Scottish Greens co-convener Patrick Harvie on constructive opposition

The Scottish Greens have had their electoral ups and downs, going from one MSP to seven at the 2003 election, then dropping back to two in 2007, which they held in 2011. They turned down an offer to go into coalition with the minority SNP government in 2007, instead signing a loose agreement that saw Patrick Harvie given the convenership of the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee, but they were instrumental in voting down the SNP budget in 2009.

As with the SNP, the Greens’ membership has grown dramatically on the back of the referendum, with not all Yes voters necessarily finding their home with the SNP. During 2014 Scottish Green membership rose 625 per cent from 1,200 in January to 7,500 in December and has continued to go up to over 9,000. While it remains to be seen whether the party will achieve its target of at least one MSP from each of the regions at this election, the opinion polls certainly suggest they will increase their seats.

Patrick Harvie somehow retains both a sense of idealism and pragmatism, despite 13 years in parliament and eight as co-convener of the party. He comes across as friendly and down to earth, coming to meet me at the Scottish Parliament reception rather than sending an assistant and refusing to pick up the phone during the interview, even though a decision on the fiscal framework was expected at any moment.

This pragmatic character is perhaps reflected in the role Harvie sees the Greens playing in the Scottish Parliament, which is to hold the government constructively to account.

“Governments need to be pushed, sometimes beyond their comfort zone, and we have a good track record of doing that, winning, for example, progress toward rent controls in the private rented sector, winning first of all that moratorium [on fracking], and then extending the moratorium to other forms of unconventional gas extraction.

“We think we have a good track record on being constructive wherever possible – not just saying everything the Government does is terrible – but being constructive and challenging and that’s what gets results.”

Given that the polls suggest the SNP is going to be the largest party after the election, Harvie suggests the real question should be who is to hold them to account. He criticises the Conservatives for passing on cuts from Westminster and Labour who “too often just say everything the Government do is terrible regardless of the detail”. The Greens, he says, push the Scottish Government on things like rent controls and a more radical approach to land reform, things, he suggests, that many of the SNP’s own members actually want them to do.

So does he see the Greens as more collaborative than the other parties?

“I see it as constructive opposition. We’re not here to cheerlead for anybody. We’re not here to ignore the shortcomings of the Government when there are shortcomings, and we’ll challenge them vociferously if we need to, but we’ll also try and find common ground.

“We won’t obsess over the differences but we’ll never forget them. We’ll try and find areas of common ground where there’s a chance to improve what the Government is doing, to push them to go further.”

What would be the key areas where Harvie would challenge the SNP’s record over the last term of government?

“From our point of view, one of the most fundamental is the approach to fossil fuels, whether it’s the ambiguous moratorium on fracking, which we think needs to be a clear permanent ban, or indeed the wider approach to the North Sea.

“The SNP have done reasonably well at increasing the deployment of renewables in Scotland, but that’s only going to reduce our emissions if it’s replacing and displacing fossil fuels from our economy. We need to burn less of the stuff.

“Fergus Ewing only gets the fire in his eyes when he’s talking another 40 or 50 years of oil and gas extraction. That’s not realistic, and I think a great many people working in the sector realise that their jobs are not secure. I think they’ve been forced into that realisation in a very brutal way in the last year or so.

“This mantra of maximum extraction is simply not going to secure either the economic prosperity for people dependent on that industry or the longer term transition for Scotland, or indeed, the ability to live within our environmental limits.”

Housing is another area where the Greens have pushed for change, advocating rent control schemes and a land value tax to fund local government and encourage more building.

“I think we need to be really clear about saying housing is not like any other commodity,” says Harvie. “It is not just like any other financial transaction; it is a deeply intimate thing, it is fundamentally connected with our wellbeing, with our health, with how securely we raise our children.

“If young people are being brought up in a household where they’re having to move every year or two, that’s a deeply insecure life for young children – I don’t think it’s good for anybody, but it’s particularly damaging for young children – and that’s not an acceptable way to provide housing for people.

“Now, if the private sector wants to provide housing for people, okay, fine, but it needs to be to a high standard, it needs to be designed and regulated to meet the people’s needs, not being seen as merely a speculative investment. The prime purpose of housing is to be a home, and that’s what I think we need to get back to.”

The Greens are in favour of a land value taxation as a replacement for council tax, but the Commission on Local Tax Reform has indicated it would be quite slow to implement this because the data is not in place yet. Would it be worth waiting for? And would he support any income tax element?

“I think it’s entirely reasonable to suggest that as part of that new system, local authorities can calculate, even if it’s on a rule of thumb at first and becomes more precise later, what proportion of a property tax is based on land and what proportion is based on the value of the property that sits on the land, and in time they would have then the flexibility to vary that proportion.

“This is the direction we want to go in, towards a land value tax, and we think that there are social, economic and environmental benefits from doing that. The underlying principle is that property wealth runs to a greater degree of inequality in Scotland now than income inequalities. So property taxes have to be part of the mix.”

He’s critical of the council tax freeze and the way it has led to fees and charges becoming a bigger source of income for councils than council tax.

“Whatever you think of council tax – and it’s rubbish – fees and charges are the least progressive way of paying for the services that people depend on and yet that is now a bigger proportion of councils’ income than the council tax. That’s an absurdity. We need to be giving councils the ability to make their own choices about taxation, both the level of taxation and the opportunity to make a different choice about types of taxation which they can use.

“The frustrating thing is we’re now finally in this debate about tax policy in Scotland because we’ve got this mechanism, the Scottish rate of income tax. We’ve had far greater flexibility on tax policy than has ever been exercised, so long as we were willing to have a bigger proportion of what local councils spend being raised from local taxes. We’ve had that flexibility since 1999, the ability to levy any kind of tax that we want, any way that we want for local purposes, and it’s not being used.

“Now we’re into that debate, we can’t afford for it to be simply a debate about income tax at a national level; it has to be about how this whole basket of taxes fits together and how we achieve the greatest economic benefit, not just the greatest revenue, not just doing it progressively, but, for example, having a positive impact on the housing market so that housing becomes more affordable.”

He was in discussion with Labour during the budget debate about their proposal for a 1p rise in income tax, but remains unconvinced on two points. One is the practicality of the rebate and the other is tax avoidance. 

“Given that SRIT can’t apply to savings and dividend income, there would be a big incentive for high-income individuals to reformulate their financial affairs and pay themselves a dividend or use other ways, such as pretending that they’re working for a company which is contracting their services. We know about these tax dodges. We would be increasing the incentive for high-income individuals to find ways to avoid paying their taxes.

“But the fundamental point that we [Greens and Labour] agree on is if you don’t want to hand on the UK Government’s cuts to public services, particularly at the local level, you need to raise revenue, and that can be done fairly progressively.”

One fairly radical area of Green policy is the idea of a citizen’s income, replacing most benefits with a universal basic allowance of £100 per week for all adults. It’s not something the Scottish Parliament actually has power to implement and it hasn’t really been tried.

“Is it radical?” he asks. “I think it’s increasingly being seen as the way that social protection systems have to go, particularly as the way the modern economy is changing.

“You know, if more and more people are going to be balancing different income sources at different times of their lives, more and more work is precarious, I think a citizen’s income is going to be seen – and you can see thinkers on the left as well as the right who agree with this – as compatible with the way the modern economy is going to be developing.

“We’re not going to be putting forward a manifesto that says ‘this is what the Green Party will do in year one of the next session of the Scottish Parliament’, but we do think this is an idea that needs to be talked about. The long-term direction of travel needs to be in this direction and we think we can find examples where Scotland would be able to take steps in this direction, particularly, for example, in areas like the carer’s allowance.”

Are these proposals affordable? I point out he has not provided costings.

“Well, we did at the last election. I expect we will be doing so again this election. Certainly at the last election, we demonstrated how the significant cuts to colleges and to the housing budget that were happening at that time could be reversed by using the land value tax and what we’ve been doing in this year’s budget debate is showing how these three mechanisms, unfreezing the council tax, using the council tax multiplier and using the derelict land tax, would raise something approximate to the same amount that the 1p SRIT proposal from Labour would raise.

“You can’t pin it down absolutely because some of it is about local flexibility, it is about allowing local councils to make their own decisions, but it would certainly be of the same order, and the advantage would be that local councils would be making that decision based on what they think the local needs are and the pressure on their services that they have to deliver.

“And for a party that doesn’t have access to the civil service to crunch its numbers and doesn’t have access to the big private donors to fund that kind of research, I think we do a pretty good job of putting numbers on our policies and we will do so again this year.”

Is it easier to be a bit more idealistic as a minority party that doesn’t expect to have overall control?

“I think everyone should be idealistic, don’t you?” he counters. “I think there’s something quite difficult about the role we have to perform, which is that the Green agenda is huge and it engages with big ideas about the direction our society is moving in – about the relationship between human beings and the wider world, the ecosystem that we depend on, our life support system, how you can fit a successful economy within that, what prosperity really means.

“There are deep questions that the Green Party exists to put on the agenda, and yet with a very small number of MSPs, we don’t have the opportunity to expand on that at the level of depth that it deserves. We don’t have the ability even to sit on every committee and scrutinise what the Government is doing.

“I think that we strike a good balance between that kind of nuts and bolts ‘what can we improve right now?’ but also, the longer term ‘where are we going?’ and ‘what’s all of this for?’”

I ask what his expectations are of achieving in this election. He says they’re aware that more people are open to voting Green than have done, but they haven’t had the capacity to reach those voters before. When he joined the party it had around 50 members in Glasgow; it’s now two and half thousand.

“We’re going into this election nearly ten times the size that we were at the last Holyrood election and with branch infrastructure around the country way beyond what we’ve ever had. We’ve now got the capacity to reach those voters.

“I see no reason that we can’t win at least one MSP in every region. Even in 2003 we got two MSPs in Lothian. I see no reason that we couldn’t do that in Lothian again, hopefully in Glasgow as well. We’re going to give it a shot.”

They’ll be standing in a few “carefully selected” constituencies where they think they have the capacity to campaign on the scale that is needed. Harvie is standing in Glasgow Kelvin as well as on the regional list, a seat that had a three-way split at the European election.

“I think it was 50-odd votes between us, the SNP and Labour. And that’s without a local candidate. We’re certainly going to give it our best shot and see what happens.”

Is he concerned about the support for RISE, given they’re occupying similar political space in terms of being environmental, pro-independence and left wing?

“Without wanting to be hostile at all, I just don’t see them anywhere. I’m not sure there is a rise of RISE. It puzzles me, to a certain extent, why the SSP decided to throw their lot in with a kind of brand identity that no one has ever heard of outside of political circles. I don’t see them as terribly active around the country.

“I think if anybody is looking for the kind of policies the Greens represent, there is a very good case of voting for the party that has got a track record of getting MSPs elected to the parliament and doing a good job rather than falling out with one another once we’re in here,” he says.