Niall Christie: Greens can lead fight against the far-right

The height of the ‘green wave’ of 2018-19 saw unprecedented street mobilisations of climate protesters, including school strikers inspired by Greta Thunberg, alongside record-breaking votes for green parties. Just five years later, Europe appears to have taken a political turn for the worse.

Across the continent, including in the UK, the far right is on the march — with climate denialism and sabre-rattling against green policies playing a central role in the insurgent right parties’ platforms. But what the millions of people attracted to the likes of Marine Le Pen or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) want most of all, Scottish Green candidate Niall Christie tells Heckle, is change.

“The Greens have probably shot themselves in the foot somewhat in Europe — and I include Scotland in that,” Christie says bluntly.

He fears that too many European green parties have surrendered their radical credentials by forming governments in partnership with parties of the centre-ground political establishment, in effect having “compromised their own values for a seat at the table”, name-checking the notorious Irish and German parties as the most egregious examples.

Perhaps controversially among his own party colleagues, he includes in that vein the Bute House Agreement through which the Scottish Greens and the SNP governed together for nearly two years before the pact’s dramatic collapse at the end of April.

“Full disclosure — I didn’t vote for it at the time,” he is anxious to point out. Hitting the streets of Glasgow South in the final weeks of the election campaign, Christie says he is all too happy that his party is “no longer tethered to a withering SNP”.

“The Tories, Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems and most other parties are offering pretty much the same thing at this election,” he argues. “They’re all offering a continued austerity project, some sort of western imperialism that’s tied to NATO, some low-level social conservatism, and pretty much all of that has been on offer for the last 20 years, if not longer.”

He adds: “[Scottish Government] policies like the council tax freeze, abandoning climate targets, massive cuts to the housing budgets, the abandonment of further education support — all of those issues are just symptoms of the Greens allowing themselves to be outvoted and outgunned by the SNP in government.”

The end of the agreement puts the Scottish Greens back into more comfortable territory, competing in the election as an opposition party rather than part of a government far from the peak of its popularity.

With a record 44 candidates across Scotland, the Greens are mounting by far the biggest electoral challenge to the left of the Labour and SNP mainstream.

Unlike south of the border, where a large number of socialist and independent candidates are running to challenge the rightwards turn of Starmer’s Labour, there are only a handful in Scotland outwith the Greens, with the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) running two candidates and the smaller Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) mustering as many as four.

In another world, Christie could have been running as a candidate of one of those organisations. Thinking back to when he joined the Greens in 2016, he says he was “probably pretty close to joining RISE”, the short-lived left-wing electoral alliance backed by the SSP in the wake of the 2014 referendum.

Though he eventually landed on the Greens, “I still don’t think that, particularly on the left of the Greens, that there’s that much difference between what would be seen as the radical socialist part of the independence movement and the Scottish Green Party as a vehicle,” he says.

Having joined up as a working-class student at the University of Dundee, Christie took a backseat from frontline involvement in the Greens as he embarked on a career in journalism, which saw him reporting for the Barrhead Telegraph and Glasgow’s Evening Times before becoming Scotland editor of the Morning Star, the paper traditionally associated with the Communist Party and its fellow travellers.

“As a journalist, you’re expected to know a little bit about a lot of things — and I think, as a politician, that’s actually quite similar,” he suggests. “I think that probably makes me quite well suited to being a politician.” His reporting, he adds, has covered “some of the most impoverished parts of the central belt” and focused on issues like “trade union disputes and asylum rights and poverty”.

“The climate emergency goes hand-in-hand with capitalism — it’s impossible to have a conversation about one without the other.”

Class struggle is a theme that emerges throughout our conversation, and Christie makes clear that he views the climate emergency as a class issue.

“What people are bringing up on their doors, which is public services, which is their bills every month — there is a direct path between that and the climate crisis and the crisis of capitalism that we’re currently in, and I think that unless we’re making that case, no one is,” he explains.

Though “people are bothered about their bills going up… energy companies are still taking home billions of pounds in profits,” he notes. “Labour say they’re offering a publicly-owned energy company but they’re not, they’re offering effectively energy PFI, which would be a disaster and cost us more in the long run anyway.

“Why not just invest the money upfront, create an actual energy company that can produce and also sell to the people at cost price? That would mean people aren’t paying over the odds.”

That might require tax rises, Christie adds, but they should target “the asset-rich and the landlord class and business owners who squirrel away money”.

“The climate emergency goes hand-in-hand with capitalism — it’s impossible to have a conversation about one without the other,” he contends.

“I live in Glasgow. It’s wet enough here already and it’s just going to get wetter over the next few years, and we need things like flood defences to make sure that communities like the one I live in — a scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow — are well protected against the dangers of climate change.

“No wealthy company is going to parachute in here and make sure that some of the poorest communities in Glasgow are protected. That’s for the birds, that’s not going to happen.”

In an election where, “when you look at economic policy between the SNP and Labour, there’s a fag paper between the two of them”, Christie argues it’s been left to the Greens to put the case for “genuine exciting change and policies like a wealth tax that would hit the 20,000 richest people in the UK [or] like massive increases in corporation tax”.

Money needs to be “poured — and I don’t say that lightly, I mean poured — into public services… and the people who should be paying for that are the asset-rich, the wealthy, and big companies who are massively fleecing both our natural environment and also the people who live here”, he stresses.

“We need to be more radical and make sure that we are the voice against the far right, because no one else is going to be.”

With Nigel Farage’s Reform UK nipping at the Tories’ heels in opinion polls, Christie views that job as part of the struggle against the right.

“Maybe at this election Labour will win, but at the next election, the big question will be who can realistically take on the Labour Party — and unless there is a realistic left option, all roads lead to the far right,” he warns.

“I think it’s a danger in green politics if we allow ourselves to be moulded into a more establishment or watered-down party… We need to be more radical and make sure that we are the voice against the far right, because no one else is going to be.”

Farage’s previous vehicle, UKIP, made few inroads in Scotland — and Farage himself has refused to visit Scotland during this campaign, likely in no small part because of his experience being chased out of Edinburgh by pro-independence protesters in 2013.

Christie is optimistic that frustrations with a Starmer government will again, in Scotland, be channelled into support for independence, but admits that “when it comes to independence, that’s probably the least radical part of my politics”.

He suggests the movement could benefit by “moving step-by-step”, focusing over the next parliamentary term on securing the devolution of employment law and the scrapping of the section 35 veto that allowed the Tories to sabotage Scotland’s progressive gender recognition reforms.

He adds: “This is a ‘Tories out’ election — people should be absolutely buzzing, but they’re not. They’re totally disheartened because they know what they’re getting is just more of the same drab politics, regardless of who they vote for in Scotland.

“I think that will drive the independence movement forward, because we’re going to go from one conservative government to another conservative government and, regardless of who we send down to Westminster, it’ll make zero difference.”

Internationally, with conflict deaths around the world currently at levels not seen for decades, Christie stresses that the Greens are “the party of peace”.

He backs the civic society campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel as “the least we should be offering the people of Palestine” amid an ongoing genocide. When it comes to Ukraine — two years into a war which has sharply divided the left — he believes the UK “shouldn’t be selling weapons to any country, and that includes Ukraine, because we don’t know whose hands they are going to fall into… but I do think we should be providing [humanitarian] aid”.

Those are not the only conflicts happening in the world, he also points out. Parts of Africa are being ravaged by civil wars at the same time the UK is slashing its international aid budget.

“At a certain point, we need to take responsibility for the damage that we have over generations and generations and generations and hundreds of years caused overseas and take some responsibility there,” Christie says. “We didn’t see that in Afghanistan and that’s even in the last 20 years we’ve caused destruction there, and we were still happy to leave people high and dry.”

In Glasgow South, Christie is competing against “a variety of establishment figures and hawks and people who do not care about this community at all”, he argues. He is one of the only candidates “who believes in equality, in wealth redistribution, in independence and a Scottish republic”.

The exiled Dundonian is also prepared to challenge the other candidates head-on on their passion for his adopted city. “Glasgow is an outward-looking city — it always has been,” he says. “Firstly as an imperial city, and I don’t agree with that part, but latterly we are very welcoming of refugees, we are very welcoming of asylum seekers, we’re welcoming people of all classes and backgrounds.

“I think that is something beautiful about the city of Glasgow, and that’s a picture that is often painted by politicians who don’t believe in any of that… In Glasgow South, quite frankly, I’m the only option that does. It should be a simple choice for people.”