Veteran Green Robin Harper joins Scottish Labour and urges vote for Keir Starmer's party

dailyrecord.co.uk:

The first ever Green MSP has handed Scottish Labour a pre-election boost by joining Anas Sarwar’s party.Robin Harper, a trailblazing figure in the Scottish Greens for decades, is now calling for voters to back Labour to boot out the Tories.Harper, who was the first Green parliamentarian in the UK , was an MSP between 1999 and 2011.But he fell out with his former party on independence and trans rights and ripped up his party card.Labour’s Ian Murray, who is in line to be a Cabinet Minister in a Keir Starmer Government, has secured Harper’s endorsement in the Edinburgh South seat.In a letter to local voters, Harper wrote: "I want to tell you why I’ve joined the Scottish Labour Party and why I’m supporting Ian Murray at the General Election on 4th July.“I desperately want to see the back of this Conservative government, who have crashed our economy, degraded our political life and failed to tackle climate change.“The SNP, and until recently their Green coalition partners, have also failed to take action on the environment.

John Swinney has failed to rule out supporting new oil and gas licences and the SNP have rejected Labour’s calls for a windfall tax on record oil and gas profits.”He also backed Labour’s plan for GB Energy, a vehicle to deliver clean energy by 2030:“Investment in renewable energy would be paid for by a windfall tax on the oil and gas giants making record profits during a cost-of-living crisis, something that the SNP oppose.”He concluded: “This election provides us with a now-or-never opportunity to remove the Tories from power and end the chaos, failure and inaction that has marked their fourteen years in government.“Only Labour is able to do this across the UK and only Labour has a plan to halt