This afternoon Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, co-leaders of the Scottish Greens, will become ministers in Nicola Sturgeon’s government. The appointments come after Green members ratified a cooperation agreement over the weekend. The unity pact is a strategic masterstroke by Sturgeon, handing her an overall majority at Holyrood, insulating her from internal SNP criticism and coopting a rival nationalist party. There is one midge in the porridge, however, and it’s this: the Scottish Greens are unhinged. Not merely eccentric or a little outside the mainstream, but full-blown, solar-powered, honest-to-Gaia cranks.
For an illustration, consider a motion debated at their autumn 2015 conference in Glasgow. I was a political reporter back then and covered the event, and the talk of the weekend was Policy Motion 2. Dry-sounding but incendiary, Policy Motion 2 resolved that Israel was an apartheid state, Zionism a racist ideology and Hamas not a terrorist organisation. The text claimed that ‘historically the Palestinian peoples have enjoyed peaceful religious and ethnic cohabitation’ but had come under ‘colonial occupation’, listing ‘Zionist/Israeli powers’ among the colonisers.
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