 The most interesting contest on the 6th of May, and the one that will be most consequential, are elections to the Scottish Parliament. The big story here is whether or not Nicola Sturgeon can win an absolute majority, which she says would serve as a mandate for planning for a second referendum on Scottish independence. And we can go to the latest projection from Britain, Alex, in conjunction with the new statesman, and that puts the SMP on 62 MSPs, just short of the 65 needed for an absolute majority. That poll also suggests that the Greens, who also back independence, could double their representation in Hollywood from 6 to 11. So, obviously, even if the SMP don't get that absolute majority, there will be an absolute majority for an indie ref too. Now, to find out what the Scottish Greens will do if they become kingmakers in the next Scottish Parliament, I'm joined by Ross Greer, a member of the Scottish Parliament with the Scottish Greens. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Current polling suggests in practical terms the next government could be a lot like the last. You'll have an SMP minority government with the Greens sort of propping it up essentially, voting through their budgets. I suppose potentially you could also join a formal coalition with them. My question for you though is, at the moment, you've got SMP government supported by the Greens. You're about to have probably SMP government supported by the Greens. Is a vote for the Greens a vote for the status quo? I mean, from our perspective, you just need to look at what we've been able to do with that position of influence over the last five years. And it's worth saying, yes, we've agreed, budget deals with the SMP most notable, each one of the last five budgets, they do vote with the Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament just about as much as they vote with the Greens. So, particularly on issues like housing, the SMP and the Conservatives are always very keen to defend landlords, whereas you see the Greens and to an extent Labour standing up for tenants. What we've done over the last five years though with the budgets, we've been able to introduce stuff like free school meals for all primary pupils. So that will be coming in over the next year, because that was our price of this year's budget, free bus travel forever and under the age of 22, about half a billion pounds back into our local government budgets, and stuff like we, the Green Party rewrote the income tax system in Scotland. So income tax was devolved for the first time after the 2016 election. And one of our prices, the 2018 budget, was that the income tax system be rewritten. So the richest people, the highest earners pay more. And those on the lowest incomes actually got small tax cuts. So you've seen the influence that we've been able to have over the last five years. It's not been on every issue, on other issues that the government can count on other parties support where they want to preserve the status quo. Where we've been able to really make a mark has been on issues where other parties, frankly, wouldn't work with them. I mean, the controversy with the Greens role, as far as I understand it, is, I suppose, voting for budgets which put through quite severe cuts to local councils. So this is Labour Party research reported by the Herald, which suggests that 937 million pounds in cuts have been made to local government over the past eight years. Obviously, only four of those years you were supporting the government. I mean, is there anything you think the Greens could have done differently? Could you have played a harder bargain in trying to limit those cuts to local government? I think we definitely got better at negotiating year by year. So you can see that the last couple of budgets where we got stuff like free bus travel for young people, free school meals, direct cash payments for low income families this year. So they'll be coming in June, August and December because we put them into the budget. Yeah, we've got better at it than we were in the first couple, but Labour will deliberately use longer periods of time, because that's the period of time you'll have for those budgets. The SMP was in majority and passed them themselves. What we've done over the last four years is essentially stop the bleeding. Local government was being hammered for the last couple of years. It's not been, I wouldn't for a moment suggest that the Greens have reversed all this austerity that local government has suffered between 2010 and 2016 when we started holding the balance of power. But we put half a billion pounds back in, which in Scottish terms is pretty significant, and it stopped the massive austerity that was happening up until that point. Yet we need far more fundamental change. I mean, the haggling that we do over a couple hundred million pounds every year doesn't fundamentally solve the problem of local government finance. Council tax rates in Scotland were last set in 1992. I wasn't born in 1992, so we have members of Parliament who are fiddling around the edges of a local government tax system that is older than I am. Most people don't even pay the right rate of council tax and trying to get not just the SMP, but Labour and others on board with that more fundamental reform, the really transformational stuff that the Greens want. That's been what's challenging. We've done the best we can with the position of influence we had. I think for five or six MSPs, we've punched above our weight. We're proud of what we've done. Would it have been different if it had been a green majority government? Of course it would have been. These weren't green budgets. They were SMP budgets that we were able to really significantly influence. Comparing contrast that with Labour, whose strategy and budget negotiations was to try and force the SMP into a corner where they could only do a deal with the Tories, and it would be a really bad budget, and Labour could turn around and say, we told you they were just the Tartan Tories all along. We never wanted to cooperate with that kind of strategy because people suffer as a result of that. Those aren't good budgets for public services. They would have been even worse for our councils. Labour's strategy was never to get a good budget. It was to, for political opportunism reasons, deliberately force the SMP to pass worse budgets for their own electoral advantage. There are some uncertainties when it comes to this election, but it looks pretty certain that there is going to be a majority for a second indie referendum for Scottish independence after the elections on the 6th of May. What's your position on what should happen next? How that should happen? We can presume Boris Johnson is in power and Westminster is not going to say, go and have the referendum. Do you think they should go and do, I suppose, an illegal referendum where you just organise it without the support of the Westminster government? The kind of trite answer to this, I suppose, is that I don't want to live in exile in Belgium and you just need to look at the experience of our friends in Catalonia to see that that's not a path to independence. There are avenues that are available to us, though, but most interestingly has been the briefings that have come out of Downing Street and the Tories over the last couple of weeks, that instead of this hard-line position of opposition, you can never have a referendum even if you voted for it. They're beginning to recognise that that's actually just pushing more people towards the independence cause, because it's validating our argument about the democratic deficit. So what the briefing now is that they might try and bounce us into an early referendum and to try and have it really quickly and they think that the no side, the unionist side, believe that they would stand a better chance of winning if we've not had a chance to prepare our post-pandemic, our post-COVID argument for independence. So we're seeing a shift in their tactics, which I welcome, because it's obviously to a slightly more democratic or a slightly less anti-democratic position. But we don't actually have any legal precedent on this in Scotland. So it's never been tested that the case for whether or not the Scottish Parliament actually has the power to hold a referendum, it's never been tested in court. So if we end up in that situation where we've won the pro-independence majority that it looks like we're going to, the Scottish Parliament has passed a resolution saying there should be a referendum. If the UK government rejects the Section 30 order that's required to do it in what would be constitutionally and unquestionably a legitimate manner, if they reject that, we can go to court and test the case on whether or not the Scottish Parliament actually has the power to do this itself, because that's not settled and there's strong legal opinion on both sides of that particular debate. So we've got legal avenues that are available to us, though obviously that wouldn't be the preferred path. We would prefer that the other side simply recognise the democratic legitimacy of the mandate we will win. As far as I understand it, what you guys want is to leave the UK and immediately join the EU. And as well as there being a lot of currency issues which were exactly the same issues that you know arose, I mean in EF1 in 2014, you now have this massive issue of the border. And you know we've seen what happened in Northern Ireland, it was very difficult, they also had the Good Friday Agreement. So there was you know I suppose a necessity for both sides to have an arrangement whereby you could have a bit of a soft border on the island of Ireland. How if an independent Scotland joins the EU and the rest of the UK still has a fairly hard Brexit situation with the European Union, are you not going to have a hard border between England and Scotland where people have to you know have checks before they can cross that border or at least goods will have to have checks before they can cross that border? Yeah I mean I'm not going to stand here and pretend that there's a straightforward answer to that but we would also, we wouldn't claim that an independent Scotland would be you know joining the EU instantaneously. That's a process now. We would be better placed than most countries that start the accession process for joining because at the moment obviously we abide by most of the Ikea because until very recently we're bound by them as part of a member state. The discussion around that is in a totally different place to what it was in 2014 and obviously where we've been gradually moving to since 2016. It would be an absolutely no one's interest to have a hard border between Scotland and England. It is notably different to Northern Ireland so I set on one of the bodies that monitors the Good Friday Agreement. Obviously we're in wildly different places. For us it's not conflict related situation but it would be incredibly bad economics obviously to be setting up a hard border. The process by which Scotland can move back in towards the European Union and the process by which we become independent and avoid a hard border. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. I mean you know no one is suggesting that the common travel area would end for example and we're not suggesting that overnight these issues are easy to solve but what we're asking for here is the opportunity to have that debate so we want an opportunity. We've not set out our detailed prospectus for how independence would look like on day one because we've not yet won the mandate to have that referendum. That's what this election is all about and we recognize the plans that were there in 2014 they don't apply anymore to quite a significant extent on both sides. Both sides arguments have completely changed since 2014. What we as a country deserve is the opportunity to have this debate and to thrash out exactly how that would work and for those of us who are pro-EU and believe Scotland's future should be should be in the European Union that requires a different case to the one that existed in 2014 and we need the time the opportunity to actually build up and develop that case. What we're trying to do between now and Thursday is the pre-debate, the pre-argument the the debate about whether or not we should even have this debate should Scotland have another opportunity at self-determination and you know clearly it looks like we're heading towards a majority for that at least. Once you get to what independence looks like that's when there are much much sharper divisions because the Greens you know as a part of the radical left we want something quite fundamentally different from the SNP so it's not just that we want something different from what our friends in the Unionist side would argue for. Our vision of independence is of complete social and economic transformation the SNP's I would argue is you know the status quo in Edinburgh but rather than London. Those debates are debates that we can only have if we are having a referendum and then actually become independent. At the moment it's all kind of theoretical and academic where all we're asking for is the opportunity to actually have that argument have that debate about self-determination.