THE co-leader of the Scottish Greens has said that independence isn’t a “red line” which would prevent the party potentially doing a deal with Scottish Labour in the future.
Appearing on BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show, Lorna Slater was asked by presenter Martin Geissler if there was any scope for the Scottish Greens to do deals with political parties other than the SNP in the future.
He asked: “Could you go into government with another party? If Labour needed your support to get Anas Sarwar elected as first minister, could you do that, or is independence the red line?”
Slater replied: “The Greens are open to conversation wherever we have points in common.
“I think the challenge for Labour is: what do they have in common with us? Because it’s hard to know what they stand for at the moment.”
Geissler added: “So, independence isn’t a red line?”
Slated said: “Absolutely not”.
The current SNP-Green cooperation deal, the "Bute House Agreement", sees the smaller party lend its votes to the SNP on a host of issues, giving them a majority in the Scottish Parliament.
However, there are areas which are specifically excluded from the agreement, on which the Greens can differ from the SNP without breaching the deal.
Speaking to the BBC, Slater was also asked her thoughts about Ash Regan’s defection from the SNP to Alba on Saturday.
Geissler asked if Regan was right to say that independence is no longer a priority for the SNP.
“No, she’s not right,” said Slater.
“Independence is, of course, foundational to everything that we do in government, that we do in the Scottish Greens.
“I can’t speak for any other political party, of course. But so often in my job every day when we’re trying to put in place support for industry or even support for households the answer is ‘we can’t do that, it’s not devolved’.
“'We haven’t the powers, we can’t, we can’t, we can’t'.
"And all of that is because of the dissatisfactory settlement that we’re in where most of the levers that we need for economic and green transition actually sit in Westminster with Rishi Sunak, who has climbed down on all his climate commitments.
“We have our hands tied.”
It comes as the Scottish Greens hold their autumn conference in Dunfermline, with the party already announcing plans to propose a “firm alternative” to council tax before the next Holyrood elections.
