Scottish Greens: From 'monetary' haivers to 'too wee, too poor, too stupid'

Green noteable Ross Greer responding to serious questions raised after Caroline Lucas MP voted
against Home Rule after "doing best to reflect views of colleagues in @scotgp @patrickharvie"

Today was the day that the Scottish Green Party policing of opposing Home Rule, and all that this fiscal conservatism implies in terms of enforcing austerity, came to the proper attention of the democracy movement.  This follows a vote earlier in the week in the House of Commons where Green MP Caroline Lucas voted with the Tories to defeat an SNP motion calling for the phased introduction of full taxation powers, which would have given Scotland Home Rule.

Months previously Scottish Green Party Convenor Patrick Harvie MSP had maundered in the National and for Commonspace on why the Greens (probably) opposed "Full Fiscal Autonomy."  However the use of the jargon and his non-committal 'this needs more work' style of delivery meant most activists and democracy supporters eyes glazed over before they could come to understand the implications of this apparently technical statement.

The Greens initial supposed point was that devolving control over taxation to Holyrood would leave us hostage to whatever the Bank of England decided to do about our currency and interest rates.  They made some rather curious points about an inability to borrow which need teasing out because they are utter haivers.

Giving Scotland full control over taxation would not, in and of itself, allow Scotland to borrow money.  The UK government issues debt by selling government bonds it creates which are called "gilts" (the UK has a funny special word for government bonds, which are basically government IOUs - which can themselves be bought and sold, or speculated on - because the UK is a fousty old empire and likes to have stupid words of its own for something every country does; they are no different from any other government bonds).  There are no proposals on the table or recently defeated proposals off the table to be able to allow Scotland to issue these "gilts" in its own name.

That *doesn't quite* mean Scotland can't borrow money tho.  The new Forth Brig has been financed by money from the "Scottish Futures Trust" (SFT), which is basically a series of loan deals between the Scottish government and individual private sector lenders, on negotiated terms.  These aren't government bonds tho, because they are specific to the projects, or bound by individual contractual arrangements, whereas bonds are a much more universal and therefore more 'liquid' asset.  The Scottish Government has been trying to create its own system of regular debt financing and bring these debts into a more regularised system of debt and interest along the lines of bonds markets.  That's what the whole SFT thing is about, and why it's not just a series of private finance deals.  But here is the rub, unless there is enough debt issued on behalf of the government, it is not possible for the government to treat this as a sustainable market for government finance in the way that UK gilts, or the more pedestrian (and less up itself) named US Treasury bonds are.  There needs to be enough IOUs floating around for international investors to care about or trade in them, and for a standardised rate of interest to emerge on what would then be effectively real Scottish Government bonds to emerge.  I.e. we do not need to access Westminster's gilt markets to issue government bonds on behalf of the Holyrood government, and do real government borrowing; it is simply a question of scale.  Roughly around £10billion needs to be issued in debts before there would be a secure market for Scottish government borrowing.  It wouldn't necessarily have the same rate of interest as UK government borrowing, but it would have *a* regular rate of interest, and it would allow us to *END AUSTERITY.*

The problem at the moment is that the Scottish Government's budget sits at about £30billion.  There is no collateral for the Scottish Government to issue that amount of debt.  However under Home Rule this position is reversed.  If we are able to access the money raised in Scotland, and spend it in Scotland (or on the 'shared services'/tribute payments towards our glorious Union), we would be able to establish a secure Scottish bonds market, and therefore be able to *completely end austerity*, within the Union.  The Scottish Green perspective that this is risky within a currency union and so forth omits that at the present moment our economy and society *is being destroyed* by Westminster's austerity programme.  The Greens position then starts to seem like an awfully theoretical splitting of hairs when action is needed now.  In effect voting against Home Rule amounts to voting for continuing austerity.  How is this preferable?  Any risk incurred through having a shared currency with Westminster is also a risk for the Whitehall state, and that also has the benefit of encouraging the British state to start to see Scotland as better off independent anyway.  This twiddling of thumbs while the children of benefit claimants starve was enough to send a snell scunner through the movement by itself, however in defending their dippit policy the Greens's leadership have been rather more revealing about their attitudes towards Scotland than perhaps they at first realise.

Cos obviously if we controlled our own taxes, and had the ability to
borrow they'd have to call in the IMF, right?  Is Patrick Harvie's
twitter account now being run by Peter Jones from the Scotsman?

When Greens like Ross Greer start to talk about *PHASED* tax devolution to Holyrood (which has all these advantages I've spelt out) as 'enforcing austerity' they start to sound very much like Labour, and one careerist Greer becomes another careerist Dugdale merging into a monotone cacophony of self-doubting cringing verbiage, straining to douse any last hope beneath a blah blah of identikit 'realism.' 

And yet the Greens are asking for SNP members to lend them their second vote in the forthcoming Holyrood elections on a constitutional change ticket?  Perhaps 'too wee, too poor, too stupid' is not quite the amazing chat up line it's cracked up to be?  Can someone tell the leader.  Under pressure to defend his party's vacuous policy of enforcing Tory spending at Holyrood to avoid 'risk,' Patrick Harvie let the mask slip. 

There is no doubt the many thousands of new members who joined the Greens in the aftermath of the referendum did so because the Greens were in favour of independence and autonomy for Scotland.  Perhaps it is time they started to rein in a leadership that seems on the face of it to have been exposed as preferring Unionist managerialism to real autonomy and broken down into a paroxysm of cringing at Scotland's economy.  The issues at stake - the lives of our poorest citizens - are too important to allow the Greens' feart managerialist leadership to allow our movement to fracture into self-defeating Scotch cringe and Unionism Lite posturing.  It is time they were called out for opposing democracy and autonomy by their own members.  Holyrood needs Home Rule, and we need to end austerity.  Trying to separate these immediate demands from the democracy struggle can only weaken our movement.