HUMILIATION OF HOLYROOD
Millions wasted on pet projects. Second-rate decisions made by third-rate politicians. And laws that fail basic tests. Is it any wonder that Scotland’s ‘wee pretendy parliament’ is held in such contempt?
THE Scottish parliament cost taxpayers a prodigious £414million to build, and stings us for another £72million a year to run, exclusive of MSPs and the staff each hires directly. The First Minister alone is paid £148,995 – on top of the £60,685 she coins as an MSP – and has, at her direction, the country’s top civil servants, Scotland’s keenest legal minds and all the expertise even a devolved administration can confidently command.
So why, as the Supreme Court on Thursday flatly ruled, did the Scottish Government manage to pass an Act that is illegal; a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights infringing the privacy of citizens and the right to family life? And this despite the SNP administration being repeatedly and vocally warned.
Not that Nicola Sturgeon was to be seen anywhere on Thursday; explaining, apologising, accepting responsibility. It was John Swinney – part education chief, part Labrador – who instead braved the media, blustering as best he could and insisting that the five London justices had not condemned the controversial Named Person legislation in principle.
No – but they had emphatically pronounced that, as framed, it was against the law and the Scottish Government must change it. Its mandarins and lawyers are already frantically preparing amendments to clarify – and to tighten – just how much information can be shared by this official or that state snooper without your child (and, indeed, yourself) ever hearing about it.
This is not merely an embarrassment, it is a humiliation; a failure not merely of the SNP and the Scottish Government but of the Scottish parliament itself. Ministers failed to check the law. MSPs failed to scrutinise. Holyrood’s much-vaunted committee function failed to function.
And the opposition parties declined even to oppose. The Children and Young People (Scotland) Act, to give the proposals their formal handle, sailed through Holyrood in June 2014 by 103 votes to nil. Ruth Davidson and her Scottish Conservatives abstained.
How could this happen in a recently established, modern little parliament which, as we were assured from its genesis in 1999, is meant to be efficient, agile and able to legislate swiftly and adroitly on all sorts of problems specific to Scotland?
OF the wretched Named Persons scheme much has already been said. Concerns were raised in spring 2015 about the implications of the Data Protection Act. Police Scotland, a year ago, warned of a ‘lack of clarity’.
Teachers, already buckling at the knees under the strains of Curriculum for Excellence, threatened industrial action. By last July, the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, the Faculty of Advocates, the Law Society of Scotland, Autism Rights, the Christian Institute, CARE Scotland, the Schoolhouse Home Education Institution and four respected national newspapers – led by this one – had all expressed grave concerns.
‘While the intentions of the Bill are clearly benign,’ rumbled the Faculty of Advocates last summer, ‘it does have some potentially insidious aspects.
‘By making indiscriminate provision for possible interference in the lives of all children, rather than providing for focused intervention when the need arises, the Bill risks enshrining a structure that has the potential to be used to undermine families.’
The most sustained and trenchant criticism of the Named Persons scheme came from stalwarts of the traditional family, particularly evangelical Christians, and many believe this made the Nationalists the more thrawn.
As one journalist shrewdly noted from online newspaper comment-threads, the infamous Cybernats – yowling reliably in support of the plan and monstering anyone who dared object to it – kept using the same taunt: ‘religionists’.
In the social and intellectual circles where Miss Sturgeon and her colleagues move, there is no comprehension of faith, a disdain for Christians in particular, occasional mutterings about ‘patriarchy’, and instinctive suspicion of any sphere apart from either the free market or the State – and especially of straight, white men.
‘It’s the sort of attitude favoured by an abysmal little enclave of middle-class handwringers which currently holds sway in civic Scotland,’ warned one observer in April.
‘By pandering to them so unthinkingly the SNP kids itself that it is liberal and edgy. It is nothing of the kind; it is constructing an illiberal, biggovernment control centre that is seeking to insinuate itself into every corner of family life in Scotland… The state has many, many tendrils to sense when there is danger, but it has no right to presume to act as a grim surrogate parent for the nation’s children.’
The Scottish parliament has a history of hasty and slapdash legislation. In its very first year it was badly shaken by Wendy Alexander’s triumphalist bid to repeal the undeniably fatuous Section 28 legislation, a cynical measure from Thatcher’s time to prevent the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local councils. What could have been accomplished with minimal fuss became, thanks to Miss Alexander’s student-union grandstanding, a protracted psychodrama that made Scotland look ridiculous.
But there was much more in this vein. In 2002 Holyrood – adjudged ‘a wee pretendy parliament’ by Billy Connolly – passed a law making fur farms illegal. The last in Scotland had closed nine years earlier. Such ‘virtue-signalling’, characteristic of that generation radicalised in the 1980s, has proved its besetting sin: a fondness for posturing over practicalities.
The Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act 2002, which banned hunting with dogs, was so ineptly drafted that, in the Borders, men ride to hounds as exuberantly as ever. On the Act’s tenth birthday, the Scottish Countryside Alliance smugly pointed out that three times as many foxes are now killed annually – shot, these days, rather than being despatched by the pack.
Like the Named Persons plan, the alcohol minimum pricing scheme was holed below the waterline by European legislation and, thanks to the Scotch Whisky Association’s suit, is set to languish long in the courts.
The Offensive Behaviour At Football Act 2012 is another verse in a very old, bourgeois Scottish game – tut-tutting at the low pleasures of the poor.
In a land where you can freely buy Mein Kampf or the worst pornography, you can now be arrested for singing The Sash My Father Wore. Indeed, as columnist Alex Massie has pointed out: ‘The law as written and enforced allows for the creation of entirely fictitious or imaginary people who might have been offended had they existed and had they been present to hear the alleged criminal offences (songs, chiefly) being committed…’
The SNP was even forced – at length – to clarify that in no circumstances would it ever be a crime to sing the National Anthem. Yet, in the Scotland the Nationalists are rapidly engineering, we may soon be in
danger of arrest for practically anything. ‘Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media,’ purred Police Scotland on Twitter the other Christmas, ‘and any offensive comments will be investigated.’
THE SNP, at least, alone had the sense to oppose Edinburgh’s fateful bid to bring back the trams. But the minority Nationalist government was outvoted in 2007, and legislation for the £350million project forced through. The first trams were to run in 2009… and the rest is history. The truncated route did not open till June 2014, after untold disruption, traffic chaos and serious damage to retail trade, and at the gulping cost of £776million (with over £200million more in ongoing interest).
After such mortifying reprise of the Holyrood construction debacle [our odd-looking parliament building finally opened in 2004, having cost ten times the original £40million estimate] Alex Salmond naturally announced an inquiry into the trams farce.
It would, he boomed, be ‘swift and thorough’. Two years on, the inquiry itself has cost the taxpayer almost £4million – and has yet to report. Indeed, there is little public awareness of just how fat a fortune has been squandered by the incompetence of Scotland’s rulers.
Some £60million was wasted before Police Scotland finally gave up on their new, unified IT system. The new Queensferry Crossing will now be at least six months late. ‘Bad weather’ is blamed, those in command having apparently planned for several years of unfailing calm and sun.
Scotland’s new IT system for NHS 24 is four years late and still not in operation – the bill so far is £118million. Yet another one, automating payments to our farmers, crofters and smallholders, has now been scaled down and ministers had to beg for an extension of the EU deadline: the bill, £178million.
Consultants and businesses are doing famously out of all this and those finally, incontestably unmasked for ocean-going incompetence – after years of drawing fat salaries and pensions – pocket handsome golden goodbyes.
Sir Stephen House, whose command of Police Scotland will be best remembered for gun-toting cops in Highland villages and the frisking of thousands of Scottish schoolchildren, walked away with £500,000.
Meanwhile, far below them in the food chain, people who will never in their lives be in the higher tax-brackets lose their jobs while lifeline services are cut – and it has taken a court in distant London to derail the latest lump of inept and illthought legislation. How has it all gone so wrong? It started with an electoral system expressly designed to favour parties with regional concentrations of support – meaning a perpetual Labour and Lib Dem coalition.
It was thought the SNP would languish come the advent of devolution but no one had foreseen a day when its support would touch 50 per cent across the board. Now, on two successive occasions, the SNP – with the Greens as independenceminded Marxist-Lentillists – have won an absolute majority.
That makes a mockery of the committee system and has allowed the Nats in 2011 to crown one of their own as Presiding Officer while embarking on a continuing campaign of secularist social engineering, ruthless centralisation and constant banging on about independence.
It is deliciously ironic that SNP laws have now twice been stuffed by the EU they so noisily adore – and the more so when it slowly dawns on them, as it will, that Britain’s departure from the EU does not make Scotland’s independence inevitable – it will make it very much harder to win.
But there is a broader cultural problem in the kind of people who now seek a career in pro politics and the way all parties select their candidates.
SADLY, the day is long past when, say, a local Conservative association could sound out some nice, sensible farmer and put him on the ballot. All candidates bidding for a seat in Holyrood, from the four major parties, must first pass muster from a centrally approved list. Labour compounded this with its insistence, in about half the winnable seats, on women-only shortlists.
The result, in 1999, was a parliament packed with numpties or, as one commentator mocked, ‘a shoal of Karens’. There were too many Labour MSPs of mortifyingly low ability. Most have since been swept away.
Nationalists have tended to be of keener brains but – especially as the party has welded itself to power – spineless character. It has built a veritable army of spin doctors and special advisers tasked, it seems, with forming an impenetrable layer between public and politicians.
Something is profoundly wrong when we know that 29 per cent of Scots who voted Brexit are habitual SNP voters, but not a single elected Nationalist came out against Europe.
And any parliament is subtly debauched when, increasingly, its members deny constituents what they owe them most – their own private judgment.
We have met, off the record, not a few Nationalist MSPs who viewed same-sex marriage with disgust; think the hypothesis of man-made climate-change utter baloney; know that when the oil and gas runs out we will need nuclear energy and would even accept Trident [if only as a bargaining-chip in negotiations for independence].
But, publicly, they toe the party line, ask their planted questions, side with the political correctness of the hour, put up meekly with abominable rudeness from SNP ministers and rubber-stamp everything put before them – less elected legislators than a meek, compliant wife.
That is bad for governance. And, in time, it will prove very bad indeed for the SNP.