For veteran Labor militants, they were called Nicola Sturgeon’s “gardening wing”. I had always tried to ridicule them because they believed the past was the best, referring to them as the Iron Age Appreciation Society.
Today, we do not laugh at the Scottish Greens as saviors of the land, but consider them a genuine and undemocratic danger to the UK.
Patrick Harvie, its joint leader, has now been accused of abandoning the fight against climate change after supporting the prime minister’s plan to turn the next general election into a vote on independence.
He rescued her from the embarrassment of not getting the general majority he had demanded in last year’s Holyrood election using his eight MSPs to join her in a coalition of convenience.
And now, he has said that anyone who votes for his party in the next general election, scheduled for 2024, is supposed to support Britain’s break-up.
Political climate emergency
With an arrogance to which we have become accustomed from the Prime Minister of Scotland, he accepted that nothing else will matter in this contest: neither the cost of living, nor the NHS, nor the international crises.
In keeping with the widespread view that the Greens are now a wholly owned subsidiary and a cat paw of the SNP, Harvie said his party will follow its line.
The central policy that has earned them most of their support has disappeared from the Greens’ closet: to fight the so-called climate change emergency and to follow in the footsteps of people like Sir David Attenborough to save the species in danger of extinction of the Earth.
Instead, its only raison d’être from now on is the independence of Scotland.
All this means that if you support the many arguments that support the maintenance of the current UK but have voted for the Greens in the past, how would you vote on what Mrs Sturgeon, and now Mr Harvie, insist on, which are elections with a single topic? ?
The answer is that no matter how much you worry about the economic implications, the idea of border posts between England and an independent Scotland, and how the policies of the greens to deal with climate change, you would be faced with a dilemma.
Breaking is not hard to do
For Mr. Harvie, however, there is no confusion in this situation. Not now that he has put independence above all other considerations. Voting for Britain’s break-up is what he wants you to do.
He insisted that most voters already know that the Scottish Greens support independence. However, Holyrood’s ridiculous “closed list” proportional representation voting system, pushed by Labor and Liberal Democrats to increase their votes, is now responsible for his party’s rise to its current position.
In a Holyrood election, it is possible to use the constituency vote to increase Labor, Conservative, Lib Dem or SNP parties and then vote for someone else entirely in the second, regional section.
And that’s how the Greens got the bulk of their votes, often through getting a small proportion of the votes. In the central and northeastern regions, they got one MSP elected in each, but with only six percent of the vote.
In the Lothian region, which includes Edinburgh, the Greens won two MSPs, the same as Labor, but garnered less than 50,000 votes compared to Labor’s nearly 80,000.
Stop this democratic affront
But there will be no second ballot in the general election. If they want to offer their side of the coalition business, the Greens will have to present a candidate in each of Scotland’s 59 constituencies. In the last Holyrood election, they fielded one candidate in only 12 constituencies. All lost.
Mrs Sturgeon’s plan to manipulate the next general election for her own purposes, if the Supreme Court decides against her candidacy for an illegal referendum, is bad enough.
But by joining this sordid effort, the Scottish Greens are shamefully adding to the democratic affront of this whole episode.