THE SNP would have us believe that, these days, they are the modern party of Scotland, that their interests are inimical to its general advantage, prosperity and so on. Supposedly gone are the ties with ultra-nationalist fringe groups such as the 1320 Club, the Free Scotland Party, the Scottish Jacobite Party and Siol nan Gaidheal (Seed of the Gaels), with all their rhetoric about English carpet-baggers. Similiarly out of fashion is anything too much in the way of overt genuflection towards the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, the party's founding father and a man who when he wasn't pamphleteering for either communism or fascism, or egging on the Luftwaffe, seemed to glory in Scotland's mediaeval past.
Yet within the SNP administration at Holyrood, one sort of mediaevalism is alive and well: a regressive, back to the land and the forests, back to the foraging life mediaevalism, the like of which Friends of the Earth would happily see the entire western world adopt.
Last week the SNP proudly announced theirs would be the first government in the world to carbon cost every single proposed public spending project, this in order that ministers can weigh up the environmental costs of running the country for us against the economic benefits that accrue to us from doing so. The policy, masquerading as bold and brave, is entirely fatuous. It also demonstrates that the SNP - in its slavish obeisance to the cyclops of environmentalism, the most fashionable and the most over-funded -ism of our times and a lobby that should be kept well clear of the public purse - is wholly out of touch with ordinary people.
Nowhere has there been any mention of cost. According to the Taxpayers' Alliance British families are paying almost £800 more per household more in green taxes than is necessary to offset the social costs - as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. Even going on the UK government's own estimates of those social costs, we are paying more than £300 too much per household, all of this through under-the-counter taxes including fuel levies, vehicle excise duty and landfill tax. Theoretically then Scots shouldn't have to pay a penny more for this exercise in showboating. What will happen, given the current fiscal arrangements, is simply that money will be diverted from other areas and trousered by climate change scientists.
Common sense will tell you that there is little appetite - particularly in the current economic climate - for further stalling growth and making life more inconvenient simply in order to placate, for the time being, a lobby whose science is frighteningly inexact and entirely lacks for transparency.
Increasingly we are seeing a backlash against the green agenda. People always resent stealth taxes; in the case of environmental levies they feel they are being punished for being alive. It is also clear that incentives for the cultivation of biofuels have hugely distorted the world food market. And, in the case of fortnightly bin collections - environmental fatheadedness at its worst and a neat way of maximising budgets for much more important things like community outreach projects and the like - local authorities have shown themselves to have a flimsy grasp of what the word 'environment' actually means. Most people are not, in fact, okay with there being more rats knocking around, or more fly-tipping, just so that councils can boast of a reduced carbon footprint - this while countries in the developing world get to double theirs every month, equipped as they are with assurances that they have the moral right to do so because they are poorer than us. All of which points to the fact that even if it were possible to have an entirely carbon neutral country (a preposterous notion but one Friends of the Earth will doubtless be trumpeting soon enough), so long as that country was one the size of, say, Scotland, it wouldn't make one blind bit of difference either way to climate change.
There were, of course, other ways the SNP could have gotten serious about global warming. For a start they could have devised new and fairer schemes to make it pay for consumers to go green. On a British level, they could have campaigned for supermarkets to be forced to cut out wastefulness and reduce their packaging. But then, maybe they just couldn't resist the intimacy-by-proxy with their mediaeval ancestors to be gained from cosying up so unequivocally with such an unreasoning lot as the green lobby.