Excluding Greens from election coverage won’t make the climate crisis go away - Joyce McMillan

The situation in Scotland was more complicated, of course, in that First Minister Humza Yousaf had just made the error of dumping the Greens from Scotland’s governing alliance, instead of working more closely with them to develop well-designed and popular green policy. The crisis would lead, within days, to Humza Yousaf’s resignation, and to dire predictions from SNP hard-liners that the Greens would soon be wiped from the electoral map; but unsurprisingly to anyone interested in public opinion on the environment, the end of the Bute House Agreement actually brought a slight uptick in the Scottish Greens’ opinion poll numbers.

Just three weeks later, though, came Rishi Sunak’s surprise general election announcement; and with a sharp slam of the Downing Street gates, the Greens - who can hope to win two Westminster seats at best - were consigned to the outer darkness of politics. Despite the fact that their sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a superb media performer (sadly set to step down at this election), their media representation has always been poor compared to that of more sensational and disruptive minority parties on the right. Nigel Farage, who abruptly announced his return to British politics this week as a candidate for Reform UK, has famously appeared on BBC Question Time some 38 times in his career so far; whereas when Carla Denyer, the co-leader of the Greens in England and Wales, appeared on this week’s Question Time, it was only her second outing since she took up the role in 2021.

In the current election campaign, though, the Greens’ relative exclusion has been particularly striking, given both the growing salience of climate-related issues, and the recent surge in support for them at local level. Like every other smaller party, they have been consigned to the role of bystanders in the ill-advised and (so far) unimpressive presidential-style debates between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer.

In Scotland, the Scottish Greens’ lack of Westminster MP’s denied them any place in the recent party leaders’ television debate, despite their key role in recent Scottish politics. And in general, UK media culture seems to regard Green politics as non-newsworthy, compared to the delusional anti-immigration hi-jinks of Farage and his crew, to whom incidents like this week’s milk-shake affair in Clacton come as a headline-grabbing gift.

All of which only helps to confirm what many voters will already have observed; that the quality of the general election debate is abysmal, and the ability or willingness of politicians to address the real dominant issues of our time desperately limited. This election is being held after a shameful decade of soaring poverty in the UK, which has left almost a third of our children growing up poor, with all the vast human damage and wasted potential those numbers entail.

Yet neither of the two major UK parties seems remotely interested in addressing this burning issue, except through vague talk of “economic growth”; i.e. more, with a few minor adjustments, of the same economy which we all know - whether we acknowledge it or not - is steadily destroying our planet as a habitable human environment.

The mainstream debate on the detail of the UK’s essential transition to a low carbon economy remains bogged down in dim-witted conspiracy theories about low emissions zones, knee-jerk tribal hostility to Green politicians, and environmentally illiterate bickering over the Scottish Government’s suggestion that some climate criteria should be applied to the licensing of new gas and oil fields. That the protection of energy jobs in Scotland’s north-east is still, in the year 2024, primarily associated with the opening of new oil and gas fields, is a desperate indictment of all the levels of government involved, and of many major actors in the energy business itself.

Yet instead of debating this impasse like adults trying to ensure a sustainable future for coming generations, we are reduced to a hopeless yah-boo in which the Tories increasingly aim to do nothing about climate change, and Labour seems set on doing far less than it once promised; while the political right tries to set up Kate Forbes as an anti-climate-action candidate for the SNP leadership (not really what she said this week, but who cares?), and to marginalise the Greens for good.

If the debate is a disgrace, though, it also fails to reflect the real state of public opinion on climate change. It’s inevitable that people used to being poorly supported by free-market governments will fear and oppose some of the specific measures being proposed, as a threat to their knife-edge household budgets.

Yet even in the UK, huge majorities of 80 per cent or more express serious concern about the impact of climate change; and an eagerness to see governments take action, provided they can support their people through what will be a profound and radical transition. The pandemic, in particular, has shown how quickly and drastically governments can act when they believe that their country really faces a major threat.

And that, finally, suggests two things. First, that easy though it is to scapegoat Green politicians and to seek to exclude them from debate, the attempt to silence or marginalise inconvenient truths about environmental crisis is a sign not of strength, but of a profound and increasingly unpopular weakness. And secondly, that what the current generation of political leaders finally lack, when it comes to climate change, is neither power nor access to resources; but the courage to act, while there is still time to make a difference.