PATRICK HARVIE noted the importance of political discipline as he opened the Scottish Green Party conference in Greenock on Saturday. The Greens “must continue becoming the effective and professional political force we are capable of being,” said the party’s co-leader.
 
Hours after he stepped off stage, the gathering descended into chaos as Green members voted to abandon the day’s proceedings by comprehensively rejecting their proposed agenda. Much to the leadership’s chagrin, the hall emptied for the day without a single motion going to the floor.
 
In a procedural dogfight that would have tested even this newspaper’s most rule-bookish readers, grassroots Greens scored a major victory over their co-leaders, both of whom — together with most of their MSP group — voted to retain the day’s agenda.

Far from a tedious breach of standing orders, the political disagreement which underpinned these shenanigans may yet have significant ramifications for the rest of Scotland.
 
When members sought to amend an emergency motion on this year’s Scottish Budget brought by Ross Greer MSP and Gillian McKay MSP, their path was blocked.

The conference’s standing orders committee (SOC) sought to hear the amendment — which would have bound Scottish Green MSPs to vote against any SNP Budget package which included local authority cuts — from the floor rather than by default.

Due to an archaic provision which predates the surge in Scottish Green membership that followed the 2014 independence referendum, amendments from the floor are not heard if they are opposed by just 10 members, regardless of the scale of support they receive.
 
Had this been the Labour Party conference or perhaps even the SNP, a more bullish chair may have persevered despite members’ opposition — or, in the case of the former, forcibly removed the dissenting voices from the hall.

But this was the Greens. In a very polite and mild-mannered way, members forcefully argued their case from the conference floor with rule book in hand. Precedent, it transpired, was on their side.

Two years earlier, at the Scottish Green Party conference in Dundee, an amendment to a motion affirming the party’s support for the STUC’s People’s Plan for Action was accepted automatically. Coincidentally, that amendment was submitted by Patrick Harvie and Ross Greer, who, on Saturday, tried their level best to prevent it from happening again.
 
Warned by SOC that the conference would be cancelled should they opt to discard the agenda, the Greens threw caution to the wind and threw it out anyway. In previous years, as one longtime member noted, the leadership has successfully mobilised the membership against similar grassroots efforts, casting their architects as disruptive wreckers.

This year, the tables turned as the gulf between members and MSPs was put on show for all to see. The leadership was left humiliated having tried, and failed, to stifle democratic debate.
 
Besides revealing an intellectually weak and politically fragile party hierarchy, this vote provided a conclusive verdict on the Bute House Agreement — the power-sharing arrangement which saw the Scottish Green Party enter government alongside the SNP after the 2021 Holyrood election. In government and throughout the last parliament, Green MSPs voted for one cuts Budget after another at the behest of the SNP. Since Humza Yousaf collapsed the power-sharing deal, the party has returned to railing against the austerity politics to which it once offered left cover.

The Scottish government, say the Greens, has lurched to the right since their departure. For many, this has been symbolised by Kate Forbes’s return to the front bench. This reading of history conveniently ignores that Forbes, approvingly labelled “Tartan Thatcher” by the Spectator, was finance secretary when the Bute House Agreement was signed.

Saturday’s vote dealt a blow against this duplicity. The following day, with a new agenda in place, MSPs’ hands were successfully bound by the membership as the amendment passed overwhelmingly.
 
This result is significant by any measure. Given that John Swinney’s minority government has already warned of coming cuts, the SNP’s most likely route to passing a Budget has been blocked — providing Green MSPs abide by the conference’s decision that is.
 
On Saturday evening, Green members took stock of the day’s events at a rare unofficial conference fringe co-sponsored by New Internationalist magazine.

As the panel debated whether Green parties were really that radical, one member neatly summarised their party’s time in government. “It is said that decisions are made in the room,” they said. “We weren’t in the room; we were locked in the cupboard.”
 
While consensus appears to have formed around the failure of the Greens’ spell in government, the party does not yet appear content to completely break with their colleagues in the Scottish government.

On Sunday, the conference voted to throw the SNP’s disastrous National Care Service Bill a lifeline. Stopping short of following Cosla and the STUC by calling for the Bill to be scrapped outright, the Greens may yet have offered the Scottish government’s legislation a route to limp onward.
 
Like in many European countries, the Scottish ruling class accommodated the Greens at minimal expense. Rather than using their leverage to exert meaningful concessions from the Scottish government, the Greens have consistently sought to justify some of the worst excesses of the SNP neoliberalism.

The disparate composition of their electoral base forces a default to class neutrality that binds green parties to the prevailing political orthodoxy and leaves them unable to mount a coherent challenge to the status quo.

This weekend, the determined effort of the Scottish Greens’ leadership to evade accountability — and consequently comply with Holyrood austerity — illustrated exactly this point.
 
Ultimately, however, they were unsuccessful. My intention is not to overstate the importance of last weekend’s developments but to emphasise the barely disguised civil war which continues to rumble on inside the Scottish Greens — a war the leadership looks increasingly likely to lose.