A policy labelled 'progressive' should not be above scrutiny

Many actions short of war can also be justified in the name of progress – bringing down a first minister, for example. Perhaps even backing a vote of no confidence in a Scottish Government still led, for the time being, by said felled FM.

But the Scottish Greens have said they won’t go that far. They will express confidence in the government of which they were recently part, on the basis that it won’t be led by Humza Yousaf for very much longer.

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This stance is perhaps not surprising, given an early election would not benefit the party with whom a lot of Yes supporters are currently furious. Votes of no confidence work both ways, and their act of revenge will not be forgotten. The Greens may boast that their membership numbers have surged since last week’s dramatic falling-out with Yousaf but they shouldn’t count on being “loaned” too many additional-member votes from SNP supporters in any early election they help to trigger – or indeed any election after that.

Not only have they stated, since the last election, that independence is not a “red line” for them when it comes to negotiating deals at Holyrood, but in the eyes of many Yes supporters they have been a thorn in the side of the much larger party to whom they have been supplying votes for two-and-a-half years in exchange for confidence that their “progressive agenda” will be pursued.

The problem with words like “progressive” and “reactionary”, when used in the context of contemporary Scottish politics, is that some of the people deploying them might best be described using other contested terms.

Some might call them extremists. Others might view them as misogynists. And what’s become very clear over the last five years is that one man’s “progress” may be another woman’s step backwards.

“It’s utterly fascinating to observe which women’s upset and tears moves certain men, and which doesn’t,” posted Lucy Hunter Blackburn, of policy collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, after Gillian Mackay’s emotional interview with John Beattie on Radio Scotland.

Her voice wobbling, the Green MSP expressed upset that she would no longer be working with her “really good friends” in the SNP, who were apparently “hurting as much as we are”, before suggesting Yousaf had let Scotland down by ending the Bute House Agreement.

Presumably she would have had similar words of outrage had her own party’s members made exactly the same decision at the extraordinary general meeting that was already in the diary, but alas, we’ll never know for sure.

Either way, Mackay admirably managed to pull herself together in time to deliver a savage putdown of Alba MSP Ash Regan, whose “demands” of Yousaf in return for her confidence vote were vague (surely quite deliberately so) and to the casual observer might have seemed entirely reasonable.

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Progress on independence, competent government, protection of women and children’s rights? Who could quibble with those principles? The progressive Greens, that’s who!

In his resignation speech, Yousaf said he had not been “prepared to trade his values and principles simply to retain power”, but he didn’t stick around to answer any questions about which values and principles he had been asked to set aside, or by whom.

We’ll perhaps never know to what extent last week’s events were sparked by the stance of the Scottish Green co-leaders on the Cass Report into gender identity services for children and young people in England, and the decision to pause puberty-blocking drugs to children in Scotland.

We perhaps shouldn’t take Alex Salmond’s word for it that Patrick Harvie’s repeated refusal, during a BBC TV interview, to accept the report as a valid scientific document had set “alarm bells ringing all over the SNP”.

It was clear the SNP and Greens initially felt they could fend off questions about the Scottish Government’s response to the Cass Report by repeating the mantra that clinical decisions were “for clinicians, not politicians”, but the BBC’s Martin Geissler quite rightly pushed Harvie for a more detailed response to its findings.

It is, after all, in the interests of the public to know whether a politician is being guided by evidence or ideology, and Harvie made his stance clear enough. He has not previously appeared moved by evidence that young people were being harmed by medical transition, so why would he start now?

Going forward, the Greens cannot be allowed to loftily proclaim that anyone who questions their policies (or their track record in government) must be right-wing, reactionary or hateful.

The SNP must have the mettle to do what Yousaf was perhaps attempting: reject the party’s dangerously anti-science positions on important issues and refuse to be intimidated by a threat of toys being thrown from the Green pram. That would be real progress.