The Scottish Green party are often accused of promoting ‘student politics’ so it is perhaps no surprise they are fielding a 20-year-old social policy student, Cameron Eadie, in the forthcoming Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. What is a surprise is that they are standing at all. They’ve never stood here before. Indeed, Greens tend to avoid contesting constituency elections since they generally do rather badly, having only around 8 per cent of the popular vote in 2021.
What mischief is the ‘wee green man’, Patrick Harvie, and his band of stop oil disrupters up to now, wonder SNP insiders. Haven’t the Greens caused enough trouble recently? The SNP government is still picking up the pieces after the collapse of Green minister Lorna Slater’s disastrous recycling scheme. Humza Yousaf also had to step in to halt the Green-inspired Highly Protected Marine Areas policy after a revolt by Highland fishing communities.
SNP election strategists worry that the Greens could split the independence vote in Rutherglen. Indeed, it is quite possible that the presence of a Scottish Green party candidate could deny the SNP victory in this tight contest with Labour, who came second here last time. The by-election was caused by the former SNP MP, Margaret Fletcher, losing a recall ballot last month after her suspension from the House of Commons for breaching Covid lockdown rules.
The SNP membership has been increasingly frustrated at the ‘green tail wagging the SNP dog’. There is disquiet over the drive by the Low Carbon Housing Minister (to give the Green co-leader Patrick Harvie his proper title) to force 2 million Scottish homes to install costly heat pumps that even the suppliers say don’t work in Scotland’s climate. Worst of all is the insistence by the Greens that Humza Yousaf mount a doomed defence of the unpopular Gender Recognition Reform Bill and self-ID. The scandal of trans sex offenders in being placed in women’s prisons is still fresh in the public mind.
The former SNP leadership candidate, Kate Forbes, has openly criticised self-ID and ‘urban centric environmentalism’ and made no secret of her view that the 2021 Bute House coalition agreement with the Scottish Green party has outlived its useful purpose. SNP veterans like Fergus Ewing MSP (son of Winnie) just want to see the back of the ‘wine bar revolutionaries’ as he calls them.
This bothers Patrick Harvie not one whit. In fact he revels in criticism from SNP figures he calls ‘angry old men’ who are ‘out of step with the times’. The Greens’ main aim in Rutherglen is to consolidate their support among Scotland’s under 35s who, according to pollsters like Professor John Curtice, support green policies however incompetent their recent delivery. Standing in the most high-profile by-election in years will yield valuable publicity for the Greens as they position themselves for the 2024 general election. They’ll get a pot of cash too to send planet doom leaflets through Rutherglen doors.
It is widely believed that younger Scots support ‘trans rights’. They also hate cars and gas boilers, believing the claims that they are causing the planet to burn. That younger voters often can’t afford cars and, have zero prospect of owning a house, is perhaps what Marxists would call the material basis of their anti-growth environmentalism. Regardless, there is strong anecdotal evidence that students and many young people are sympathetic to the Green dream of throwing capitalism into reverse and reverting to an economy based on ‘farmer’s markets instead of stock markets’.
Unfortunately, the First Minister Humza Yousaf – or ‘First Activist’ as he calls himself – has to live and govern in the real world. There, 75 per cent of Scotland’s total energy still comes from oil and gas and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Most Scottish voters still have access to a car and more than 60 per cent of Scots use them to get to work according to Transport Scotland.
The Greens intend to use this by-election to subtlety, and not so subtly, attack environmental backsliding by the SNP on issues like developing the Cambo and Rosebank oil and gas fields. They expect Yousaf to delay plans to scrap petrol and diesel cars and gas boilers. The hard political reality is that it is Humza Yousaf, not the Greens, that suffers the fallout from disasters like the marine areas fiasco and the collapsed Deposit Return Scheme. And it is the SNP government that’s blamed for allowing trans rapists like Isla Bryson to be placed in women’s prisons.
Rutherglen may be the catalyst for a parting of the ways. The SNP is beginning to realise that the Greens aren’t so much independence allies as cuckoos in the nest.
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