Politics Notebook #1: Whose parliament?
The political divide at Holyrood is not what you think it is.
Today MSPs at Holyrood will debate a report on ‘embedding public participation in the work of the parliament’.
Brought by Jackson Carlaw on behalf of the citizen participation and public petitions committee, the debate will consider the experiment of citizens’ panels, which purport to involve ordinary voters in the parliamentary process. The committee report calls for two more of these panels to be set up and for them to become a permanent feature from the next session onwards.
I am against citizens’ panels on the grounds that MSPs are for them and therefore they must be a terrible idea. It’s not that more input from the voters would be a bad thing, it’s just that no mechanism devised or endorsed by MSPs will ever permit meaningful input. Citizens’ panels are one of those hollow box-ticking exercises that allow political elites to tell themselves they are listening to the voters while continuing to ignore them.
The Scottish Parliament is not the parliament of the Scottish people. It is the parliament of the political establishment. It is the preferences and priorities of that establishment which are to the fore every time Holyrood legislates. The polls told us voters didn’t want the Hate Crimes Act or the Gender Recognition Reform Bill but that’s what they got because it’s what the political elites wanted and they are the only people who matter.
One of the mistakes the general public makes is in thinking Scottish politics is a contest between SNP, Tory, Labour and the rest, or a competition between supporters and opponents of independence. Party and constitutional differences are real but much less pronounced than you might assume. The sharpest dividing line in politics in Scotland is between the political establishment and the people. There is no gap in worldview or policy between any of the parties as stark as that between Holyrood and the voters it supposedly exists to serve.
That’s why the legislative agenda is unrecognisable to ordinary people: Holyrood isn’t there to represent you, it’s there to provide jobs for a ruling class that resents you. And it’s why there are no great clashes of ideas. Ideas are dangerous. Ideas can lead to change. Ideas can lead to conflict. The conflict you think you see at Holyrood is nothing more than play-acting for the TV cameras. There is no genuine conflict because across the yellow team, blue team, red team, every team, there is very little dispute about ideas that matter.
The role of government, the structure of the state, reform of public services, human rights, immigration, the response to climate change, identity politics — these matters and many more are the subject of a consensus over which the voters have no input. And if a citizens’ panel were to say any of that to Holyrood, it would be the last one ever held.
Lord Elder, the Labour peer who has died aged 73, was one of the architects of devolution but thankfully that was not the summit of his achievements. After undergoing a heart transplant in 1988, he embarked on a mission to bag every Munro in Scotland, and he did. As Gordon Brown notes in his Times obituary for Elder:
He completed his round of the Munro peaks with an ascent of Beinn Sgritheall in 2007, and is number 3897 in the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s list of Munroists. He showed brute determination to complete his Munros, often climbing on his own without a phone. “If something happens, it happens,” he told my brother.
To climb the Munros is one thing. To climb them as a heart transplant patient is another entirely. They don’t make them like that anymore.
Justin Trudeau looks to be in real trouble in Canada. His Liberals have been polling behind the opposition Tories for more than a year now, but in the last month or so the slide has started to become a slump. The most recent survey, by Pallas, has Trudeau fils trailing Pierre Poilievre‘s party by 16 percentage points. Of course, there are two years to go before he needs to call another election, and plenty of time for the Conservatives to bugger their chances, but it looks like the shine has finally come off golden boy.
Really liked your articles. Sooner the Scottish parliament is shut down the better.
Has the first entry been written by Stephen or perhaps Effie? It looks more like "her" style.
Either way, it should be carved at the entrance of the Scottish parliament (capitalisation meant) and taught to children at school.