Continuing the series of blog posts looking at the chapters of the 2001 book ‘What future for Scotland?’ from the Policy Institute, we now turn to the second chapter ‘A constituional sleight of hand’ by Gerald Warner, columnist at the Scotland on Sunday and Telegraph.

The Executive Summary states: There is one ‘nuclear option’ open to Westminster, which would make accountability real and would bring the devolved parliament into stark interface with its electorate. The Scotland Act could be amended to include a proviso that any Scottish election where the turnout fell below a certain percentage would be ipso facto invalid. By imposing such a qualification for Holyrood, the prospect of four consensual parties carving up power, to the exclusion of their own electorate, would be eliminated.

There’s a lot that can be said from even the several short sentences above. For one, the indication that the writer was not in favour of the Scottish Parliament comes through (to me at least) loud and clear. For a book looking at Scotland’s Future, it is odd to decide to talk of Westminster neutering a Parliament that is only two years old when there is no reason to believe that Holyrood would work just as effectively as any other Parliament across the world. It is an exanmple of the negativity that Holyrood itself was built to shake off Scotland’s back.

Another interesting point to note is that, far from four (three, two or even one in the SNP’s case) conensual parties “carving up power”, each of the three Governments that have been formed in Scotland and completed their terms have largely delivered, or at least attempted to deliver, what they promised to in their manifestos. Compare and contrast with the current UK Government (a comparison I won’t dwell on) and the Scottish Parliament looks positively buxom in its healthiness. It does beg the question therefore why anyone would assume Holyrood is any more likely of falling short with a democratic deficit than Westminster (or, say, the European Parliament) would.

However, at its core, this chapter deserves to be taken at face value whereby turnout needs to be above a certain level in order for an election to be valid. So, where better to start than by looking at turnouts in Scottish Parliament elections in the past four elections:

1999 – 59%
2003 – 49%
2007 – 52%
2011 – 50%

Technically that is a declining trend which would, strictly speaking, support the notion that interest in Holyrood is waning. However, the turnout in 1999 is presumably higher simply because it was the first election and there was a novelty to going out to that ballot box the first time. The bump in 2007 may be due to the election being so close that year (I am not going to entertain the notion that 2011 should have seen a bump with Scots rushing out to vote Yes or NO to AV).

Gerald writes with typical intellect and literal references that I shan’t reproduce, other than to note his opening mentioning of the earliest Scottish soundbite from the Roman era, coming from a defeated Caledonian chief – ‘They make a desert and call it peace’. So born, according to Gerald, was the grievance politics that has supposedly plagued Scotland for much of the time since.

It is this grievance that devolution sprang from, the “weasel worded” ‘democratic deficit’ supposedly used to cloak more selfish interests by the parties of the left in Scotland. Gerald charts the history of the Scottish Parliament, from 1967 when the Tories supported an Assembly via Edward Heath’s Declaration of Perth, through to 1999 when “at the zenith of (the Scottish Parliament’s popularity”, the number of people voting Yes was 1,775,045, out of an electorate of just under 4 million.

Gerald goes on to point to further democratic deficits in the system, the first of which lives on today and is surely unsustainable. “Out of
129 MSPs, 56 are ‘elected’ from closed lists, drawn up by the party leadership. The elector is constrained to vote for an anonymous ‘regional’ candidate by endorsing a political party rather than an individual.”

I agree with the unsatisfactory nature of this method to Holyrood elections. We are seeing voting fodder being put into the Scottish Parliament and it seems undemocratic that, of the 8 MSPs that represent any one Scot, he/she only had a direct say in the suitability of one of them.

Granted, this, to an extent, is the price we pay for PR and we can (and should) join parties to ensure a healthy democracy resides within political parties as well as outside of them. However, there is no valid argument for closed lists over open lists that I can see if we not only want a stronger democracy but want to attract more quality and more variety to the ballot slip.

Gerald continues the article by arguing that Holyrood safeguards the vested interests of the four main parties, either through increased representation relative to Westminster (SNP, Tories) or increased power and privilege (Labour/Lib Dems) and, under such circumstances, who is is going to “actively seek root and branch reform of the Scotland Act, for fear of becoming turkeys voting for Christmas”?

It’s a good question but it’s relevance hinges on the question of how bad things really are. Are the people really shut out from debate? Is there endemic corruption at the Scottish Parliament? They are notions that would appeal to the conspiracy theorists out there but my impression is that the Parliament is, and largely always has been, a tight ship run efficiently by whoever happens to have their hands on the tiller.

Perhaps the most cutting part of Gerald’s piece is the needlessly personal attack that “MSPs are recruited from the most venal and least articulate elements of the nation”. Now, to be fair, the broad argument that is being made here is something that I have voiced before so I can’t be too critical. Holyrood is a far cry from the greatest minds of the nation wrestling with the economic, science, sociological issues of the day and, often, merely a miserable extension of student politic with salaries attached.

However, natural selection at each election has largely driven standards higher to the point that the SNP is now a professional outfit and is being rewarded accordingly, with the other parties playing catch up in a ‘race to the top’ that will serve Holyrood very well indeed. Gerald’s expectations started out low and, if anything, when looking forwards sunk deeper. That is not the positive, optimistic outlook that I wish to see in our political culture and it betrays a defeatism that has been the scourge of Scotland for far too long.

The pinpointing of the shortcomings of the d’hondt system is the shining light of Gerald’s article but his proposed solutions are a regressive rather than progressive step:

(1) 118 MSPs elected through FPTP, two each from the 59 Westminster boundaries that currently exist (presumably this dropping to 50 constituencies would reduce the number of MSPs to a positively anaemic 100?).
(2) “The Scotland Act could be amended to iclude a proviso that any Scottish election where the turnout fell below a certain percentage would be ipso facto invalid”

Both solutions are terrible ideas. The first suggestion would lead to a very poor Parliament with smaller parties not represented at all and, much of the time, one party dominating proceedings even more so than the SNP do currently.

The second suggestion is unnecessary as, as I have shown, turnout is holding up reasonably well, and, anyway, this suggestion insinuates that politicians currently believe that the public exists to serve MSPs rather than the other way around. I have no doubt that politicians of all parties in Scotland would dearly love for turnout to be 100% and they certainly put the hard yards in to ensure that this is the case. To punish the very people who are holding democracy together in Scotland, the people who join parties, put policy papers together, deliver leaflets and organise hustings would be to deal a needlessly self-inflicting blow on ourselves and create a hole in our society. Who would write the cheques if the 2011 election result, for example, was deemed invalid? What chaos would ensue then?

The Scottish Parliamet deserves to be held to the same standard as other Parliaments across the world, no higher and no lower. In trying to apply unique constraints on Holyrood, an instiution that the writer clearly didn’t want created in the first place, one has to question the motives behind the largely unnecessary suggestions put forward in this article.

However, on moving from closed party lists to open party lists at election time, Gerald Warner has a proposal that is still relevant today, even if it is perhaps the right answer for the wrong reasons.

Back in the Stone Age of Scottish Devolution, 2001, a small book was published by the Policy Institute called ‘What future for Scotland?’. The book consisted of “eight leading writers and commentators providing a critical analysis and radical suggestions for reform”.

Ten years have passed but how relevant are these same ideas from a decade ago? Have they already been incorporated, are they urgently needed or have events resulted in these proposals no longer being necessary? They say that those who forget the lessons of the past are forced to repeat them, so, I decided (in part due to the dearth of bloggable subjects for the Better Nation team at the current time) to take each in turn over the next week or two and flesh them out into a blog post. So I hope this goes well because there’ll be seven more of them coming soon.

The first chapter in this book is rather negatively entitled ‘Why devolution has disappointed’ and was written by Katie Grant (from what I can establish, a journalist and author).

The executive summary to this chapter states: Devolution may, arguably, have empowered the Scottish people in parochial terms but it has, without doubt, terminally weakened the national and international standing of the country itself. Since the 1999 Scottish elections, Scotland’s voice at the Cabinet table has diminished to little more than a squeak. In bargaining terms the position of Secretary of State for Scotland has been sidelined without the position of First Minister filling the vacuum.

In making her point that the Scottish Parliament was surplus to requirements, Katie quoted the foreign correspondent of the Swedish broadsheet newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Lars Ryding, who said “I think Swedes would opt for interesting rather than important when it comes to devolution. It reminds people that there are several national identities under the Great Britain umbrella. In that sense, devolution has definitely added to Scotland’s profile here. It will never, however, be a big issue with the Swedish media but it has whetted the interest in those, quite many Swedes, who pay some kind of attention to the UK.’

Now, I don’t think the point of devolution was ever to fill column inches in European newsrooms and nor was it necessarily to raise Scotland’s standing in the wider world. I find it particularly ironic that a Swede provided the above quote as it was 1999 no less that devolution came to Sweden, with SkÃ¥ne (pop: 1.3m) opening its Regional Assembly. I can’t remember that making the front page of the Daily Record or Scotsman back then but someone in that country must have deemed it a good idea for local people to decide on issues like transport and healthcare locally nonetheless.

Looking within Scotland, I find Katie’s points much more persuasive. Bemoaning the £242m spent on “parliamentary administration” and the £257m on “electronic service delivery”, Katie wonders quite reasonably if that money might actually be better spent elsewhere. The argument the other way that “devolution brings benefits that far outweigh (this) expenditure” is mooted but how can we know that the public’s expectations are being met and value for money is being realised.

This is something that I have wondered myself recently. At a stroke we could do away with a whole tranche of political activity that sits between MP and councillor and, well, would we really miss it? Even all the ancillary bodies do seem to be surplus to requirements. Do we need to have a Scottish Parliament that pays money to ASH Scotland that only exists to help us stop smoking? I’m sure there are plentiful other examples and, at the end of the day, what have any of your many MSPs (list or constituency) actually done for you that wouldn’t have been achieved without Holyrood in place? Is it worth all that money sloshing its way out of the country’s coffers for 12 years? (I would say yes, but only just)

Katie took this notion and, having noted that there was not a clamour for the closure of Holyrood back in 1999, effectively challenged the Scottish Parliament to meet the public’s expectations – “To be deemed a success, devolution needs to be seen as crucial to turning Scotland into a place both financially and socially dynamic”.

I would personally say that that has happened. Katie mentioned that the only thing going for Scotland is tourism and to an extent that does still remain but, despite a geographical disadvantage, we in Scotland do seem to hold our own against European countries in terms of growth and employment and, furthermore, the opportunity that renewables has offered has been taken with both hands by the Scottish Government when the UK Government may well have been more sluggish and more butterfingers about the potential that our wind, waves and tidal provide.

Katie’s suggestion that the Minister for Enterprise should be “devolution’s most important post” in order to “wean Scots away from the diet of whinge and welfare” still rings true even now in 2011, and under a Government with different party colours from 2001, but that is a decades old problem that would exist with or without devolution, and devolution surely provides a better model for moving on and getting Scotland working again simply through a Government being closer to the root of the problem.

Katie’s open wondering as to where the modern equivalent of the Tay and Forth Bridge will emanate from has an obvious answer in the new Forth Road Crossing, a less obvious answer in the largest onshore windfarm in Europe and largest tidal project in the world and even a silly answer in the Edinburgh trams adventure. Projects and investments that arguably wouldn’t have happened without a Scottish Parliament.

It perhaps says a lot about how much I disagree with this article that the rare plaudit that Katie gives the then Scottish Executive is something that I can’t accept: “The school rebuilding programme, achieved through the controversial PFI formula, has been a welcome and tangible sign of Executive action.” “Labour MSP wobbles over PFI vanished as soon as they realised that building sites with “Scottish Executive” written all over them were worth a dozen consultation papers.”

The exorbitant cost of these PFI contracts are well-documented and it was sheer folly to believe that the public could get so much for supposedly so little and, of course, we shall be paying interest on those shiny schools and hospitals for decades to come. A controversial suggestion that winning votes was a deal-breaker is not somethin that I would suggest but it’s hardly an edifying defence of a spending decision if you ask me.

Katie goes on to bemoan “the lack of a role for the Secretary of State for Scotland”, a concern that has certainly continued up to 2011. I may have complimented Jim Murphy personally and professionally in my previous post but the role that he held at the tail end of the last Labour Government was surplus to requirements, through little fault of his own. The truth is Scotland is over-represented and it doesn’t need both devolution and a distinct Cabinet role. How Michael Moore fills his time is beyond me. Furthermore, why Scotland deserves such representation and, say, Cornwall or Yorkshire doesn’t has always seemed a little mystifying.

This diminished role for the Scotland Office is not a failure of devolution, quite the contrary. The unrivalled profile and prestige that the FM position now carries (possibly only mostly due to the current incumbent) is to Scotland and devolution’s benefit and if a UK Government feels it has to ‘man mark’ the First Minister then so be it. The “bargaining power” that Katie craved now exists through a First Minister that has publicly stood Scotland’s ground arguably more effectively than a Sec of State would have behind closed doors. 

Even the specific areas that Katie pinpointed as being “disappointments” have not been borne out one decade on, the “haemhorraging away of jobs” doesn’t stack up against Scotland’s robust employment figures, the “fast collapsing”, “financially insupportable” free care for the elderly continues on and Scotland’s student fees strategy is proving quite the opposite of “restricting” with fees kept at bay. There is no better endorsement of the Scottish Government and the optimism that Scotland holds than a returning of that Government with a majority to go further than it has before.

So, has devolution disappointed? In the round the answer would have to be no. If devolution is indeed a process then that process is still unfolding and complete success, be it Scotland’s standing in Europe, full independence or a mature relationship with the rest of the UK, is a time that is not yet with us, but there is a greater sense that that moment is at hand than there was in 2001 and, for that reason, I have to conclude that the title of Katie’s article is not only incorrect but no longer as relevant as it was when written.