Source: Scottish Greens

12 Apr 2025 Climate

Now as you know, I’ve given more than a few co-leader speeches at our conferences, and I can’t really begin today without recognising that I’m turning the page now, both for myself and for the party.

I’m want to say how grateful I am to everyone who has offered kind words since I announced that I won’t be standing for re-election as Co-Leader.

And I want to thank everybody who has given me the opportunity to serve the party as co-convenor and then as Co-Leader; and everyone I’ve worked with across the party over many years.

And naturally, having made that decision, I’ve been reflecting on the journey we’ve all been on.

I think back to the public perceptions, and the internal reality, of the party I joined in 2001.

A party with just one MSP, no councillors, and a handful of members. A party so strapped for cash that it only narrowly escaped being bankrupted by a photocopier contract. A party with so little profile or recognition that when you said told people you were a member, people thought you meant Greenpeace.

I think back also to my experience of becoming part of our new parliamentary group in 2003, when we suddenly jumped up from one seat to seven. It was an exciting time, of course, but we knew that to most voters, to most politics watchers and to most of the media, we were an unknown quantity at best. 

The Daily Mail knew what to make of us. As the first MSP to be elected as an out candidate, when I started talking about equal marriage and civil partnership, they splashed a front page with the headline “Green threat to the family.”

In the article that followed, they fretted “describing himself as bisexual, enjoying relationships with both men and women!”. I mean if they’d written “hoping for…” it would at least have been accurate.

And not long after that I was dubbed the voice of the “irresponsible left led anti family anti-Christian gay whales against the bomb coalition.” Because they hadn’t thought of the word woke by then.

But even beyond the odd worldview of the Mail, much of the media saw us as nothing more than a novelty act, something to do with the environment, something a bit eccentric, but nothing like a serious political force.

We wanted to change that perception. And slowly and surely, by taking our jobs seriously, and taking parliament seriously, we started to make others take us seriously. We built credibility. But that early success didn’t have a strong foundation.

Though our national membership was still measured in the hundreds, we had run a decent campaign, on half a shoestring, but in truth the electoral weather had been very kind to us. We did need to build that political credibility, but we hadn’t yet built the strong campaigning party in the country that we would need when we faced a tougher election. 

In 2007 we just about held on by our fingernails. We lost most of our seats, most of our staff, most of our profile, and most of our ability to achieve change.

I never want that to happen to the Scottish Green Party again.

We began the slow process of rebuilding the party, and because Parliament was so tightly balanced we did manage to find opportunities to keep making change happen, from funding climate work in communities, to passing hate crime laws. 

But it was 2014, and in fact the few years running up to it, that changed everything.

As soon as it was clear that Scotland would be making this historic decision on independence, we saw the opportunity not only to set out why independence fits with the Green vision, but why the Green vision is the path to making independence work – why a sustainable independent Scotland, able to move quickly and fairly away from the fossil fuel age, is the best future we can choose. 

Some independence voices hadn’t yet moved on from “it’s Scotland’s oil.” To be honest, a few still haven’t even today. But we saw, and we seized, an opportunity to change the debate, and change the story of Scotland’s future.

More than that, we wanted to show that people could debate that choice in good spirit, and that people can disagree and still be friends. And that positive ideas and vision are of more value than fear, opportunism, or insults. That Scotland was capable of the standard of debate we deserved.

Our message reached more people than ever before, and more people than ever before decided to join. 

There are people here today who joined in that surge, who attended branch meetings in the wake of the referendum, meetings where the overspills rooms needed overspill rooms.

With the capacity and the profile that we gained in that period, 2016 restored our parliamentary group, and with the SNP returning to minority government we were able to achieve real change; passing legislation, winning the case for progressive tax reform, and forcing policy change from government, but – critically – building out political relevance; and we laid the groundwork for our best ever result in 2021.

And on the back of that result, the opportunity to become part of the government presented itself. In the biggest and most participative democratic process our party has ever undertaken, our members first shaped and then approved the Bute House Agreement.

Doing that was a clear statement that we’re here to make change happen, and that we were ready to step up and do the hard work that’s necessary to make change on a far bigger scale than ever before.

Clearly, it was shorter lived than it could have been, and now some of our most important work is being undone or watered down by the SNP. But even without the chance to complete a lot of the work we got started, we made a bigger difference in people’s lives than ever.

It’s the reason three quarters of a million young people today have a bus pass in their pocket today, making public transport an affordable and natural first choice. 

It’s the reason investment in climate and nature hit record highs, investment that was needed because for far too long politicians had been setting targets and then blocking the action needed to reach them; and it’s the reason why better planning policies ensured that Loch Lomond has been protected from the damage threatened by FlamingoLand.

This commitment to making change happen instead of only talking about it went well beyond the environmental agenda that Green politics is most strongly rooted in. The actions we took showed how Green ideas apply to social and economic policy, in ways that other parties have shied away from.

It’s the reason tenants across the country were spared thousands of pounds in avoidable extra rent rises during a cost of living crisis.

It’s the reason Scotland has continued on the path of more progressive taxation to help protect public services from the austerity first of the Conservative and now of a UK Labour Government.

And it was also the reason that more people than ever before gave us their support. While the SNP’s legal woes and Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation led to a decline in their support, we saw the highest sustained period of polling in our party’s history, and an election in 2022 that exceeded all expectations.

I’ll never forget the frustration of some of the SNP’s right wingers, furious at their own party for working with us, desperate to blame their loss of support on Green policies, but looking at our growing success with utter bewilderment. 

So what now? How do we build on that success, and take Green politics forward in Scotland?

In this party, it has never just been leaders who answer questions like that, but I’ve no doubt that over the coming months as we choose the leadership team for the 2026 election, these are the questions we will debate. 

And I want that debate to be a positive, collaborative debate; just like that positive debate that we aimed for about the country’s future, that’s what our party deserves as we debate our own future.

At any time, but especially now with basic democratic values facing new and very real threats, political parties should be willing to ask ourselves – why do people vote for us?

For the Greens, many people see us as the political wing of the environment movement. That’s fundamental to our origins and our purpose, but it was never the whole of the answer

Some people might vote for specific policies; whether that’s on climate & nature, housing, transport, independence, or anything else.

These policy stances really matter, of course; they matter most if we can actually make them happen. And we should never lose sight of the need to build a reputation for actually turning ideas into reality; all those achievements we’ve made – Scotland is a fairer, better, and greener place because of this work; they are the achievements that are only possible thanks to the political credibility we’ve earned and the support people have given us at election time.

But it’s a common error for people in politics to think these individual policy issues are what drive most people to the ballot box.

For far more people, it’s more about who we are.

We’re a party that’s always tried to be hopeful, even when that is hard work. We’re a party that’s always tried to be constructive – challenging others by putting forward better ideas, but also seeking out the common ground where cooperation can happen – and that’s ever more important in these dangerously polarised times.

These have been parts of our political character that people really value.

And I’m truly sorry to say that there have been times recently when I’ve had to ask if we really live up to those values? Times when instead of speaking up in an open and democratic way, a small minority of members have taken to anonymous leaks, smears, insults, undermining the work of fellow members and damaging our whole party and our reputation by doing so.

I want to appeal to everyone, lets make sure that the next few months see a positive campaign that lifts our party up, one that lives up to the best of our values, not one that descends to the factionalism and toxicity that characterises too much of political debate.

The vast majority of our members and our voters have had more than enough of that. I’m asking everyone in our party to call it out when they see it, and show those who behave that way that it’s not welcome in this party.

Ours has to be a movement that offers vision, ambition, and clarity. It’s only if we do so that we will deserve the trust of voters; and our message is even more urgent and important in these unsettling times.

Green politics could hardly be more of a contrast with the rise of dangerous forces in today’s political climate; the far right threat is very real, and too much of the political spectrum is still behaving as though it can be defeated by imitation.

They tried that with anti-immigrant and anti-asylum prejudice, making policy ever more hostile and brutal. It harmed people, and it also didn’t work.

They tried it with Brexit, parroting meaningless slogans like ‘make Brexit work’ even though they knew that it never could. It harmed people, and it also didn’t work.

They are now doing the same thing with the so-called culture war agenda, with transphobia and the right wing’s attempt to redefine free speech. It’s harming people, and it also cannot work to defeat the far right – playing into their agenda will only ever give the far right more political space.

Their ideas can only be defeated by openly and consistently challenging them, never by imitating them. 

And that goes for the right’s contempt for democracy too – undermining trust in the democratic process is easy, and utterly destructive. Greens have a harder job to do, but a far more important one. We have to rekindle belief that in the idea that democratic politics is capable of making our society better, fairer and more liveable. 

For much of our party’s early history, people might voted Green as a bit of a protest. That’s not enough. It’s not enough to win the chance to make change happen. It should never be enough to satisfy us.

Green politics must be about making a difference in the real world, because the challenges, and crises, that we exist to face are far too urgent.

Not just during my time in a leadership role, but throughout the two and a half decades of the devolution era, that’s what we’ve built – the capacity and the credibility to make change happen.

It took hard work, by many people over many years, to build this party into a political force in Scotland that’s capable of making the country a better place, and that can now point to a track record of doing it and not just talking about it.

So that’s still the task before us – to take Green politics forward, to achieve more positive change in people’s lives, and to live up to our values in the way we do our politics, because that’s the only way to truly deserve people‘s trust, not just for ourselves, but for democracy.

So as I close my last speech as Co-Leader, I look forward to our party having the debate we truly deserve in the coming months, the debate we need, about how to build on the most impactful period in our party’s history, and go forward to achieve even more positive change for people and for planet.

Thank you once again for the opportunity to serve.