Leaders of the Scottish National Party and Scottish Greens on Friday announced a power-sharing deal that will create a governing majority in the devolved parliament in Edinburgh, adding potential pressure on the UK government to approve a second independence referendum.
The deal will see two Green politicians serve as ministers in the SNP administration – a first for any UK government – and sets out a broad shared policy platform while allowing the two parties to continue to differ on some issues.
Nicola Sturgeon, first minister and SNP leader, said the deal was groundbreaking for UK politics, stressing that it was "not a coalition".
"Today's politics can too often feel small – polarised, divided and incapable of meeting the moment – and this agreement is intended to change that in Scotland, " Ms Sturgeon said. "It is about doing politics and governance better."
The top item on the two parties’ shared policy programme was their call for a second independence referendum to be held “after the Covid pandemic has passed”.
In Scottish parliamentary elections in May, the SNP fell one seat short of a majority in the 129-seat chamber at Holyrood in Edinburgh. The Scottish Green party, which also supports independence, won eight seats.
The UK’s Conservative government has so far waved aside calls for it to approve a rerun of Scotland’s 2014 referendum, in which voters rejected independence by 55-45 per cent.
However, some in the SNP believe the case for a second vote will be strengthened if the Scottish government directly commands a majority at Holyrood on the question.
‘Impossible’ to block
Ms Sturgeon told a briefing she wanted a second referendum to be held before the end of 2023, and that she believed the deal with the Greens would make it “impossible on any democratic basis” for the UK to seek to block one.
The opposition Scottish Conservatives on Friday condemned the deal as creating a “nationalist coalition of chaos”.
"Nicola Sturgeon failed to win a majority, so she needs a hand to ramp up the division and push for [a second independence referendum]," Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross said on Twitter on Friday morning.
The agreement included shared manifesto pledges to increase payments to low-income families with children and to “implement an effective national system of rent controls”.
The Greens have more left-wing policies on wealth distribution than the SNP and have also demanded an immediate ban on new North Sea oil and gas developments and other action to counter climate change faster.
Ms Sturgeon declined to answer whether she would oppose developments, such as the Cambo oilfield, northwest of Shetland, saying the two parties still had differing opinions on oil and gas.
“We do not agree on everything but we are coming out of our comfort zones to focus on what we do agree on,” she said.
Approval pending
Patrick Harvie, Scottish Greens co-leader, said reaching the deal despite such differences on oil industry development had been made easier by the fact that final decisions on energy were made by the UK government.
The agreement should make the passage of key legislation more straightforward for Ms Sturgeon, although the SNP governed relatively comfortably as a minority administration between 2007 and 2011 and again since 2016.
The deal, which came after three months of talks and must still be approved by the SNP’s national executive committee and Scottish Green party members, is the first of its kind since the creation of the devolved Holyrood parliament in 1999.
The parliament’s proportionately representative electoral system makes it difficult for any party to win a majority. Labour and the Liberal Democrats ran the Scottish government between 1999 and 2007 as a formal coalition. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021