from Sunday Herald, 8 May 2011
As the sun went down on Friday, the newly re-elected Green MSP, Patrick Harvie, sat sharp-suited and sleepless on a concrete bench outside the Scottish Parliament and tried to come to terms with the last 36 hours.
After years of election planning, weeks of ceaseless campaigning and a dizzying blur of media appearances, the Scottish Greens had ended up exactly where they began: with just two MSPs, Harvie himself in Glasgow and Alison Johnstone in Lothian in place of Robin Harper.
As many as six other colleagues from around the rest of Scotland never made it, despite winning an overall total of 87,060 votes – 4.4% of the regional list vote. The hope, born of opinion polls, that they might beat the Liberal Democrats into fourth place after the SNP, Labour and the Conservatives was dashed.
“It’s a disappointment, but not a disaster,” said Harvie. “We weren’t wiped out. We hung on by our fingernails.”
The Greens were the only party, as well as the SNP, to increase their share of the vote. But the increase was tiny, just 0.3 of a percentage point, and not enough to send any additional Greens to Holyrood.
And it fell far short of the party’s high water mark in 2003, when it returned seven MSPs with 6.9% of the list vote. “It’s been a tough day for us,” Harvie said. “But things could have been far worse.”
Because of the SNP’s overwhelming success, two Green MSPs will have less power and influence in the new parliament than they had in the last. In return for backing Alex Salmond for First Minister four years ago, Harvie was made convenor of an important parliamentary committee.
That’s unlikely to happen this time, as the SNP don’t need to rely on anyone else’s votes. So Harvie and Johnstone will have to do what they can as ordinary committee members.
“It will be extremely hard work,” said Harvie. Instead of trying to cover every policy issue that comes up in the Parliament, they may now be able to focus on a few areas where they can be more effective.
They will hope that the SNP will be open to ideas, and collaborative in its approach. And they will try and forge alliances of specific issues where they can work with some of the new intake of SNP, Labour and Liberal backbenchers.
The Greens’ election campaign has been unashamedly left wing, causing them to be dubbed the “continuity Scottish Socialist Party” in some quarters. They argued in favour of tax increases to combat the public spending cutbacks being imposed by Westminster.
This approach - making sure that the Greens are as much advocates of social justice as the environment - is unlikely to change. It is central to Harvie’s philosophy, and the reason he joined the Greens in the first place.
He has had to take flak for it from the right wing press, but that is not going to put him off. “My favourite was in the Daily Mail,” he smiled. “They called me the voice of the irresponsible left-led anti-family anti-Christian gay whales against the bomb coalition.”
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