They’re at it again. The Scottish Greens are annoying people.

Alex Salmond’s Alba won’t appear on the bill of a planned pro-independence rally on Saturday in order to preserve the Scottish Greens’ ideological purity, it seems. Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater’s party have indicated they won’t share a platform with those like Alba whose political vision diverges from theirs.

Also in the last week, senior Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer reposted a comment on X calling the independent Cass report into NHS gender identity services for children “a straight up transphobic and conservative document”.

Dr Hilary Cass, an eminent paediatrician, you’ll be aware, conducted a comprehensive review of the international evidence for gender-affirming trans healthcare instead of just proclaiming its supposed benefits. She found the research base was “remarkably weak”, with children being given puberty blockers that could not be declared either safe or effective. Perhaps Mr Greer would have preferred it if she’d kept her findings under wraps? Scientific rigour is now transphobic, it seems, to some in the Scottish Green Party.

What these two incidents have in common is a closed mind. A view was reached - on what basis, we are not told - and with doctrine established, dissenters are neither engaged nor reasoned with, but condemned from the virtual pulpit. They are cancelled.

Sometimes senior Scottish Greens are portrayed as arch liberals. Oh please, they are anything but. Doubt is alien to them. Tolerance is only one way. The widely respected MSP Andy Wightman left the party over........

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