CLIMATE targets ditched last year were “a fiction” designed to allow the Scottish government to “pat itself on the back,” according to a former minister.

Goals to slash emissions in Scotland by 75 per cent by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050 was passed by parliament in 2019.

But Scottish Green co-leader Lorna Slater says her party “knew that those weren’t achievable targets,” despite their backing an even tougher target of 80 per cent at the time.

Ms Slater went on to serve minister for green skills, circular economy and biodiversity in the SNP-Green coalition from 2021 until its collapse in 2024.

She  told the Institute for Government think tank: “Maintaining targets that we knew we couldn’t hit and that everybody’s known for years that we weren’t going to hit was a fiction that allowed the Scottish government to pat itself on the back and go, ‘Oh, we’ve got these fantastic targets’, while doing nothing.

“Nothing is probably unfair … but doing none of the hard stuff.

“I felt, and many people felt, that maintaining those targets was a bit of fiction that we were allowing to cover up for a lack of action.”

Ms Slater’s remarks echo those of SNP net zero secretary Mairi McAllan who admitted to a Holyrood committee in May that the targets were “always beyond what was possible.”

Ms McAllan had scrapped the goals a month earlier after a damning report from the statutory climate change committee which described the 75 per cent target “beyond credible.”

Within 12 days the already strained Bute House agreement between the SNP and Greens had been terminated by First Minister Humza Yousaf, itself prompting calls for Holyrood vote of no confidence which forced his resignation on April 29.