Last week, seeking to question Health Secretary Michael Matheson about his strange holiday arrangements and extravagant expense claims, members of the Scottish parliament’s press corps arrived at their usual spot outside the debating chamber to discover a cordon had been erected.
Up until now, reporters had been able to form a ‘scrum’ around politicians as they emerged from the chamber, all the better to press them for answers on the issue of the day. This is what had happened to Mr Matheson the week before when the discrepancies in his story began to emerge. Last week, however, the parliamentary authorities decided it was time to put the media in a pen. They stood behind: the politicians walked in front.
It’s a small thing, perhaps – taken, the media were informed, for health and safety purposes (apparently they were blocking the stairs). But it struck me as a significant symbol nonetheless. Despite the best efforts of many MSPs and its Presiding Officer Alison Johnston, our parliament lacks the tools to be an effective scrutineer of government. Too many of its members willingly put themselves behind a cordon, allowing the Government to walk past without question. It is something that has to change.
Partly this is the fault of the great Scottish public. Since 2011, we have given immense power to one party – the SNP – handing it an iron grip over our democratic institutions.
Thanks to this, it dominates the parliament’s committees and can rule on how the parliament is run, making things as easy as possible for the Government in St Andrew’s House.
Health Secretary Michael Matheson being quizzed by the Press over his £11,000 iPad bill
Problem
But the problem here isn’t the SNP per se, though it has used its power ruthlessly. The problem is that when we decide to elect one political party in such numbers, it turns out the democratic institutions we’ve built to hold them to account don’t.
So much for the balance and separation of powers; devolution has landed us with one immense new power in the land – the Scottish Government – which has sucked up the parliament into its orbit.
We’ve seen this in the past few days in the parliament’s attempts to get to grips with ministers when they mislead and lie.
Firstly, there is the business with Mr Matheson. Right from the off, it’s been the cordoned-off media which has put the minister on the spot, seeking answers on behalf of the public. The parliament itself – not so much.
Last week, for example, when Mr Matheson made his apologia, opposition MSPs were given only ten minutes to cross-examine him. No wonder Scots Tory leader Douglas Ross is demanding Mr Matheson return to the chamber to respond to the many questions that remain – though it’s doubtful he’ll be heard.
Then there’s Humza Yousaf’s use of statistics. Last year, Mr Yousaf misled parliament, claiming – wrongly – that Scotland had ‘the majority of renewables and natural resources’ in the UK.
Rather than admitting to a mistake, however, Mr Yousaf came up with an elaborate excuse, insisting he had forgotten to include ‘per capita’ at the end of the sentence which, when added, made the sentence correct.
Private government papers released under freedom of information strongly suggest Mr Yousaf had ‘reverse engineered’ his excuse, making up a spurious reason to cover up his error. It stinks, yet the sorry episode came to a conclusion on Monday when Mr Yousaf announced he had decided to exonerate himself, refusing to refer the matter on for an independent probe.
It is for him, as First Minister, to decide whether he, as First Minister, should be investigated. Parliament was left to twiddle its thumbs.
The lack of accountability is astonishing. But these are trivial matters compared to the most important question of whether parliament is doing its job in scrutinising and challenging the big government decisions of the day. And here too, we see a shortfall.
Humza Yousaf claimed – wrongly – that Scotland had ‘the majority of renewables and natural resources’ in the UK
Calibre
Some blame the calibre of our MSPs. Giving the Donald Dewar lecture in Glasgow last week, veteran SNP backbencher Fergus Ewing declared: ‘Some now see legislation as an opportunity for virtue-signalling, politicking or creating broad frameworks which pass all substantive powers from the parliament to the executive, thus bypassing more probing scrutiny.’
He has a point: thanks largely to his party’s record over the past 16 years, a healthy culture of intellectual scrutiny and careful scepticism – vital for any parliament – has at Holyrood simply gone missing. It was thought the parliament’s committees would provide this kind of probing. The parliament’s founders believed they would become Holyrood’s House of Lords – revising legislation without fear of the party whips. But the reality has been rather different.
Giving evidence at the Scottish affairs committee earlier this month, the former Labour MP George, now Lord, Robertson said: ‘I do feel disappointment that the committee system has not been as robust as we hoped, and that the party discipline has been far too tight and has therefore not allowed a flowering of debate and discussion, with the variety of views that you would normally have expected.’
He is entirely right. The great irony of Holyrood is that while it was supposed to provide a ‘new politics’ markedly different to Westminster, the reality has been – to quote Professor James Mitchell, one of our foremost political experts – that it has copied Westminster’s tribalism, and placed ‘a Holyrood cherry on top’.
So what should be done? One imbalance that can be immediately corrected is over numbers. Scotland has way too many ministers: there are no fewer than 30 well-paid members of the Government now toeing the party line. The Government should be told to cap that at 18 (the numbers that Alex Salmond made do with in 2007).
This would not only increase the number of backbenchers whose primary job would be to run the rule over the legislation of the day and shorten the ministerial gravy train; the money saved could be used to give committee conveners a supplement to their salary, denoting the importance of their role.
The think tank I work for, Our Scottish Future, has suggested that jobs on committees should be for MSPs to decide, not party bosses. Tough committee conveners such as the SNP’s Kenny Gibson, Labour’s Richard Leonard and the Conservatives’ Edward Mountain are all leading the way: we need to encourage more of their colleagues to follow.
Watchdogs
As things stand, the most effective scrutineers on government in Scotland today lie outside parliament: with the media, with impartial watchdogs such as the heroic Audit Scotland organisation, and think tanks like These Islands, the small pro-Union group whose dogged pursuit of SNP obfuscation has recently forced ministers into some long-overdue truth-telling.
This can’t be right. Whether you wish the Scottish parliament well, or whether you’d rather the whole thing were razed to the ground, it would be to all our benefit if our parliament in Edinburgh bared some sharper teeth. Faced by a government that has made an art form of evasion, it is the least the public deserves.