The Scottish Green party can usually be relied upon to provide some light relief at election time. But this year, in their manifesto for the Scottish Parliament elections on 7 May, they have outdone themselves in fantasy policy-making.
The Greens want to ban everything from horse racing to homework; from nuclear power to wood-burning stoves. Candidates such as Kate Nevens, who is almost certain to be elected as a list MSP for Edinburgh and the Lothians, say they want to abolish prisons, presumably so that murderers and rapists can be free to express themselves.
The Greens also want to legalise hard drugs, the distribution of which would likely offer attractive job opportunities to the thousands of criminals released from Scotland’s jails. The Greens want to install a shooting gallery – sorry, ‘safe drug consumption facility’ – in every town in Scotland so that folk can inject themselves with their drug of choice in peace.
The Greens would like to open our borders so that every ‘undocumented’ citizen of the world can arrive on small boats and head to Glasgow, Scotland’s own sanctuary city, where asylum seekers already outnumber the indigenous homeless. Refugees would naturally be fully entitled to claim benefits from day one.
Indeed, everyone can have benefits from day one in what is possibly the most reckless item in the Green agenda. The Scottish Green manifesto pledges to introduce automatic benefits. They want to auto-enrol every Scot for thousands of pounds’ worth of state benefits so that no entitlement would go unmet. Everyone’s a winner.
The model presumably is the auto-enrolment of employees for pension contributions, which was introduced a decade ago. But that was paying in to pension savings; this is paying out to every potential benefit claimant whether or not they apply for them. Local councils would be legally obliged to find out who is eligible for what benefit and ensure that they receive it.
Scotland already has a more generous benefits regime than England. The Scottish Child Payment gives every child in a family on benefits an extra £28 a week on top of child benefit and other benefits. The Greens want this increased to £40 a week, rising to #55, even though it is already costing some half a billion a year. Along with other uniquely Scottish welfare benefits, the Scottish Government is already facing a black hole in its finances of around £5bn.
But that’s not all. The Greens want to scrap a million gas boilers by 2030 and eliminate them entirely by 2035. When the green heat-in-buildings policy was costed during the SNP-Green coalition in 2021, the bill was then estimated at £33 billion.
The Greens want everything to be free, from bus travel to university maintenance grants. They would like a universal basic income for every citizen so that no one would have to work at all. Ms Nevens has also called for reparations to ‘countries we damaged through colonialism’, as she put it, and says that this is the main reason why the party supports independence for Scotland.
The IFS and the auditor general for Scotland, Stephen Boyle, say the Greens’ programme is unsustainable without swingeing tax increases. Yet Scots are already taxed to the hilt and already pay far more tax than working people in England.
So where would the money come from? Not my problem, said the co-leader of the Scottish Greens, Ross Greer. ‘The concept of a fully costed manifesto is frankly a misleading one to the public,’ he said yesterday. Well, that’s one way of putting it.
However, under pressure, he did concede that a Green administration would tax the evil billionaires. ‘The richest 2 per cent’, he said, ‘have more wealth than half the population combined’. Perhaps, but if the Greens get a sniff of power you can be sure that those wealthy Scots would be long gone, taking their investments with them. It would be ordinary workers who pay the price for Green madness.
Many Scottish voters, ‘scunnered’ by the establishment parties, are apparently contemplating backing the Greens as a protest vote. Many still think that the Scottish Green party are a benign, if slightly daft, band of tree-huggers who can do little harm. But they should beware.
The SNP is not ruling out another coalition arrangement with the Greens. The last ‘coalition of chaos’ collapsed in April 2024 following successive policy failures and the row over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which effectively allowed rapists to enter women’s prisons. Transgender self-ID remains a key plank of Green policy. It would be part of any repetition of the 2021 Bute House cooperation agreement between the two parties. History may be about to repeat itself as farce – and tragedy.
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