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The Sunday Mail today takes the historic step of backing the Scottish Green Party in the European elections.

The Euro poll in 11 days has been turned into a proxy referendum on Brexit – the issue which has crippled our politics for almost three years and counting.

Meanwhile, we are faced with a genuine emergency which is, in relative terms, being ignored. Climate change is the biggest issue confronting our country and our planet.

According to the Royal Society of Great Britain, the rise in CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere poses a serious threat to our existence unless urgent action is taken.

Across the world, the Green movement is growing, with the need to safeguard future generations from the effects of global warming a critical priority.

(Image: Handout)

Yet in Britain, in 2019, this most pressing issue plays second fiddle to a seemingly never-ending festival of tedium about how we interact with the countries in closest proximity to our own. That’s shameful. And the best way to deliver this message to politicians in our established parties is with a Green vote.

For decades, the Greens have been dismissed as a well-meaning but frivolous collection of hippies who might have a point about the environment but who couldn’t be trusted with their hands on the tiller of a first-world economy.

That’s no longer the case. The movement is serious, it’s grown up and it’s here to stay.

Yes, the Green election manifesto largely focuses on the environment.

But the party also now has a developed picture including proposals on regenerating communities which have never recovered from post-industrial decline with their job-creating Green New Deal.

The Green Party is pro-Remain and stuck to its guns at every stage in the Brexit negotiations.

Here, the Green group at Holyrood has much to be proud of.

Their input in Government has had a huge role in committing Scotland to some of the world’s most ambitious climate change targets.

They have an excellent leading candidate in this election in Maggie Chapman, the rector of Aberdeen University, whose background as a grassroots campaigner and activist has won her enormous respect throughout her home city of Edinburgh and beyond.

These European elections have been described as the most important the UK has ever faced.

(Image: Getty Images)

At the last election in 2014, Chapman was pipped by David Coburn, a Ukip politician so obnoxious that Nigel Farage wants nothing to do with him.

What a message it would send if Scotland elected a Green MEP and rejected Farage’s Brexit party, Ukip and the sinister band of vaudevillian characters who sail in both.

It would give fresh legitimisation to the issue of climate change and make it more difficult for the cause to be framed as the preserve of a rent-a-mob group of protesters, hypocritical celebs and cranks.

It would give succour to the school kids so motivated by doing something about climate change that they staged a strike with the sole intention of getting the issue up the agenda.

It would tell our major parties we are sick of the Brexit obsession and constitutional bickering.

It might just be a start in rearranging some very skewed priorities.

The Sunday Mail has a proud history in tackling prejudice and fighting for social justice – though we do value our neutrality in party politics.

Our backing of the Green Party doesn’t mean we agree with them on everything – and doesn’t necessarily mean we’d follow them on the Yes side of a new independence referendum.

In this election, though, their manifesto and vision chimes clearly with our values and the interests of our readers.

It is incumbent on all of us to do all that we can to safeguard the health of our planet for future generations.

Voting Green in the European elections is an easy but important step in achieving those aims.