Interview: Robin Harper MSP, first Green Party Parlimentarian in the UK

Photo: Eva Barton

Robin Harper spent almost 12 years as an MSP, making history in 1999 as the first Green Party parliamentarian in the UK. After 37 years in politics, he stepped down in May of this year at the recent Scottish election. In January, I went to Holyrood to meet him.

ROBIN HARPER meets me in the entrance hall of the Scottish Parliament, and I’m slightly disappointed to see that he appears to have used the stairs, and not just stepped out of the Tardis in a cloud of smoke. The list MSP for Lothians is easily recognisable, and well-known for his rainbow-coloured scarf and fedora hat, which give him the appearance of a rather benevolent Doctor Who. Harper flirted with politics briefly while at Aberdeen University; he joined and became the secretary of the Liberal Club and “toyed with left-wing politics”. As a teacher, he took his first steps towards political involvement in 1975 by helping to make a short film for the BBC entitled ‘Futureshock,’ which looked at the world’s diminishing energy supplies.

Environmental politics

However, it was the 1985 sinking of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, which prompted Robin to get more involved in environmental politics. As he told me: “I joined the Scottish Ecology Party, Greenpeace and WWF on the same day.” To this day, Harper is still heavily involved with a number of non-governmental organisations alongside his work with the Green Party, and jokes that he is looking forward to his retirement so he can “cut down from fifty things on the go at once to five”.

But there’s more to Robin Harper than a penchant for multicoloured neckwear and big hats.

As we walk through the controversial, Miralles-designed parliament building, Robin and I chat about his morning. Despite the approaching end of his time in parliament, he is still heavily involved with environmental projects, and has just returned from Heriot-Watt University where he opened two new research centres. The Scottish Institute for Solar Energy Research (SISER) is intended to enhance solar energy research and development and CAESAR – the Centre for Advanced Energy Storage and Recovery – focuses on renewable energy.

Since he first walked through the doors of the parliament as an MSP, events such as the one at Heriot-Watt have been very much the norm for Robin. In his first eighteen months in office, he tells me he visited fifty-one schools or other educational institutions, forty-one environmental groups, forty social enterprises and campaign groups, twenty-two business organisations and eleven other businesses. In addition, he made seventy keynote speeches.

Robin reels this off like a poem he’s memorised, but he’s not exaggerating his achievements. Speaking almost matter-of-factly, he tells me that winning the Lothians seat in 1999 came on the back of “fourteen years of hard work,” which involved travelling the length and breadth of the country raising support for the Green Party. Nowadays of course, he does this less frequently, but the hard work is still evident.

Love of the job

When I ask him if anything from the past decade or so has been particularly memorable or enjoyable, he laughs and fondly recalls a trip to a village south-east of Thurso called Watten, where he opened a sewage treatment plant. Thurso-born himself, Robin appreciates the irony of it being the only structure in Scotland bearing his name, and calls it “something of a high spot”.

In terms of his day-to-day work as an MSP, he tells me that, before he lost the discipline, he used to try and write down three things a day that were enjoyable, and usually managed five or six. His enjoyment of the job is almost tangible, especially when he speaks about the Green Party’s election successes; not just the victory in 1999, but also the victories in the last election, in which the Party, though losing five MSPs, made their first gains in local politics. Although he describes the loss of the parliamentarians as “a punch in the stomach,” Robin points out that having eight councillors elected – five in Glasgow and three in Edinburgh – was a major success and filled the “gap in local politics”. In a day and age where most young people regard politics and politicians with suspicion or apathy, Robin provides an approachable, vaguely eccentric and endearing alternative.

Politics and education

And it’s perhaps his time as a teacher that has allowed Robin to bridge the gap between youth and politics. Shortly after his victory in the 1999 election, Robin left his teaching post at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh, where he had been teaching since 1972. As he reminds me, he had spent three years in this teaching post before getting involved with environmental politics, and I get the impression that he felt the pupils benefited from his politically neutral stance.

Given the recent introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence model for Scotland’s schools, I ask Robin what his take on it is. With education still clearly close to his heart, and with plans to increase his work with young people through art, music and drama once he has stepped down from his parliamentary position, he tells me that the Curriculum for Excellence more or less covers everything he’d been campaigning for as a teacher for many years, and mentions the importance of children enjoying their school experience.

He informs me that in 2002, research had shown that 25% of school leavers had had a negative experience at school, and that personally, he felt the concentration on exams, drills and working to targets, combined with the system as a whole being set around the demands of university entrance, was largely negative. He believed colleges were being left behind and there was no provision for those leaving school who did not intend going on to higher education. As I expected, he mentions the role that the creative arts play in the Curriculum for Excellence, and his hopes that the two-tier system, separating those going onto university and those who don’t, will be minimised in the coming years.

What lies ahead

Going back to politics, I ask Robin how much of a role he will play within the party after stepping down, and where he sees the Greens going from here. He speaks very highly of Patrick Harvie, the second Green MSP touted as Robin’s replacement as convener of the party, and tells me that he’s already been cajoled into helping to write the manifesto for the upcoming election. Although he mentions no specific goals for the Greens, he believes that they can continue to progress over the next few years.

With my time running out, I can’t resist asking Robin about that iconic scarf and its impact on his time as a politician. He tells me proudly that he bought it in the 1970s and that despite fellow party members asking him pre-election time if he wouldn’t mind minimizing its appearances as they sought to dispel the ‘open-toed sandals and vegetarian’ image of the Green Party, it has become something of a colourful symbol of the Green Party, rather like Robin himself. Although his time in the Scottish parliament is over, I can’t help but feel that this man, who has done so much to advance Green politics in Scotland as a parliamentarian, hasn’t nearly finished yet. Watch his space!