Another idea of the Scottish Greens goes up in smoke. Happy days

I ask the question because we know how much politicians fear U-turns and we know who’s to blame for it (you may blame her for other things too): Margaret Thatcher. She did that famous speech where she said the lady’s not for turning even though it never really made sense. In government, Mrs Thatcher did lots of U-turns and, certainly in her first few years, she was extremely pragmatic about changing course if something wasn’t going well. The lady was for turning, and a good thing too.

It's good for a simple reason: if you’ve got something wrong, it’s a bad idea to stick to it regardless and the Scottish Government, while still under the influence of the Greens, got their policy on wood-burning stoves wrong: badly wrong. Now, thanks mainly to Kate Forbes, who’s warmed her feet in front of a wood burner in the Highlands once or twice, the government have accepted they screwed up and have done the U-turn. And they deserve credit for it. They got it wrong. They changed their minds. Good.

The policy they had been thinking of introducing was a ban on all new homes and buildings using direct-emission heating systems, such as oil and gas boilers and wood-burning stoves. Patrick Harvie, who used to be a government minister, I assure you it’s true, google it, said the policy was essential because heating our homes and buildings is responsible for about a fifth of all Scotland’s emissions and we must move to low-carbon heating.

The problem for the policy on stoves, fatally, was that it didn’t consider the fact that the ambition of any policy, even if it is good (and the ambition to be low-carbon is good), must have some connection to day-to-day reality. The campaign group The Scottish Islands Federation put it best when they said that progress on the climate must be made in tandem with developing and enhancing the resilience and sustainability of communities, not at their expense.

What they essentially meant by that is that the ban on wood-burning stoves didn’t take into account how much rural communities rely on them to get through the winter. Mr Harvie’s response was that the ban would not affect a single existing home and that’s true, it was for new-builds only. But first: it would affect new builds in rural areas. And second: it clearly indicated where the policy was going. How long before all wood-burning stoves were banned?

The case people in rural houses made for stoves was also strong; I know because I live in one. Mostly, I heat the house with heating oil but it’s expensive and the price fluctuates a lot so my wood-burning stove gives me the option of having the radiators off and heating the place another way. Once it’s up and running it’s very good and of course you can heat one room and turn the heating down in the rest of the house and keep costs down. Sometimes, because I collect fallen and broken wood from outside, I can also fuel the stove for free. Pretty sustainable actually.

And it doesn’t end there. When you do have to buy wood, you can buy it in stages over the summer if necessary and stock up for winter, which means you know your heating is bought and paid for. This is reassuring when the cost of heating oil, and electricity for that matter, can suddenly shoot up. The price of logs has gone up as well, everything has, but once you’ve bought the logs that’s it, you know the price and they’re yours. So your fuel cost anxiety is considerably reduced.

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Power cuts are a thing as well. Let me tell you about the notorious winter of 2009 when there was a power cut, my heating went off, the water froze in the pipes and I had no heating when it was minus-20. Fortunately, I was able to pretty much move into the living room and heat the place with the stove for the time it took to get the heating fixed which took a number of days. This is what happens when there are power cuts or problems with your heating: at least you can rely on the stove, the best and warmest analogue technology there is.

All of this may sound a bit selfish and self-centred: the current policy works for me so why change it? But hundreds of thousands of people are in a similar situation. And the fact that ministers thought at one point that clamping down on stoves was a good idea points to some deeper problems with how the current government works.

The most obvious is the division between central-belt and country-belt, urban and rural. The SNP used to be strongest among rural voters but it’s now the other way round; their strongholds are the cities and the poorest parts of them as well. This can lead to a city-centric point of view and policies that do not properly take into account the impact on the countryside and this appears to be what has happened with stoves. Fortunately, the Deputy First Minister is MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch.

(Image: The wood burning stove policy has been reversed)

The Scottish Government also has a real problem with a disconnect between policies that are good in theory – new ferries, bottle deposit scheme, encouraging low-carbon heating – and delivering them in practice. Partly, it’s because of its woeful consultation process which is riddled with confirmation bias; partly, it’s the lack of robust debate within the SNP; partly, it’s the standard of government ministers; and partly it’s because the party has a tendency to think in terms of issues rather than practicalities. Pick an example: self-ID maybe or even independence itself.

All of these flaws were obvious in the handling of the wood-burning stove policy, but at least we got there in the end. Andy Wightman, the former MSP from the former sensible wing of the Scottish Greens, said the ban on stoves was always silly because wood fuel can be a local, sustainable and net-zero fuel that supports local jobs and I see this on the road where I live. The man in the cottage down the road makes his living from selling logs. The logs we burn come from local trees. We do not rely on more damaging forms of fuel that are more common in the cities. It makes sense.

So perhaps the Scottish Government could proceed from here by applying the lessons of the stove U-turn to other areas, and it amounts to the same basic idea: listen to people with experience. Ferries: listen to islanders; what do they need? Bottle deposit: listen to businesses; how will it actually work? Self-ID: listen to women; how might it affect their lives? You get the idea: listen, learn, act rather than act, listen, learn. That way, you might get policy that is effective and practical. You might also avoid the thing that politicians appear to fear the most: the dreaded U-turn.