Green leader takes aim at Sunak — again

Is this the Scottish Green conference — or just an anti-Tory one? In his opening speech, co-leader Patrick Harvie laboured the point that he, er, just doesn’t like Prime Minister Rishi Sunak very much. Making some colourful accusations, Harvie didn’t hold back…

Starting with his favourite fixation, the Scottish government minister seethed: ‘Heat pumps have become the new hate symbol of choice for the extreme far right! The climate change deniers on the far right!’

‘Here in the UK, a Prime Minister desperately clutching anything he thinks might give his party a chance of clinging to power has once again chosen to copy the extremism of the far right!’ he raged at his modest conference audience. Decrying Sunak’s own conference speech as a ‘betrayal of current and future generations’, Harvie slated the UK’s ‘vacuous’ PM, noting that ‘a lot of that speech should just have been laughable.’

On independence, the Green co-leader swooped in on Scotland secretary Alister Jack:

Time and again over the last year, the Tories have laid waste to the idea of the Union as a partnership of equals… cheerleading from the the Scotland Office in the shape of Alister Jack, as he tramples over devolution with all of the finesse of a toddler on a sugar rush.