Why Scotland needs SNP and Greens to get back together

Minority government is the Holyrood norm, of course, and was meant to be so. Scots should take pride in the fact that our electoral system prevents results like this summer’s ridiculous outcome at Westminster, where a party that won barely 34 per cent of the vote ended up with 63 per cent of the seats, and an overwhelming mandate to govern unchecked for the next five years. Since the SNP first became Holyrood’s largest party in 2007, they have mostly governed through deals with several other parties.

Now, though – with the SNP battle-scarred by 17 years in power, Labour cock-a-hoop over its Westminster triumph, and the debate over Scottish independence at an entrenched stalemate – the party is struggling to find allies. And in the event that even John Swinney’s legendary negotiating skills cannot steer the Budget through parliament, Scotland could face a possible early Holyrood election, and further tormenting months of financial uncertainty.

Bute House Agreement lament

All of which invites a certain nostalgia for the much-maligned Bute House Agreement, the deal between the SNP and the Scottish Green Party, concluded after the 2021 Holyrood election, which gave the Greens two seats in the Scottish Government, and guaranteed the SNP an effective majority in most Holyrood votes.

The agreement, collapsed, of course, in May, when Humza Yousaf decided to ditch the Greens in a decision that effectively ended his First Ministership; and there is certainly no talk, under John Swinney’s leadership, of any such formal deal being reinstated. Indeed there is a dominant narrative around Holyrood that the deal was an embarrassing mistake from the outset, and should not be lamented.

Yet I do lament it; and for reasons that seem to me ever-more compelling, as this grim political decade unfolds. The grimness of the times, of course, is one underlying reason why the whole idea of such an agreement is increasingly dismissed. As last week’s COP29 debacle in Azerbaijan showed, action against climate change is now out of fashion in global politics; and the prevailing political response is a kind of regression into dumbed-down Maga-style nationalism, which talks delusionally of national fortresses against change and population movement, and colludes with massive corporate interests in guaranteeing the ‘business as usual’ that is destroying our liveable planet.

And while Scotland is more resistant than some to that response, the same impulse can still be traced here, among Conservative and Reform voters, in that part of the Labour party which subscribes uncritically to the Starmer-Reeves growth agenda, and in that small but noisy segment of the SNP which is still in love with the gas and oil industry, and saw the Bute House Agreement as a mistake from the outset. Some ministers reportedly banged the Cabinet table in schoolboyish approval, after all, when the Greens were ejected from the Scottish Government, as if annoying green issues would simply go away if we ignore green politicians and activists.

Reactionary forces at work

Some SNP ministers doubtless cheered out of pure tribal instinct, because even after 24 years of proportional representation at Holyrood, we are all still children of the old Westminster ethos – constantly reified by UK media – that sees thumping overall majorities as a good thing even when they do not reflect popular opinion, and co-operation between parties to form a government as somehow unnatural, and even undignified.

The Bute House Agreement was doomed, in other words, by a range of reactionary forces far beyond the immediate control of its advocates, whether in the SNP, the Scottish Green Party, or the wider environmental movement. Yet still, I am inclined to wonder whether there is any other political formation, in Scotland at the moment, that offers Scottish voters a more convincing programme for a progressive future. Scottish Labour seems in abject confusion about how far it wants to distance itself from Labour at Westminster, if at all; and so far, there are no signs of the Starmer-Reeves “growth” agenda foregrounding Scotland as much more than a resource to be mined.

Unanswerable logic

The Tories and the fast-rising Reform are lost in the delusional badlands of reactionary nationalism, and currently offer little in the way of practical policy; the Liberal Democrats think it clever to grandstand for diehard unionism by claiming – most illiberally – that they won’t vote for a Budget that contains any spending on plans for Scottish independence, although independence is the core policy of Scotland’s largest party.

And that leaves the SNP and the Scottish Greens, whose support in polls and local elections is holding up well, although if the Green leadership wants to keep its party together, it had better start talking more about green issues, and less about independence, which for most Greens is at best a means to an end.

Both parties, after all, still cherish what must, given the available resources, be an achievable vision of a self-governing Scotland, in the European Union, taking advantage of its massive renewable energy wealth to build an economy and a society resilient enough to survive the tempests of the coming century. And although the idea of an SNP-Green alliance is currently out of style at Holyrood, its logic finally seems to me almost unanswerable, as a home for all those in Scotland who long for a truly sustainable future for our country, shaped by the people who live here, and won in full co-operation with other willing nations around us in Europe, and across a troubled Earth.