Weekly roundup

A tough week for Scotland’s environment

After nearly a decade of campaigning against a resort development by a company called Flamingoland, threatening the shores of Loch Lomond, there was good reason for optimism. It had been the most unpopular development in the history of the Scottish planning system, with over 155,000 objections. And when it came to what we thought was the big decision point, the board of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park rejected the plan, unanimously.

So there was understandable anger when it was announced that Scottish Government planning officials had overturned this decision, and were set to give this unwanted, unnecessary and environmentally damaging development the green light.

Ministers still have the power to intervene. They can stand up for Scotland against the private interest of profit-hungry developers, and overrule the officials. The junior Minister involved, Ivan McKee, has said he doesn’t intend to do that, so we’re putting pressure on the First Minister to act.

Surely John Swinney has learned the lesson from his past mistake when he overruled local decisions to give Donald Trump his golf course in Aberdeenshire? Surely he knows that his job is to protect Scotland’s environment and its public interest, from this kind of threat? It doesn’t look like he’s ready to do the right thing yet, so we all need to keep up the pressure.

Sadly this wasn’t the only bit of bad news for Scotland’s natural environment. On the same day that John Swinney ducked the question on Flamingoland, his Cabinet Secretary also scrapped the plan for a new National Park, which was set to be created in Galloway. 

This is a huge missed opportunity for the local community, for sustainable economic investment, and for nature. And it’s a reminder of how far the SNP have strayed from the ambitious environmental commitments the Scottish Greens brought to the table.

Challenging transphobia

This week we saw concerns expressed by a group of MSPs and staff about the recent “interim position” on excluding transgender people from certain spaces at Holyrood. This comes in the wake of the highly controversial ruling by the Supreme Court, and the even more extreme interpretation of it by the Equality and Human RIghts Commission, a body which no longer deserves its name given its efforts to undermine trans people’s rights.

On Tuesday I took the opportunity to raise this in the Chamber - not a question to the Government, but to the group of MSPs who run the Parliament buildings and estate - and challenged their decision.

For a long time the Scottish Parliament had a strong track record on LGBTQ+ people’s equality, and not so long ago I couldn’t have believed that we’d end up with this disgraceful situation, the sort of thing the “Bathroom Bills” from far right US Republicans were all about. Worse still, it’s been done without any consultation, debate, or democratic control; just announced out of the blue and leaving trans and non-binary staff and visitors feeling excluded from Holyrood.

The Greens will continue to challenge this harmful and unnecessary decision, and the wider wave of transphobia, at every opportunity. But I was glad this week that we weren’t alone - more supportive MSPs from other parties are starting to speak up too.

Farage - Reforming racism

The media’s extraordinary deference to the far right continues. For decades, their coverage of Farage and his succession of ego-fuelled political ventures has been wildly disproportionate to his actual elected representation. Now that he has five MPs, they’re treating him like the leader of the opposition already.

While politicians, including those of us who are scathing about Labour’s direction in government, came to the defence of Anas Sarwar when he was the subject of Reform’s overtly racist campaign ad, major broadcasters decided to do the opposite.

Giving live coverage to a Reform Party press conference (an unusually generous form of coverage in its own right) they actually broadcast the racist ad unchallenged, beaming it straight into people’s homes and massively increasing its reach.

It’s troubling enough that many people are getting their news from the billionaire owned press, or from the social media platforms owned by unregulated techbros whose algorithms push out conspiracies and far right propaganda. But when major public service broadcasters uncritically promote the same kind of content, we should be deeply worried about the state of our democracy.

Health committee

Our colleague Gillian Mackay, Green MSP for the Central Scotland region, has gone off on maternity leave, and we’re all eagerly awaiting the first baby photos. In fact across our whole team there have been so many new arrivals this year that we’re considering having baby races on the Green corridor in a few months!

But Gillian’s leave means that I’ve taken on her seat on Holyrood’s Health Committee. I’ve joined just at the end of the inquiry into Douglas Ross’s bill on addiction recovery. He gave evidence at the Committee this week, and he was on better behaviour there than he was in the Chamber. 

But there does seem to be a weight of evidence from the experts that the bill could have some unhelpful consequences, and that it places too much emphasis on the particular treatment types that Mr Ross seems to favour, to the exclusion of successful harm reduction approaches. All this will be debated when the bill gets its day in the Chamber. Whatever happens, I’ll take the opportunity to set out the longstanding Green opposition to the harmful effects of criminalisation.

Community energy

The main debate I took part in this week was about community energy. It’s one of those issues where there’s some consensus on the broad brush strokes, but disagreement on exactly what the Government should be doing.

Certainly there’s a huge opportunity. Having more energy infrastructure in public and community hands would mean the profits get invested in the public interest, it would mean projects get put where people really want them, and it would help lock in more public support for renewables, because they know it’s not just about benefiting the shareholders of a private company.

The Scottish Government does have some schemes in place to support community energy. But it’s on such a small scale - Denmark for instance has had a more ambitious approach for many years, and the result is that over 50% of the wind assets are in community hands. In Scotland it’s less than 1%.

It’s not too late to change direction on this. By setting up local energy companies, by making public land available to community schemes, and by helping community projects access capital for new projects and for repowering existing projects, we can start to achieve what Denmark and other countries already have - an energy system that works for the community.

Europe Day

Let’s end on an up note. I was delighted to host an event at Holyrood to mark Europe Day, which was earlier this month. As Co-Convenor of the Cross Party Group on Europe, and an honorary Vice-President of the European Movement in Scotland, it was a pleasure to welcome some of the consulate and diplomatic community, as well as EU citizens living in Scotland and supporters from civil society to Parliament.

The event was a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, which laid the foundations for what became the European Union, as well as marking European Diversity Month. I was born just a few months after this country joined the European project, and I’ve always known that the EU’s role in advancing equality and human rights has been of immense importance. WIth those values under serious threat now, it’s more important than ever that we keep reasserting them, and work toward a path back to EU membership.

As well as some speeches, we had a performance of the Badly Behaved Poets Society, and music from our ‘house band’ for the evening, the Ando Glaso Collective who bring together Roma musicians from Romanian, Polish, Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian backgrounds. Many thanks to everyone who made our celebration of Europe Day a lovely event.