It might be easy to assume that only one political party in Scotland had reasons to celebrate last week. Reform UK marked a milestone by securing their first council seat in a by-election, accompanied by a poll indicating a gradual rise in their popularity as the Holyrood elections approach next May.

While Nigel Farage’s Reform UK certainly enjoyed a moment of triumph, they were not alone in their success. The same Ipsos poll that ranked Reform UK second in constituency voting intentions—where they face significant challenges in securing seats—also placed the Scottish Greens in a promising position on the regional list.

The Scottish Greens, led by Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay, found themselves in third place on the regional list, a crucial component of the Holyrood voting system due to its proportional nature. With nearly 17 percent of Scottish voters indicating their support for the Greens, this level of backing could translate into an unprecedented number of Green Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).

This potential surge in Green representation might provoke strong reactions, yet in the realm of electoral politics, comprehending one’s opponents is often more valuable than dismissing them. The political landscape in Scotland appears to be shifting, with multiple parties finding themselves in positions of strength as they look ahead to the upcoming elections.

Almost one in five (17 per cent) Scottish voters plans to cast a ballot for Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay, and because the list is the more proportional element of the Holyrood voting system this level of support would return the largest number of Green MSPs ever seen.

The very prospect might draw from you a strong oath or two, but in electoral politics it is more important to understand your opponents than it is to disdain them.

Ross Greer and the Scottish Greens want to see higher taxes and a quicker transition to Net Zero

Nigel Farage expects his Reform Party to do well at May’s Holyrood elections

The Greens are against North Sea oil and gas production

The Greens are not doing well because there is a great clamour in Scotland for gender identity ideology or boycotts of Israel or any of the other cultural positions with which the party is most commonly associated. 

Support for the Greens is about economics. We can surmise this from the demographic profile of those who plan to vote for them.

Green voters are more likely to be young (millennials and the older cohort within Generation Z), to hold at least an undergraduate degree, and to live in private rented accommodation. 

They are concentrated in Glasgow and the West of Scotland, with the next-largest concentration in the Lothian region, especially Edinburgh.

Young, graduate, non-homeowners who live in cities and outer-lying suburbs. These are not just sociological categories, they are drivers of political behaviour. The circumstances of the average Green voter is a profile in precarity.

Millennials, those born in the 1980s and early 1990s, were conditioned to believe that a university degree would be essential if they wished to have any kind of career. 

So they enrolled in unprecedented numbers and incurred great wodges of debt in the process. 

Then just as they graduated, the global financial crisis hit and Britain’s economy has been a prisoner to low growth and low productivity ever since.

For millennials this has meant fewer job opportunities, lower and stagnant pay, and a diminished standard of living compared to their counterparts in countries like the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Britain’s throttled housing market has priced them out of home ownership, forcing them to delay or abandon plans to start a family. 

And their freedom of movement throughout the world’s largest labour market was removed, making it all the harder to relocate to the Continent in search of a better life.

Meanwhile, older members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, see themselves sliding down the same economic ravine as the millennials.

They feel their lives are out of their control and can discern no prospect of improvement in the near future.

While neither side will appreciate the comparison, Green and Reform voters are more similar than they realise. 

Both are motivated by a feeling of precariousness (for Reform voters, it’s cultural; for Greens, economic), both distrust the major parties and political mainstream; and both are prepared to entertain radical upheavals to systems which they think no longer serve their interests.

The Greens are attracting these voters by posing as an alternative to the status quo, the party to vote for if you want the system unrigged and working for you. That is why the Greens push rent controls and bad-mouth private landlords.

That is why they frame Scotland’s fiscal debates as a matter of merely taxing ‘billionaires’ or the ‘super rich’. 

They’re better capitalists than you might think: they’ve identified a market for easy answers and demagoguery and they are selling their wares to it relentlessly.

But the buyer should beware; for the goods are faulty and their promises not worth the recycled paper they’re printed on. 

For all Ross Greer’s party poses as progressive and on the side of those struggling to get by, its every idea and instinct is antithetical to progress.

Younger voters have every right to feel aggrieved. They have been failed by one government after another at both Holyrood and Westminster. 

But each one, regardless of party, let them down for broadly the same reason: they would not face up to Britain’s biggest problems or the need for root-and-branch reform.

The state does too much and too badly, taxes too much and too inefficiently, spends too much and spends it unwisely. 

Public policy is made to reflect ‘values’, not to address needs and solve problems, by politicians and civil servants more concerned with attaining cosmic virtue points than with improving material circumstances across the country.

Public services no longer serve the public but the employees who work in them, and even then only those in the managerial and higher echelons.

Growth and enterprise are neglected, or in some places resented, in favour of the new gods: Net Zero, identity, sustainability, and whatever the latest fad is next week. The closest thing Britain has to a written constitution is the equality impact assessment.

Young, economically precarious voters might look to the Greens for an alternative but there is none there. 

Oh, there is plenty of rhetoric about ripping up the status quo but in truth the Greens aren’t all that opposed to the status quo. 

High taxes, bloated spending, a reform-averse public sector, disregard of growth, and opportunities strangled by Net Zero dogma. 

The Greens’ only objection to these conditions is that they don’t go far enough. The mainstream parties are busy managing decline, the Greens want to accelerate it.

The only way younger voters will know prosperity is by unshackling the private sector and allowing innovation, risk, competition and choice to generate wealth and grow the economy. 

Encourage enterprise, attract investment, reward those who make a go of it. 

Regulate lightly, tax judiciously, spend cautiously and make the generation of prosperity the chief mission of government.

None of this will the Greens even consider. Scrapping Net Zero and stepping up energy production in the North Sea would keep thousands in jobs for many years to come, in addition to bringing down household fuel bills. 

Gillian Mackay of the Scottish Greens 

The Greens will not stand for it.

Constructing a new estate of nuclear power stations would have much the same effect, albeit without the emissions produced by hydrocarbons. The Greens will not hear a bar of it.

Building new roads and upgrading existing ones would boost industry, enhance safety, and increase productivity. The Greens would rather make commuters suffer.

Cutting taxes would give those precarious voters more of their own money to spend and spending it would generate growth, which would in turn raise revenue, which could then be invested into improved public services. 

The Greens are quite happy with things the way they are, thank you very much.

For all the progressive posturing, the Greens are easily the most regressive party in the Scottish Parliament. Everything that stands a chance of spreading prosperity, they oppose. 

Everything that stands in the way of growth and development, they embrace. Green ideology will not rescue us from precarity. 

Their policies will condemn us to a lifetime of it.