UNIVERSAL free bus travel should be the Greens' “top proposal” going into the Holyrood election, Ross Greer has said.
The West Scotland MSP believes the policy would help Scots to deal with the cost of living crisis, tackle the climate emergency and bring the backing of new voters – if the party membership got on board.
Greer is one of four contenders for the party’s two co-leadership positions. Dominic Ashmole and fellow MSPs Gillian Mackay and Lorna Slater are also vying to take on the top job.
While the party’s core mission is tackling climate change, Greer argues that the “high watermark” for climate politics was during the series of strikes in 2019, and that now, the main issue for voters is the cost of living.
“That's why the Scottish Greens need to put together our climate and our cost of living policies,” he told The National.
“It’s why I'm proposing that one of our top proposals going into the next election is universal free bus travel.”
Greer pointed to free travel for under 22s, a policy brought in by the party under the Bute House Agreement with the SNP, and that countries like Malta and Luxembourg have already adopted the policy. In Luxembourg, all public transport was made free in March 2020, as part of a bid to reduce emissions and encourage more people to use it.
“We need to put forward policies that will tackle the climate emergency, because we know how urgent that is,” Greer added.
“But those policies also need to help people with the cost of their daily lives. That's why I think universal free bus travel is one of the policies that will really resonate with the public. It will save people money.”
He added that it would allow people to travel across Scotland for work, or leisure, and spend money in their local economies.
“The opportunities of free bus travel from a social perspective are massive,” Greer added.
Greer argued that this leaves two options - either make driving harder and more expensive, or public transport cheaper and easier.
He added: “It costs almost £20 to get a return bus ticket from Fraserburgh to Aberdeen. That is absolutely outrageous, and it is really isolating people who live in communities like Fraserburgh, the folk who own the bus companies though are making an absolute fortune off stuff like this.
“Universal free bus travel is the perfect example of combining climate justice, social justice and economic justice.”
In the Scottish Parliament, he adds, more time is given to debate cars and trains in comparison to buses.
“It's frankly tiny, and that shows the inequality,” he adds.
“Because overwhelmingly, it's people who drive or even take the train who are making the big decisions in Scotland, and a lot of the kind of people who take the bus are very rarely in our Parliament, very rarely have the opportunity to have their voices heard on that.
“I know that's the kind of policy that resonates, and it resonates in every kind of community.”
Need for 'common political strategy'
Greer, long seen as a successor to Patrick Harvie who is still contesting the Holyrood election but is stepping back as co-leader, said that he believes the Greens have “drifted a bit” over the past year after the power-sharing agreement ended.
“We've lacked that sense of shared direction and shared purpose,” he said.
“What we need is to agree a common political strategy. It's the co-leaders job to put that forward. It's for our party’s council, which represents all of our branches and other groups, to debate it, amend it, agree it, reject it. But the co-leaders need to be the ones to, as our constitution says, provide political leadership and put that forward.
“One of the first things I would be doing if I was elected as co-leader is putting forward a strategy that says we focus on a handful of really simple, easy to understand, easy to communicate ideas that combine climate justice and social justice, and top of my list would be free bus travel for everyone.”
With Nigel Farage’s Reform UK undoubtedly set to feature in the 2026 Holyrood campaign, Greer insists that the party “cannot dismiss” the anger voters are feeling as “establishment centrist” parties do.
He explained: “The job of the Scottish Greens is to make it clear to people that it's not the fault of asylum seekers or trans people that everybody's lives are getting harder.
“It's the fault of billionaires, tax avoiders, greedy landlords like polluters.
“They're the people making it harder to get by. They're the people making everything more expensive. And it's all so that they can hoard more wealth themselves and they're going to spend in a thousand lifetimes.
“We can harness that anger rather than dismiss it, and we can channel it into something positive. We can give people hope that this can actually be a better and a fairer and a greener country.”
