Holyrood 2026 campaign to be ‘dirtiest’ in history of devolution, Greer says

The forthcoming Holyrood election campaign will be the “dirtiest and the most difficult” in the history of devolution, Scottish Green co-leader Ross Greer has warned his party.

With polling suggesting Nigel Farage’s Reform could see their first ever group of MSPs elected, the Green said next year’s election would be “a fight between the politics of hope and hate”.

And with 200 days to go until the election, he said the Scottish Greens were launching “the biggest ever fundraising drive in this party’s history”.

Speaking at the Scottish Green Party conference in Edinburgh, Mr Greer told supporters: “We need to be in this fight, the stakes are simply far too high for us not to be.”

He added: “We have 200 days left in this fight between the politics of hope and hate. The clock is ticking down.”

But he warned: “This is going to be the dirtiest and the most difficult election campaign in the history of the Scottish Parliament.

“The extremists in Reform are being bankrolled by billionaires and fossil fuel interests. We are going to need more money than ever before to compete with that.”

However with some 800 new members having joined this party since he and fellow MSP Gillian Mackay became the new co-leaders seven weeks ago, he said the Greens’ “biggest strength is we are a grassroots movement”.

And he said that every vote for his party next May would “be a vote for an independent Scotland, re-joining our place in the European Union”.

Mr Greer insisted that the “prospect of Nigel Farage as prime minister after the next election means the need for independence has never been more urgent”.

But with the SNP conference last weekend having been focused on its plans for how to win a second referendum, Mr Greer said supporters of independence should instead be focusing on building support for their cause.

He said: “I think the independence movement needs to stop obsessing over process about how we achieve a referendum and spend for more of our time and energy and building public support for the potential of the opportunity of independence itself.”

Politicians in Scotland should do that “by making maximum use of those powers we have already got”, Mr Greer said.

His comments came as he said the Greens want to scrap the “comically outdated and broken council tax” system, as well as bring the bus network in Scotland into public ownership to “deliver free bus travel for everyone in Scotland”.

But with Mr Greer saying his party had “hit the limits of what we could do under devolution” when the Greens were in government with the SNP, he also said politicians need to “get into those grey areas between what is devolved and what is reserved”.

He told the conference: “We would be daring the UK Government to step in and stop us if they wanted.

“But if a Labour government was to step in and stop us improving the lot of workers in this country, all they would be doing is proving the urgent need for Scotland to take all of these decisions itself.”