government was being ‘undone, slashed, watered down or shelved’.
This new outbreak of Nat-bashing is not limited to Slater. Earlier in the week, her colleague Ross Greer, responding to Robison’s pre-budget fiscal update, pointed out that the finance minister had not turned her efficiency drive to small-business tax relief, saying she was ‘handing public cash to big business and elite landowners while slashing critical spending to tackle the climate emergency’. It appears from these interventions, and Slater’s comments to the BBC, that the Greens have settled on their strategy for the 2026 Scottish parliament elections. Where they were previously a reliable sidekick to the Nationalists, they seem to be reinventing themselves as the progressive alternative to the SNP.
High tax, big spending, climate-focused, proudly woke and pro-independence, the Greens have always been well positioned to peel off the left-wing of the SNP vote. But in working cooperatively with the Nationalists, in and out of government, and teaming up with them to campaign for Scottish independence, the Greens limited their appeal. Labour and Lib Dem voters were suspicious of their closeness to the SNP and SNP-leaning leftists didn’t feel the need to vote Green when their party under Nicola Sturgeon was speaking the language of the left anyway.
Of all the rhetoric Lorna Slater has directed at the SNP this past week, one sentence will have stood out from all the others in the minds of John Swinney and those around him: ‘The message of this week’s programme for government is that, if people want progressive green policies, they need to vote to have Greens in the room.’
That sounds very much like a declaration of intention. A Green strategy of compare and contrast with the SNP, of highlighting how progressive the Scottish government was when they were helping shape its agenda and how centrist and cuts-happy it is now they are out in the cold, could pay dividends at the next Holyrood election. The SNP lost 39 of its 48 Commons seats in the general election, most of them to Labour, which is hopeful of wresting control of the Scottish government from the Nationalists in 2026. Badgering the SNP from the left could help the Greens up their seat tally on the regional list (eight at the last election) and while a constituency victory is probably still a long shot outside of student-heavy Glasgow Kelvin if the party stands candidates in every constituency it could take big bites out of the Nationalist vote.
When Nicola Sturgeon brought the Greens into government in 2021, many of her opponents said publicly, and some of her supporters privately, that it was a mistake to collaborate with such a fringe party. But Sturgeon made decisions from a focus group of one and once she decided that she needed the majority the Greens could provide, the matter was settled and everyone else had to fall in line. Yet in elevating them she gave them the prominence and platform from which they now look likely to attack the Nationalists. Sturgeon’s dazzling blend of political vanity and ineptitude strikes again, and for the SNP it could prove to be a devastating strike.
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