Greens tail set to keep wagging the SNP dog?

I speak to a lot of retailers in this job and I think it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that quite a lot of them don’t fancy the Scottish Green Party much. Greens co-leader Lorna Slater’s catastrophic handling of the DRS shambles didn’t endear her to many in the sector – so you would imagine that the demise of the Bute House power-sharing agreement would have been welcomed by more than a few retailers.

But there is a very strong argument to say that this is one of those classic cases of ‘be careful what you wish for’. The outsized influence of the Greens on government policy-making was seen by many as unfathomable distraction when the economy is crumbling down around our ears, our long-revered education system is under-performing and the NHS is in turmoil.

Yes, gender identity, home insulation and rent capping are all important issues in their own right – but given where Scotland finds itself right now, should they really be the priorities taking up so much of the time, energy and brain power of the government? That’s a question that has been put to me by many retailers, though not always in such polite terms.

The days that followed the First Minister’s apparently brutal tearing up of the Bute House agreement have led us down a path that would seemed inconceivable just a few weeks ago. John Swinney as First Minister? Or long-shot hardliner Christian Kate Forbes?

Whoever ends up calling Bute House home, one thing is for sure: they’ll be running a minority government and that will require more concessions to the Greens and others, not fewer.

Every piece of legislation that the SNP wants to pass will now require them to do deals with opposition parties and that is likely to put the Greens back in a very powerful position once again. Their influence over policy-making could conceivably increase despite the ashes of the torched Bute House agreement still being warm.

At the heart of this is that the Green Party is pursuing its own unique agenda. The mainstream parties focus largely on the same issues, those big issues referenced above. The Greens dance to a very different tune and have their own, in a sense, narrower agenda – and now they have another opportunity to leverage their influence in pursuit of their goals.

The local retailing sector badly needs unity, decisiveness and clarity to help Scotland get back in the game, but the events of the last couple of weeks are certainly not likely to deliver those any time soon.

Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR