26 Oct 2024 Finance

Patrick Harvie Autumn Conference 2024 speech

Greens always aim to offer an inspiring and positive vision at election times, because we believe that politics is capable of changing our society for the better.

Labour, by contrast, spent the whole election campaign trying to lower everyone’s expectations. Maybe they thought it was better to under-promise, rather than under-deliver. And yet somehow, they have managed to do both.

I don’t think there can be a single voter left in the UK who can honestly say they’ve been inspired by what has happened since. 

Of course there is reason to be happy about seeing the end of 14 years of Tory austerity, corruption, and downright lies; to be rid of Boris Johnson and his pals partying in Downing street; or the shameless profiteering on the back of Brexit and the pandemic; or the Liz Truss blink-and-you-miss-it catastrophe - it’s no wonder the British public jumped at the opportunity for a change of government. 

But Labour’s offer to the electorate, after they’d dumped every remnant of a radical programme and purged their progressive candidates, was so insipid that I warned that the UK was likely to get a change of government without a change of politics. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen from Keir Starmer’s Labour since then. 

We’ve just passed the 100 day mark of this new Labour government. And what have they achieved in that time? 

Keir Starmer has some lovely new suits, and if you can believe it thousands of pounds worth of quite boring glasses. Some of the cabinet have had some nice free holidays and Taylor Swift tickets.

But have they lifted the cruel two-child benefit cap which has forced families, and especially women and children into poverty? Perish the thought.

Have they cut the artificial link between gas and electricity prices, instantly making renewable home heating cheap and affordable for millions? Of course not, instead they’ve removed winter fuel payments from nearly 10 million pensioners, forcing vulnerable older people to choose between heating their home and feeding themselves. 

It is a decision that is up there with the worst of the Tories; it’s one that will kill people. And unlike so many of their bad policies, this one wasn’t even in the Labour manifesto.

Our message to Keir Starmer is simple: reverse this cut. Do it now or your first year’s legacy will be a cold and deadly winter.

This is a Labour Government working for the few, not the many. A Labour government that is defending a broken status quo and standing up for the interests of big business and their corporate donors rather than working people.

Here in Scotland, Anas Sarwar told us to ‘read his lips’, promising that there would be ‘no austerity under Labour’. 

Anas was probably hoping that a long Labour honeymoon would let him coast for much of the way to the 2026 election. Instead people have been given an instant reminder of just how underwhelming a Labour government can be.

Two weeks ago, Scottish Labour had the chance to take a different path, and condemn their London colleagues' decision to means-test the winter fuel payment in a vote in the Scottish Parliament. 

Instead, they doubled down, standing up for Starmer’s decision and supporting one of the cruellest cuts for years.

But perhaps Labour’s most shameful failure has been on the international stage.

The last 12 months have seen daily horrors and atrocities inflicted on the people of Gaza. So many children, so many whole families, have had their lives destroyed in some of the gravest war crimes in living memory. It has been the collective punishment of millions of people.

The killing has spread to Lebanon, and missile attacks between Israel and Iran, with Netanyahu deliberately increasing the risk of a wider regional war.

For the international community this has been one of the most profound moral tests for our age, and it is one that Labour has failed badly.

When hospitals and homes have been bombed into rubble, and when genocide is being inflicted, we all have a moral duty to stand against it, and to stand on the side of humanity.

Yet, Keir Starmer can’t even bring himself to end political and military support for Israel or take action against even its most extreme far right politicians.

Every government is under a moral obligation to do everything possible to oppose the atrocities. That is why we have persistently called on the Scottish Government to block all public contracts for companies who are complicit in the illegal settlements in the West Bank, and why we have called for an end to all public grants and support for the companies who are profiting from the killing.

Even ending the arms sales and the bombing isn’t enough; peace requires justice, and that means an end to the decades of occupation, and it means statehood for Palestine.

Conference, it is long past time to end this complicity. It is long past time for a watertight arms embargo and it is long past time for an end to all trade with the illegal settlements in the occupied territories.

It is long past time for Scotland and the UK to join the call for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel. Because profiting from atrocities must have no place in a civilised society.

Conference, the months and years ahead will be crucial for peace, and they will also be crucial for the fate of our planet.

With global temperatures rising, Governments must take bold and urgent action both here in Scotland and around the world.

With just 18 months left of this session of the Scottish Parliament, the SNP now face some key tests on an issue they still claim is a priority. 

The first of those is underway already, as Holyrood considers the Scottish Government's new Climate bill. 

The first two Climate Change Acts were statements of high ambition. This third one will be an admission that, as Greens have long argued, Scotland is years behind where we should be. That’s an admission that needs to be made; but making it demands an urgent acceleration of action here and now, not just promise of more plans to come.

When we last met in April, I said that Scotland has been held back by too many politicians ready to celebrate the supposed ‘world-leading’ targets, while blocking the action needed to actually meet them. 

We have known for decades how to do it - it’s getting people out of cars and onto clean public transport; replacing fossil fuel for home heating with cheap, abundant renewables; changing the way we manage our land and farm our food, so we lock up more carbon than we produce; and ending the extraction of oil and gas in the north sea for good. 

But what have we seen in the last six months from the now minority Scottish Government? Instead of accepting that missed targets demand accelerated action, they’ve chosen a sharp u-turn on much of the action that the Greens had been advancing. 

Cutting the funding for climate projects and net-zero investment; returning to exorbitant prices on our railways; rolling back on new clean standards for home heating - these are not the actions of a Government that is serious about climate action.

And on some key climate policy areas they are simply stalling. A new energy strategy is long overdue; they said it was ready to publish before the UK election, but we’re still waiting.

Greens had insisted on a climate assessment of their road building plan for the A96, and it’s been sitting on Ministers’ desks too, unpublished. They need to come clean, publish that assessment, and make a decisive shift in their priorities, from unsustainable road building, to the green, low carbon infrastructure we need.

While this dithering and inaction continues, experts like Jim Skea of the IPCC are now warning not only could 1.5 degrees of warming be moving out of reach, but that we are potentially headed to more than 3°C of global warming in this century if we carry on with the policies we have at the moment.

Three degrees plus of warming would be catastrophic for life on this planet. We know what we need to do, yet the Scottish Government is refusing to take some of the most basic steps.

So the Scottish Greens will not waive the Climate Targets bill through Holyrood as a ‘minor technical amendment’ as the Scottish Government claims. 

When parliament goes back next week, Mark Ruskell and I will be moving amendments to the bill to try and improve it where we can. 

We’ll try to keep the interim targets alive, as crucial milestones on our path to net zero; we’ll put forward improvements to the timescales in the bill, because as it stands they risk wasting most of the time left till the next Holyrood election without an agreed climate plan. 

But the thing is, outside of the text of the Bill, what’s really needed now is an immediate programme of accelerated action to deliver emission cuts that are long overdue.

A climate plan is only worthwhile if it takes the steps that are necessary, like halting new road building projects, investing in public transport and refusing the plan to expand the gas-fuelled power station at Peterhead. 

These are just some of the actions that we have put forward as part of our Climate Reset package, published in August. Even these plans aren’t the end of the story, not by a long way, but without these kinds of changes right now, the Scottish Greens cannot vote for the new Climate bill. 

Our demands for climate action must not end with this legislation however - tackling the climate emergency must be a mission across all parts and all levels of Government. 

Nowhere is this more pressing than the upcoming Budget. 

We recognise the challenges that come with the limitations of devolution, as well as the impact of 14 years of Tory cuts and now what looks like continued austerity under Labour. We know our full ambition for a fairer, greener economy can best be delivered with the powers of a normal independent country. 

However, we’ve also been clear in recent months that we still have a duty to use every last lever available to solve the current crisis in Scotland’s public finances.

On Wednesday, when the UK Government publishes its budget, we’ll have a better idea of the financial situation Scotland faces. Labour could and should choose to end austerity, and restore Scotland’s budget to workable levels. But given their track record, none of us will be holding our breath for that.

Even the current rumours of an increase in capital spending won’t take us anywhere near the levels of investment that are needed, and UK Ministers have openly lobbied against the public service cuts they are being told to make.

There are those in Scottish politics who refuse the responsibility to offer solutions. Instead they demand the impossible, pretending that every tax can be cut and every service funded, and they never need to make the sums add up. That’s dishonest politics, and it’s never been the Green approach.

The Scottish Greens have been honest about needing to raise more money through fair taxes if we want to support public services. We are proud that we have the most progressive tax system anywhere in the UK. That is because of the work of Green activists and members in this hall and across this country, and our work in Parliament.

That’s why there’s an extra billion and a half pounds going into public services every year. It’s why councils are now able to raise more tax from second homes, and from the tourism industry.

We’ll continue to ensure the Scottish Government comes good on the commitments we secured to introduce new local taxes such as on cruise ships and carbon emissions from land, and we’ll hold them to account on the long overdue commitment for wider reform of local government finance - one of the biggest missed opportunities of the first 25 years of the Scottish Parliament, and one where the SNP are still dragging their feet. 

We’ve shown how we could make big savings by stopping tax breaks to wealthy landowners and enterprise grants to arms companies, and by bringing in more money to support our healthcare system through a public health levy on supermarkets. 

But these steps are only the start. Extra funds raised through tax or coming from the UK Government must go into reversing the broken promises made by the SNP government since they ended the Bute House Agreement. 

That includes reinstating the plan to roll out free school meals to all children in Scotland’s primary schools before the next election, restoring the Scottish Green’s Nature Restoration Fund, fully funding an ambitious programme to cut energy bills and emissions from our home heating, and reversing the decision to bring back peak rail fares which punish workers and students.

But crucially, John Swinney must also address the very real issue of the trust that was broken this year. 

In the last six months we’ve not only seen Bute House Agreement policies facing the axe, but commitments which were agreed before we even entered Government, as well as commitments that were made to local government. 

Now, for the first time in four years, we’re being asked to back a Scottish Government budget without a role in overseeing how it’s implemented; to vote on the basis of trust. That is a risk we cannot take lightly.

Later today, our Finance portfolio lead Ross Greer will open a conference debate calling on the Scottish Government to guarantee no future agreements will be subject to in-year cuts.

But even with that in place, we still face a challenging few months ahead. As Scottish Green MSPs, we have a responsibility to engage with the process in good faith, and with honesty. But as the only party that ever brought down an SNP budget, as John Swinney knows to his cost, we need to be clear that they cannot take our votes for granted. 

Conference, this budget marks a turning point, not just because of the difficult circumstances and the challenges facing the country, but also because it’s the last full year budget for this parliamentary session.

In just 18 months, Scotland will go back to the polls. Voters will make a decision that will be crucial to ensuring a sustainable and livable future for our planet, and for the people of Scotland.

We’ve made important progress for Green politics in recent years - a string of ‘best ever’ election results at every level, from the 2019 European elections onward. Our first opportunity to enter government, and sustained high polling through turbulent times when the political right threw everything they had at us. 

And despite the end of the Bute House Agreement, we have a clear role and opportunity to ensure delivery of what we got started, and hold the SNP to account for progressive Green policies they choose to drop, demonstrating to voters the reason why Green votes make a difference.

But if we want the 2026 election to continue that string of election successes, and turn our potential into a reality, we need to keep learning, developing, and becoming the effective and professional political force we are capable of being.

As a movement, Greens don’t exist for easy times. We’re here to draw attention to the profound challenges our society faces, from environmental destruction to poverty and inequality, from global threats to democracy, to the abuse of power by those who operate today’s failed economic model for their own short term benefit.

Lots of politicians talk about “tough choices”, but what they really mean is sticking with the consequences of the status quo. They make brutal choices, but easy ones - hurting the most vulnerable is the path of least resistance, far easier then challenging the powerful. 

Greens exist to take on the really tough choices - the choice to change our society, our economy and our politics, knowing that it’s not an easy path.

Our party will do that, and will earn the trust of those who know it needs to be done, if we are united, true to our values, politically disciplined, and honest. And if we work hard - knocking on doors, campaigning in our communities and making green change happen at every level. 

That’s what we are, that’s why we’re here, to be more than just a party, to be a movement. A movement for people, a movement for planet and a movement for peace. And a movement that is needed more than ever.