A GENERAL Election is about ideas, policies and visions. It’s meant to be a time when parties and candidates debate major issues and put their ideas to the public. But that can’t happen if key voices are being closed out of coverage and shut out of major debates.
Looking at the guest list for the STV Leaders’ General Election Debate on Monday was as disappointing and frustrating as you would expect. John Swinney, Anas Sarawar, Douglas Ross and Alex Cole-Hamilton. Three pro-Union panellists and one from the Yes movement. Four men and no women. There was quite obviously a party missing. Scotland has five main parties. This has been the case for decades now.
There has been a continuous Scottish Green presence in the Scottish Parliament since it was reconvened in 1999 and in the most recent election in 2021, we secured a record number of MSPs and votes.
Since then, we have been a party of government, led by the first two Green ministers anywhere in the UK. And in 2022 we elected a record number of councillors across the country. It was a breakthrough. From North Lanarkshire to Oban and from Shetland to the Borders, in councils all over the country we secured Scottish Greens representation for the first time in our history.
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This year we will be standing in a record number of Westminster seats – meaning that, despite the hugely unfair voting system, the vast majority of people in Scotland will have the chance to vote for a local Scottish Green candidate.
Alongside my fellow party co-chair I’ve written to STV to raise our concerns about their decision and to urge them to rethink their plans. There is a bigger question at play here though.
One of the most immediate and certainly the most far-reaching issue the next cohort of MPs will have to face-up to is the climate crisis.
With our environment breaking down around us, and with extreme weather events becoming far more common here in Scotland and around the world, it is now obvious that the next five years will be our last chance to turn things around.
That turnaround will require transformational change to be driven from Westminster – a difficult task! The transition away from oil and gas and towards a greener economy must happen at a far, far quicker rate than at present.
Yet, on this issue, just like many others, it is only the Scottish Greens who are proposing bold and radical action on the scale that is needed.
We are unambiguously calling for higher taxes on greedy fossil fuel giants and polluters, for no new oil and gas fields, for a huge expansion of our rail network and for energy production and supply to come back into public ownership.
Ours is a vision that many people share. It deserves to be seen and heard – and yes, it deserves to be challenged and contrasted with the offer put forward by other parties.
This isn’t the first time we’ve been excluded by STV, far from it. It should be the last though.
When we were excluded from the 2015 leaders’ debate, every other party spoke up in favour of our inclusion. I hope to see a similar commitment in the coming days.
Back then a majority of MSPs from across the chamber even backed a motion calling for a Scottish Green voice to be included.
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And that was before our recent series of record election results. There is no question that smaller parties will always be at a huge disadvantage in any Westminster election, particularly given the unfair first-past-the-post voting system.
The Scottish Greens are a national party built on years of grassroots organisation and community activism. We have fought for our ideas to be heard and are proud to have turned so many of them into reality in recent years.
Whether it is free bus travel for everyone under 22, our rent freeze and eviction protections, the scrapping of school meal debt held by many families or the record levels of investment going into climate and nature projects this year, putting our ideas into action has made a difference for people and planet.
Every vote for the Scottish Greens is a vote for transformational climate action. It is a vote for a fairer, greener and more equal Scotland, one which is a fully independent European nation. Those are our values, they will be at the heart of our campaign and we know they align with a great many people.
Business as usual isn’t good enough. Scotland deserves so much better than yet another election where the “best” outcome is the lesser of two evils.
We are being pushed to choose between more Tory cuts to public services under the real Tories, or more Tory cuts to public services under a Labour Party which has adopted almost all of Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson’s policies. As National readers know, though, those are absolutely not our only options.
Scotland’s media has a responsibility to reflect the range of visions and policies on offer at this election, not to give voters the impression that their choices are more limited than is really the case.
The consequences of this election will be felt for decades to come. When it comes to our climate, those consequences will continue for centuries. That’s why the Scottish Greens are asking people across Scotland to vote like our future depends on it on July 4.
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We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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