Ross Greer Runs for Green Party Leadership Because What Scotland Really Needs Is Free Buses and More Hand Gestures

Ross Greer has the only qualification required to be leader of a political party: when he speaks, his hands jut out in front of him as though waiting for an invisible hand drier to turn on. Every few words, there’s a shake to emphasise this point or that. Tony Blair used to do the same, and while I don’t want to read too much into a gesticulation, if Greer ends up invading a Middle Eastern nation we can’t say we weren’t warned.

The West Scotland MSP is standing to succeed Patrick Harvie, perhaps the first time the words ‘Patrick Harvie’ and ‘succeed’ have appeared in the same sentence

His leadership bid wasn’t unexpected but it was still a lot to take in. It’s a bit like Dumbledore retiring and Ron Weasley proposing to take over Hogwarts. Greer presented at the Languages Hub in Glasgow in a skinny suit, open-necked shirt with no tie, and sporting trainers instead of shoes, looking like a youth pastor about to explain how the Book of Genesis was the original Minecraft. He was standing, he said, because the Greens ‘need to become a more effective campaigning vehicle’. It’s about time they put the clown car in for its MOT.

Greer described himself as an ‘eco-socialist’ and recalled how his additional taxes had cut the number of second homes by 2,500. But the revolution wouldn’t end with cottagecore kulaks. He boasted of ‘tackling the super rich’. ‘I’m not afraid to say,’ he declared, ‘that it is the extremely wealthy who need to pay for the kind of transformation that we need in our society’.

A Green government would certainly solve Scotland’s super rich problem.

He wasn’t done yet. ‘There are Tory MSPs in parliament who are some of Scotland’s biggest landowners who get tax breaks for their shooting estates,’ he yelped. In fairness, it’s better they do their shooting out in the open air, rather than in the traditional Tory direction of their own feet.

Scrapping these tax breaks would fund his proposal for universal free bus travel, and we even got a wee story about one of his pals who was recently charged £20 for a return ticket between Fraserburgh and Aberdeen. Happily, letting everyone on the bus for free would be a bargain, costing a mere £400 million. That’s not a bad price. You can’t even get two ferries for that nowadays. When he joined the Greens, he said, the party’s job was to ‘put pressure on the big parties to be a bit less s***’, but in recent years they had been able to ‘deliver on the policies that we’ve always advocated for’.

If you’re impressed by how things are going in Scotland today, know that the Greens are the people to thank.

The most offensive thing about Greer is not his horrific politics but the fact that he’s not only young but still looks it. It’s all well and good putting himself forward as leader but what happens when First Minister’s Questions clashes with double geography?

You can’t accuse Greer of student union politics. He hasn’t got to that stage yet.

Yet, unfathomable as it might seem to some, Greer finds himself in the novel position of being the moderate in this contest. He is opposed by the so-called Glasgow Group of ultra-leftists for whom he is insufficiently committed to overthrowing capitalism. (Your occasional reminder that if you’d just voted No to a devolved parliament in 1997, this argument would be taking place on a blog read by 12 people.)

Asked about the Glasgow Group, Greer said the Greens had to be more than ‘a party of protest’, before assuring everyone that he would still be attending the protest against Donald Trump in a few weeks’ time. ‘Our Palestinian and our Ukrainian friends,’ he told journalists, ‘will take a lot from seeing us rally around their causes.’ They speak of little else in Khan Yunis: Lorna Slater has gone on a march against Trump.

The Glasgow Group have an opportunity to put forward their own standard-bearer, which would require the Greens to air their bitter internal differences in public. That would be in the best interests of democracy, and by ‘democracy’ I mean schadenfreude.

We are witnessing an electoral contest in which Ross Greer will be the voice of common sense and pragmatism. The Greens say climate change is going to wipe out all human civilisation on Earth. I’m rooting for climate change.

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