SOMETIMES I feel we are guilty of being too quick to judge the Scottish Greens over some of their more ambitious initiatives. Oil and gas workers are troubled by the Greens’ plans to dismantle their industry, while the deposit return scheme – opposed by so many small business owners – was described by the veteran SNP politician Fergus Ewing as “the biggest disaster I have seen”.

The Scottish Greens’ most recent initiative – penalising people with fossil fuel boilers so that they’re forced to turn to “greener alternatives” – seems designed to make life tougher for hardworking people more worried about feeding their families.

Perhaps, though, we need to calm down and give some of these ideas room to breathe. Let’s face it – any initiative that leaves working-class families with less money to spend on unhealthy food choices deserves our consideration.

And it’s all very well urging us to consider using bicycles, but sometimes I feel you need to force the change. Thus, if you squeeze the incomes of low-wage families further then many will have no choice but to ditch their cars and get on their bikes.

Better still, impose so many penalties on car ownership that it becomes financially unviable for ordinary families. And maybe pioneer the use instead of neighbourhood buses where every household takes a turn of driving the street into town each day. This would also engender friendship and neighbourly goodness.

I’d even be incentivising families to use those three-seated bikes that the 1970s comedy trio, The Goodies, pioneered on their show.

And surely we must now consider imposing punitive duties on all air travel. Thus, we could return to a simpler time when only very rich people could afford to fly overseas. The rest of us could do bus runs down the coast, or even just walk. Think what that would do to boost outcomes for personal health and the rural economy.

I’d also set every household a manageable target of Munros they must climb every calendar year. We could do this by using home-installed GPS tracking systems.

Just nick caves

THERE are many untapped cave systems across our country and I feel sure that some of our more enterprising housebuilders – eager to gain more green credentials – could fashion them into living spaces.

After all, we’re forever being mesmerised by those television home shows where green wellington boot types make seven-apartment homes out of storage containers. I’m sure I saw one where a family of five left their split-level house in Shoreditch to take up residence in a repurposed Land Rover they’d turned into a mobile bungalow.

One of Scotland’s most famous patriarchs was Sawney Bean, who moved his large family into a cave system between Girvan and Ballantrae in south Ayrshire.

Obviously, times were tough for a family of 45 in the 16th century in rural Ayrshire and, sadly, the Beans had to resort to cannibalism to help them survive. Understandably, history hasn’t been kind to the Beans.

Perhaps it’s time to reassess our judgment when considering ways of curbing over-population of our shrinking planet.

 

An unrecognizable woman standing in a cupboard at home, she is looking at and adjusting the settings on her boiler while using her phone as a torch..

An unrecognizable woman standing in a cupboard at home, she is looking at and adjusting the settings on her boiler while using her phone as a torch..

 

What’s the sketch?

ANOTHER notable exemplar of the 1970s comedy genre was the Monty Python series which gave us routines such as the Dead Parrot sketch and the Lumberjack Song.

These comic geniuses also gave us the Four Yorkshiremen routine in which they parodied those who seek to convince each other of how challenging their upbringings were. “You were lucky to have a room. We used to have to live in a corridor!

“Ohhhh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Woulda’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

“Well, when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

“We were evicted from our hole in the ground – we had to go and live in a lake!”

I feel, in their drive to promote circular sustainability, the Scottish Greens could do worse than update this sketch in a party political broadcast.

Obviously, no-one is advocating living in septic tanks or rubbish tips, but they could start off gently by maybe promoting the advantages of fixed caravans and empty garage lock-ups.

Green with envy

IT’S become fashionable to mock the Scottish Greens as they attempt to detoxify Scotland.

It’s too easy to say that no member of this party has ever won an election in any of the myriad jurisdictions by which we’re governed. Yet, isn’t this the very essence of the Scottish Greens?

Rather than lament this, perhaps we should salute it as a great example of how far very little can take you in smart, sustainable Scotland.

Three cheers for the Scottish Greens.