THE Scottish Greens have “brought down an SNP budget” before and will do so again if needs be, the party’s co-leader has said.
Speaking at the Scottish Green conference in Greenock over the weekend, Patrick Harvie issued a warning to First Minister John Swinney – indicating they would not shy away from a repeat of the past.
For the 2009-2010 Budget, then first minister Alex Salmond put the SNP on election footing after his plans were defeated by a 64-64 vote in the Scottish Parliament in which the Greens’ two MSPs refused to back them at the very last minute.
The Guardian reported at the time: “The defeat came after Salmond tried but failed to use his personal influence to persuade [Harvie] to back the budget, in a dramatic intervention outside the parliamentary chamber.
“The Greens had demanded an additional £11m to be spent on a free house insulation programme – extra spending that John Swinney, the finance secretary, refused to offer.”
The Budget was quickly revised and passed with the support of all parties except the Greens.
Referencing the episode, Harvie told his party’s conference on Saturday: “As Scottish Green MSPs, we have a responsibility to engage with the process in good faith, and with honesty. But as the only party that ever brought down an SNP budget, as John Swinney knows to his cost, we need to be clear that they cannot take our votes for granted.”
He also said: “We’ve shown how we could make big savings by stopping tax breaks to wealthy landowners and enterprise grants to arms companies, and by bringing in more money to support our healthcare system through a public health levy on supermarkets.
“But these steps are only the start. Extra funds raised through tax or coming from the UK Government must go into reversing the broken promises made by the SNP Government since they ended the Bute House Agreement.”
He said: “The first two Climate Change Acts were statements of high ambition. This third one will be an admission that, as Greens have long argued, Scotland is years behind where we should be.
“It is an admission that needs to be made; but making it demands an urgent acceleration of action here and now, not just promises of more plans to come.
“But what have we seen in the last six months from the now minority Scottish Government? Instead of accepting that missed targets demand accelerated action, they’ve chosen a sharp U-turn on much of the action that the Greens had been advancing.”
Lorna Slater, the second co-leader of the Scottish Greens, also spoke to party members at the conference. In her speech, Slater said that the Greens had become the third largest party in Scotland’s major cities.
“Whilst Rishi Sunak couldn’t even muster an umbrella, our activists pulled off our biggest on-the-ground campaign since before the pandemic. A substantial effort at short notice.
“In the record 44 seats in which we stood, we nearly doubled our vote share, with over 92,000 people casting their vote for us and demonstrating support for the Scottish Greens all over Scotland, including in the islands.
“In our biggest cities, we are now the third party, beating the Tories and the LibDems in one of their biggest elections. And how did we do it? Through your hard work, determination, and our positive vision for how Green values and policies can change this country.”
Looking ahead to the 2026 Holyrood elections, Slater said that the SNP would “lurch to the right and court the votes and donations of Big Oil”.
“The Scottish Greens will stand on a boldly progressive platform of real change,” she said. “We have a clear position. We have a big opportunity.”
