The Green Moment

The 2009/10 budget negotiations were dominated by one decision. The Green Party's surprise move to vote against the budget as a result of it being denied its £100m insulation scheme after frantic, literally last-minute negotiations with the SNP.

I had a lot of sympathy for the predicament Patrick Harvie found himself in at the time, and I still have. The Green Party were offering 3.1% of the required votes for 0.3% of the budget for a policy that ticked both the environment box and the job creation box. Not only that, the free insulation would end up paying for itself through reduced power bills for the public.

Although the leader of the Scottish Greens was cast as the villain of the piece and, ultimately, Patrick and Robin looked isolated in being the only 2 MSPs who voted against the repackaged budget, I always thought their chance to resurrect this policy would come and the perceived loss could be transferred into a significant gain.

It seems that time may be now.

Moving into Winter (accept it, resistance is futile, unless it's scarf-related), the Green party leader looks like he may be positioning his party to elbow this home insulation scheme into Swinney's budget, one year later than it perhaps should have been. Despite lagging on lagging last year, the SNP may find themselves once bitten, twice shy and seek to agree a deal way in advance of the final negotiations.

Certainly, Swinney and Salmond will want to avoid a repeat of the evident horror and uneasiness that was felt when they realised budget #1 wasn't going to pass. Such avoidable instability two years in a row would look sloppy from the Scottish Government. Furthermore, contrary to last year, it looks like the SNP would struggle to win the newspaper war as there has been some scathing descriptions of the existing diluted Home Insulation Scheme already:

A HIGH-PROFILE home-insulation scheme was "set up to fail", according to the Green Party.

The accusation was made yesterday after Scottish Government ministers revealed it would take 66 years to bring Scottish homes up to standard, compared with ten under rival Green proposals.

Answers to questions about the Home Insulation Scheme also showed one-third of the £15 million allocated would be spent on administration.

In adopting the scheme in its entirety, the SNP would even be acting in its own self-interest given the targets it has set itself:

The rejected Green scheme would have reduced emissions by 5.85 per cent every year, helping Scotland reaching its tough national target of 42 per cent by 2020. Ministers now admit that their programme will at best achieve 0.7 per cent of reductions a year.

But is a new Home Insulation Scheme a luxury too far at the current time? Could Swinney realistically fold this into the budget while still excluding GARL? Could the SNP conclude when it comes to insulation that 'many are cauld but few are frozen'?

It's debatable, or negotiable to perhaps be more precise. But I've always thought that the Green party in Scotland could really punch through the 6-7% barrier with the right issue selected as the bit between their teeth. (Their German counterparts received 10.7% of the vote this weekend, how many MSPs would that translate to in the regional vote?)

I daresay a Home Insulation Scheme isn't quite the issue that will truly transform the Greens' electoral fortunes but when the budget is passed there will only be 16 short months until the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections so it would be beneficial for them to at least play a significant part. A successful, smooth budget process with a clear green policy as a central plank of it could act as a springboard for the Greens going into the final year of the parliamentary term.

From there, a big eye-catching, imagination-fuelling policy on transport or nuclear stations or renewable energy could pave the way for a double digit result in May 2011. So, to that end, the Green moment could be here. It may be thyme they came in from the cold.