COLIN CAMPBELL: Slater and Harvie’s folly stokes up hostility to Greens

Lorna Slater has replaced Nicola Sturgeon as the most high profile female politician in the country, an unexpected turn of events for the Green minister in the Scottish Government. And she has gained prominence for all the wrong reasons.

She was the architect of the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS). This would see us paying 20p extra for every can and bottled drink bought in a shop or a store. Over a month that could in these hard times mount up to £20-£30. That’s the very last thing people need – forking out more money at a time when the cost of living is straining budgets up to and beyond the limit.

Now, following a challenge from Westminster, the scheme has been “deferred” by Humza Yousaf. It may end up being dumped, but there are no certainties. Lorna Slater and her fellow minister Patrick Harvie, joint leaders of the Green Party, have undue influence in the Scottish Government and they are not for being denied.

Slater’s vague proposal was that the extra money everyone would shell out in shops and supermarkets would be recouped when people brought their haul of cans and bottles back to where they’d bought them. She had plenty of time to sharpen up the detail and explain how it would work in practice.

Many of these critics have come from the retail sector, perplexed by how it would work for them. I was more perplexed by how it would work for me, and others like me.

I don’t have a car. How would I get these bottles and cans back to their original source in the first place? Were those of us in that situation supposed to haul them in big black bags on a bus? Or maybe we should take them back in smaller dribbles of glass and plastic every second or third day.

Slater had no answers. In fact it looked like she hadn’t even considered the question.

Lorna Slater with her £98,000 ministerial salary and unlimited expenses is very fussy about her own transport requirements. When she went to meet people on Rum she whistled up a £1200 private ferry to get there. Government documents have shown she made a ministerial visit to Aberdeen last November, and travelled up by train from Edinburgh. But she required a ministerial car to be driven up to take her around her engagements, and then chauffeur her back home again.

That smacks of a grossly over-promoted politician being too keen on living the high life.

Slater and Harvie are only in the Scottish Government because the Greens are propping up the SNP to give them a majority at Holyrood for independence. Many in the SNP – Kate Forbes and Fergus Ewing foremost among them – believe that is too high a price to pay.

I remember a landmark night for the Green Party when they had their first ever election success in Scotland, back in 1990. Roger Winter won a seat for them on Highland Council and was hoisted shoulder high by delighted supporters at the count in Inverness, to wide applause. Most people looked favourably on the Greens and their well intentioned environmental enthusiasm back then.

But now Slater, Harvie and their Green cohorts like ultra strident MSP Maggie Chapman seem obsessed with gender reform, they oppose road improvements even when they would save lives, and their DRS folly suggests they are also carelessly indifferent to those of us who don’t have cars – the very people they should, given their net zero, carbon neutral mantra, be most supportive of. It begs the question, what are they there for?

Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie enjoy power in the Scottish Government and we’d be well rid of them. They may have that power, but we’re a long way from the time when everyone had a soft spot for the Greens.