The Scottish Greens co-leader believes the party’s ‘fair society’ message is cutting through to voters, writes TERRY MURDEN
As the youthful face of the Scottish parliament, Ross Greer cannot escape sneering criticism from those who believe no one should stand for election without first having done a “proper job”. Greer has known little else since joining the Scottish Greens at the age of 15 and being a member of the Youth Parliament while studying at university. By the age of 21 he was on the Holyrood benches squaring up to veterans of Scottish politics.
Whatever the merits of being a “career politician”, he quickly established himself as a key architect of the party’s strategy and policies, helping to engineer the Bute House agreement which, in 2021, brought the Greens into government with the SNP and thereby delivering the first Green ministers in the UK. That year he was appointed the party’s finance spokesperson and its member of the Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee.
We meet on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill where a gaggle of supporters armed with placards are ready to kick-off the election campaign buoyed by rising support, particularly among the young. Greer and co-leader Gillian Mackay represent a generation that has little or no experience of Scotland being governed by anyone but the nationalists. While the Greens support Scottish independence, they remain independently minded.
“The Scottish government is prioritising everything but actually prioritises nothing,” is Greer’s assessment of the SNP’s economic record. He accuses it of backing out of plans that the Greens had activated on such things as heat pumps, and flip-flopping on fossil fuels. “We have a plan and offer certainty around that plan,” he says.
Even among his critics, those who know him say he is an articulate and intelligent thinker who does not waver in his beliefs. He is passionate about the redistribution of wealth which is not just core to his political philosophy but has led to his being tagged the “Bearsden Bolshevik”. He gave a socialist salute when he was sworn in as Holyrood’s youngest MSP in 2016 at the age of 21.
His rapid rise was almost halted when a number of personal attacks from within the party twice forced him to seek hospital treatment. He was so affected by anonymous briefings against him that he thought of quitting politics, until the co-leader at the time, Patrick Harvie, called for an end to the “leaks, smears, insults”.
Greer drew on his Christian faith to fight those he called bullies and was rewarded with election last summer as co-leader with Gillian Mackay. The pair succeeded Harvie and Lorna Slater, and turned their attention to spearheading a campaign with even bigger ambitions.
It is one of the fastest-growing parties in Scotland with membership recently passing 10,000, overtaking both the Tories and the LibDems. Polling shows the Greens currently trail Labour and Reform but it has been emboldened by weakening support for the SNP, Labour and the Tories and the growth of the Greens in England and believes it will be a meaningful player in the new parliament.
The party is also reaching a broader audience. Later this month Gillian Mackay will become the first leader of the party to address the Scottish Trade Union Congress in Dundee.
It is a natural supporter of renewables and recycling and has taken a firm position on environmental issues such as the protection of marine life and opposition to the Flamingo Land leisure park proposal at Loch Lomond. It is taking a more active role in broader economic issues, such as the reform of business rates, championing small firms and encouraging more tech spin-outs.
However, Greer and Mackay diverge from the general business goals of greater profit and productivity and push the case for a “fairer society”. It really adds up to constant calls for higher taxes on multinationals and wealthy individuals which are regarded as the source of funding their “people” policies.
To its critics, all talk from the Greens about boosting the economy sound hollow when the party is so keen to raise taxes, not least to fund an ever-increasing list of free services from buses to dental care. Thoughts of it returning to government send shivers through those, including some in the SNP, who say its gender politics and the failed deposit return scheme inflicted damage on the government and ultimately led to its rejection from Cabinet by the First Minister at the time, Humza Yousaf.
Greer is unrepentant about its inclusive agenda and its willingness to tackle issues such as consumer waste. The party wants a four-day week “to improve the quality of people’s lives” and opposes Scottish Government grants for arms companies, particularly those which arm and support human rights abusing regimes. Greer argues that this support should instead go into socially useful businesses like renewables or medical technologies.
He rejects claims that his party does not understand the connection between wealth creation and funding public services and says it is more about helping those currently on low incomes to live better lives and to generally create a “better” and more harmonious society.
“Scotland is a vastly wealthy country, but the top 2% of households in this country have more wealth than two and a half million people,” he says. “That is just household wealth, before you get to corporate wealth.
“We want to invest that wealth in things that will support our whole society and our whole economy. There is no point in just having GDP growth if it doesn’t result in the lowest paid people’s wages going up and it doesn’t reduce inequality.
“We want to raise money to re-invest. We know that capital investment in infrastructure is absolutely essential to a thriving economy. The Greens are honest with the fact that, for example, if we want to expand our railways to carry more rail freight we have the tax policies that would pay for that.
“We are proud of the fact that Scotland has a progressive income tax system because of Green MSPs which already raises more than it would otherwise would. The big progress that we could make now is not on income tax, we want to make sure we are taxing wealth fairly.
“For example, we know supermarkets now make more money now from selling cheap alcohol as a result of minimum unit pricing. That’s a good public health policy but it has actually increased supermarket profits.
“The Greens would introduce a public health levy, a small surcharge on non-domestic rates for those supermarkets to collect that money back in.
“The Fraser of Allander Institute has estimated that it would raise £60m to £80m and we could put that into our NHS to support the consequences of problematic alcohol consumption.”
There are those in the retail industry and health sector who would challenge Greer on his claims and say there is no evidence that retailers are pocketing the money raised from minimum unit pricing. Greer sticks to his point that progressive taxation is working.
He challenges other parties’ claims they can cut taxes and increase spending. He says the Greens are “totally honest and straightforward” about Scotland being in a “really challenging financial situation right now”, but adds that “we are still a wealthy country, we just need to distribute that wealth more fairly.”
But surely raising taxes at the top end of the earnings scale would simply drive talented individuals away from Scotland?
“We have seen these suggestions of capital flight every time progressive tax policies have been implemented,” he says. “Over the past 10 years Scotland has made really significant strides in progressive taxes and every time we have done that we have been told there would be capital flight and high income individuals were going to leave, But it doesn’t happen.
“Throughout this period we have continued to attract record levels of foreign direct investment and folks on high incomes.
“Scotland has done incredibly well in foreign direct investment because we have a highly educated population and we are an attractive place to do business.
“But that volume of FDI has resulted in a lot of the wealth generated in Scotland immediately leaving this country. The Greens want to see a far greater share of our economy being made up of businesses that are actually headquartered here and we will put more of the tax burden on to overseas owners.”
His comments on multinationals extends to the failures of the Mossmorran ethylene plant and Grangemouth oil refinery. He rejects claims that the Greens are shedding crocodile tears over their closure and that it is Green party policies that played a big part in them doing so.
“We were the only party to be honest about the fact that Mossmorran was going to close sooner or later,” he says. “We wanted to secure the jobs. A Green MSP for Fife worked with the unions to come up with a transition plan. ExxonMobil were going to pull out regardless of whether you want to tackle the climate crisis or not. It was a site with ageing infrastructure and was increasingly economically unviable.
“We know Scotland’s economy needs to change and the Greens want to make sure there is democratic control of that change so we can make sure it works for our communities.”
Wasn’t Gillian Mackay seen protesting outside Grangemouth calling for it close, then later campaigning for the jobs to be saved?
“The photos of Gillian in 2017 protesting outside Grangemouth were massively misrepresented,” says Greer. “What we wanted for Grangemouth was to convert the site. We know the fossil fuel economy is coming to an end and we want to secure a future for that community. Everybody else just buries their heads in the sand.
“I had the same experience at Hunterston nuclear power station where we knew the power station was going to close.
“We put forward plans years ago for Mossmorran. If those plans had been implemented by the government we would not be in a situation right now where a couple of hundred people have lost their jobs almost overnight with no plan for what comes next.”
If the party is not to share blame for the closure of Mossmorran and Grangemouth, what about its constant attacks on the oil and gas industry and demand for no further drilling in the North Sea, despite the security issue? Even the renewables sector itself, and Juergen Maier, chairman of the transition vehicle GB Energy, support more production from oil and gas fields.
“If you look at the Iran War, the idea that we would increase our reliance on oil and gas just makes no sense. In any case, it is a globally traded product,” he says.
Shouldn’t the UK be producing more of its own North Sea oil and gas rather than buying from Norway?
“We should not be doing either of these things,” he says. “All of our investment should be going into transitioning to electrifying our economy. Our economy should be based on the science which means moving away from fossil fuels.”
PERSONAL CHECKLIST
Birthplace: Dunbartonshire, raised in Bearsden
Age: 31
Education: Bearsden Academy, Strathclyde University (left part-way through course)
Career highlights: A member of the Scottish Youth Parliament, representing the Clydebank and Milngavie constituency 2011–13. Elected to the Scottish Parliament in 2016 via the regional list.
Other interests
He has been involved in youth work at his local church. He is a committed Christian and is still a member of the Church of Scotland congregation he was baptised into.
He and co-leader Gillian Mackay share an interest in Star Wars.
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