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May 10, 2024 - 1:00pm
There was a time when voting Green was about saving the planet. If you were worried about climate change, or just fed up with Labour and the Tories, the Greens used to be a safe alternative. Not any more. The Scottish Greens have become obsessed with an ideology that damages women and children — so obsessed, indeed, that the party’s MSPs voted this week against endorsing the findings of the Cass Report.
Greens used to follow science, criticising mainstream politicians for ignoring cold, hard facts about damage to the environment. Now, however, they’ve gone so far in the other direction that leading figures can’t even bring themselves to accept the findings of a thorough study by a leading paediatrician. Meanwhile in England, the Green Party has become a magnet for a ragbag of unrelated causes.
Last week, voters who supported Green candidates in the local elections discovered they are now represented by councillors who double up as cheerleaders for Hamas. One, Mothin Ali, shouted “Allahu Akbar” in his acceptance speech, apparently unaware that local authorities are secular organisations whose job is to provide street lighting and empty bins.
The Greens have long provided a convenient protest vote, often on the assumption that they’re not likely to win. That’s no longer the case, and people tempted to support the party need to be clear about what they’re voting for. Unscientific nonsense about human beings changing sex: tick. A raft of legislation to make us “trans-inclusive”: tick. Bringing divisive religious values into politics: tick.
Except when they’re the wrong religious values, of course. In Scotland, no one proselytises more passionately than the Greens’ co-leader, Patrick Harvie, whose commitment to trans activists’ demands is not open to rational argument. Harvie was happy to belong to a coalition government led by a Muslim first minister, Humza Yousaf, whose first act was to be photographed holding prayers in his official residence.
This week, however, Harvie led his MSPs in voting against the appointment of a deputy first minister, Kate Forbes, who is a member of the socially conservative Free Church of Scotland. I’m not religious, and I don’t agree with Forbes’s views on abortion and equal marriage, but she has been clear that she will not seek to roll back legislation with which she disagrees.
Forbes is clearly the wrong sort of woman for the Scottish Greens, however: she doesn’t have a penis and she opposed the previous government’s legislation that would have allowed any man to declare himself a woman. Harvie demanded to know whether the new government, led by John Swinney,”‘is taking us back to the repressive values of the 1950s” and suggested that Forbes’s appointment was deeply worrying for LGBT people in Scotland.
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