Why a co-operation deal between SNP and Greens might not go very well

The details have been handed over for scrutiny to civil servants, so things must be serious. We would, after all, not want the future of our country to be left to mere politicians.

True, the politicians were said to have made “really good progress” towards an agreement and to be now “95% there”. But important points remained to be settled.

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In fact, what happened to bring us to this pass after the election on May 6 was the creation rather than solution of problems. Nicola Sturgeon emerged as a leader streets ahead of the others, but without a majority at Holyrood this was less than a full vindication of her cause.

At least she didn’t have a variety of options, as we often find in other small European nations building coalitions. In fact there was no prospect of a deal with a party other than the Greens, which left her uniquely vulnerable to blackmail by them. They are prone to caprice, in ways that ought to be constrained, or else none of this is worth a damn. At least on all normal votes, the coalition (which we are not, however, supposed to call a coalition) should be safe.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

In the end we are going to follow the “New Zealand” model, which would make the Greens part of the government’s majority without being members of a formal coalition (my apologies, but I did not write this script). To avoid total gobbledegook let’s note that the leading Greens do share a lot of their views with that part of the SNP in which concern for the environment comes second only to independence as a political cause.

As usual, those orthodox Ministers who observe collective responsibility and follow formal decisions of the Cabinet will probably keep firm control of any dissent. So the electoral crisis of 2021 – such as it was – will reach its end. If all goes well, Scotland should be able to look forward to a period of stable government, perhaps till the next poll is due in 2026. Whether independence will follow remains open.

It may be, however, that all will not go so well, and other issues will arise to disrupt the outward unanimity of the two parties in power. The constitution and the environment certainly do not exhaust the points of difference they might find.

We have a high-spending First Minister never happier than when she is reading out to an ecstatic party conference a long list of the goodies she can conjure up out of her pork-barrel.

In fact, leaving aside the constitution, all the parties at Holyrood have pretty much the same kind of economic attitudes, grounded in competitive big spending and indifference to the question how it is to be sustainably paid for. The dispute is about what to spend on, not how much.

It is easy enough for the state to waste. Scotland does it all the time. Labour bought themselves more than half-a-century of power to carry out their pampering programmes, and the SNP seem set on the same. The LibDems are not far behind, and even Johnsonian Toryism will hardly be held back behind the other parties.

To economists, naturally enough, economic considerations are the ones that should always be paramount. They tell us how to get the best value out of the money we spend, so that we can spend it on the greatest number of desirable purposes, which should also mean to the biggest benefit of the greatest number of consumers. Of course we concede there is no single way of meeting these conditions or of reaching any kind of certainty that our calculations are the right ones.

Our citizens have varied needs and tastes, some more readily satisfied than others. It is often easy to identify the poorest people in our societies by their looks, their clothing and perhaps their demeanour. Some rich men flaunt their wealth, while others prefer to conceal or deny it.

SUCH traits of character may go right back to childhood, to whether parents were kind or cruel to us, to whether we were well fed or half starved, to whether we had teachers who made us enjoy or hate our schooling.

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For all these reasons and many others, I do not believe the state is the infallible judge of where we stand or ought to stand in the complex societies we live in. In that case, the fallible individuals who run the state can offer no hope of justice, if the aim is to allocate to each of us some proper place.

In western countries this is not an oppressive problem because, for one thing, they have grown successful and wealthy enough to satisfy most of their own citizens. Each may envy others, but seldom so much as to feel the most enviable should be dispossessed or punished in other ways, by imprisonment or even by death.

In front of me, I have as I write a diatribe by a noted native dissident: “No part of the natural world has been free of the planet’s chief pollutant: global capitalism. In its unquenchable thirst for profit by any means, capitalism seeks to exploit all resources available. All that’s required is the acquiescence of complacent governments eager to balance the books.”

Yet the worst pollution there has ever been was in the Communist bloc, yesterday the homeland of Chernobyl, today the setting of every fouled terrain from the Kazakh steppes to the Yangtze gorges. Western countries all run systems of environmental control, some with greater success than others, because public opinion forces them to.

Not all capitalist countries are democratic, but there are no democratic countries that are not capitalist. This can create complex political problems of a kind socialist societies need not bother with, because they need not bother to consult their populations either.

Still, the pattern is not uniform and Scotland shows its own variations, sometimes involuntary given that we are not yet a fully mature and developed society in the sense of being able to determine our own destiny through our own independent government.

Nicola Sturgeon and her closest colleagues obviously believe it is primarily themselves that ought to steer our society and determine for its citizens what sort of position they should occupy in it. For instance, landowners should be taken down a peg or two, but manual workers in the public sector should get enough money to bring an end to their dissatisfactions and satisfy their desires.

If there is a conflict of desires, it is for the state to decide. Politicians should perform this task because of their superior political insights and because enough voters have given them their confidence. No doubt an SNP-Green coalition will carry out its programme in this spirit.

I just wonder if their reasoning is good enough.