ANYONE swithering about voting Green at the Holyrood elections should read on.

In their TV party political broadcasts, they promote the idea that they are “working for Scotland” and “winning real change.” They claim to be making a “positive impact on people’s lives” as they strive for a “greener fairer economy.” It’s all super-cuddly, fluffy bunny stuff, until you scrape the surface and discover what lies beneath. The Scottish Green Party’s sneering and derisory statement on the death of the Duke of Edinburgh should serve as a warning.

The Scottish Green Party’s manifesto promises to ban the sale of all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2026. All gas and kerosene boilers would have to be ripped out and replaced by massively expensive heat pumps, with a target for installing 500,000 by 2030.

There would be no return to cheap foreign holidays in a post-pandemic Green Britain, with severe curbs on flights and rigorous taxes on frequent flyers.

They would shut down the North Sea oil and gas industry with the loss of 100,000 jobs. Zero carbon emissions from industry would close down vast parts of the economy, as the Greens seek to remove fossil fuels entirely from existing carbon-intensive sectors like the manufacturing, automotive and aerospace industries, with massive job losses.

They offset this by promising a universal basic income, guaranteed to all adults, regardless of their wealth. The mind-blowing cost of this to an economy facing its biggest recession in history has not been calculated. They also intend to stop building new roads, nationalise buses and ban exams.

In agriculture, the Greens aim to review land inheritance laws to prevent automatic succession. They will encourage more community land buyouts, ensuring communities are not forced to pay market values for land to “already wealthy landowners.” Green Party proposals include heavy taxes on meat and dairy products to cut consumption and reduce methane emissions from flatulent cows and sheep. Their policies on land reform would ruin farmers and wreck Scottish agriculture.

The Green’s radical ecological Marxism might seem like fantasy for a party that only has five MSPs at the moment. But those five MSPs, led by co-conveners Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, have propped up the SNP’s minority government for the past five years and they promise to do so again.

They are enthusiastic separatists, keen to help their nationalist chums break up the UK. The vicious civil war that has erupted within senior SNP ranks in recent weeks has seen SNP support at the polls fluctuating. But Patrick Harvie has been quick to assure Nicola Sturgeon that he would be more than happy to join the SNP in a Nationalist/Green coalition, where his party would be given ministerial office. So, the nightmare of an eco-Marxist as a minister in the next Scottish government could be a real prospect.

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I had to work with the Greens for 15 years in the European Parliament. We called them the ‘watermelons’, because they are green on the outside and red in the middle! The SNP members of the European Parliament sat with the leftist Green Group in the Strasbourg chamber, whose ‘Green vision for Europe’ sought “to replace the unsustainable economics of free trade and unrestricted growth with the ecological alternative of local self-reliance and resource conservation.” In other words, they were nakedly anti-capitalist.

Far from making Scotland into the comfortable, fairer society they like to proclaim, their Luddite and Marxist policies would derail any chance of economic recovery and send us scuttling back to the dark ages. They loathe the one thing that could transform the lives of ordinary Scots and provide everyone with some respite – economic growth.

They promise that their policies will deliver 200,000 jobs in sustainable industries. But their obsession with wind power has seen Scotland’s landscape festooned with a forest of giant, industrial turbines, mostly sourced from and constructed by foreign companies.

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The majority of wind farms have been erected on Scotland’s globally priceless peatlands. Digging up peat bogs to build wind turbines releases millions of tons of stored CO2 into the atmosphere. It is entirely counter-productive.

The green jobs revolution has turned out to be a myth and the ruination of our renowned hills and glens has sent tremors through the tourist sector. Meanwhile the Green Party’s total reliance on expensive and intermittent renewable energy has driven millions of Scots into fuel poverty, while enriching the powerful, foreign-owned, energy companies.

But the Scottish Greens like to brand themselves as the only party promoting measures that will save our planet. The truth is they don’t have a monopoly on environmental sustainability. The UK Government is now half-way towards meetings its net-zero carbon emissions target by 2050. UK emissions are down 51% since 1990. Britain is reducing emissions faster than any of the major world economies, a record which will stand Prime Minister Boris Johnson in good stead when he opens the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November.

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The Scottish Green Party’s determined efforts to prop up the failing SNP Government appears to transcend all their environmental concerns. Patrick Harvie and his MSPs have repeatedly closed ranks with their SNP pals in overturning votes of no-confidence on John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon. They have repeatedly thrown their support behind fresh demands for a second independence referendum, prioritising that selfish obsession beyond our need for post-pandemic economic recovery.

Patrick Harvie sees himself as ‘queenmaker’ in ensuring Nicola Sturgeon’s survival. He will be quietly satisfied that some polls now point to the SNP falling short of a majority at the Holyrood elections in May, sniffing the chance to seize ministerial office for the Greens and bolstering his case for the catastrophic break up of Britain.

The Greens are urging Scots to ‘vote like our future depends on it’ at the Holyrood elections. At the 2016 elections only 150,426 people voted for the Greens on the regional lists, but nevertheless they managed to secure 6 seats in the Scottish Parliament. It is a sad indictment of our political system that our future and indeed the future of our country, the United Kingdom, can be decided ultimately by this tiny band of eco-Marxists. A frightening prospect. Our future really will depend on the way we vote on 6th May.

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