STEPHEN DAISLEY: As MSPs head for the beaches, a question... Would we REALLY be any worse off if they just didn't come back?

Daily Mail​

18 hours ago

Imagine it is May 2021, a few weeks on from the Scottish parliament election, the sixth such poll held since devolution began. Only this time it's different.
This time, Holyrood doesn't reconvene. No presiding officer is elected, no oaths taken, no committee conveners appointed. The parliament lies empty.
It goes on like this for weeks, then months, until it becomes apparent that MSPs will never show up. The reason for their absence is unimportant.
Maybe they've secured more gainful employment as a travelling circus, a major career change insofar as it would involve travelling.
In every other way, however, there is continuity. Schools stay open, the NHS groans on, police still investigate your tweets, and councils empty your 15 wheelie bins sporadically while charging rates that would force the Emir of Qatar into a payment plan.
All remains as before, budgets are allocated to services, but the 2021-26 parliament never sits and never passes legislation.
Question: can you think of a single way in which you would have been worse off under this scenario?
I ask because MSPs have just packed up their offices for summer recess, the last before the forthcoming Scottish parliament election, which must be held by the first week of May 2026.
But as the politicians root around for their buckets and spades, I've been digging through the record of this parliamentary year and indeed the entire session, which is what prompted my little thought experiment.
Because this parliament is surely the most insubstantial and inconsequential since the dawn of devolution.
A do-nothing assembly that, on the occasions when it rouses itself to action, confirms the wisdom of its original instinct.
It is this parliament which brought forward the final draft of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, rammed through Holyrood in a marathon run of late-night sittings shortly before Christmas 2022.
Women's rights campaigners and legal scholars cautioned that its plans for self-identified gender changes would fall foul of Britain-wide equalities legislation, not least when it came to single-sex spaces.
Parliament would not listen and then received the ultimate slap-down when Scottish Secretary Alister Jack made history and became the first holder of his office to block a Holyrood bill.
The Scottish parliament fumed but the Court of Session sided with Mr Jack.
MSPs had no cause for pique. Most showed themselves to be singularly incurious when it came to gender legislation, satisfied to regurgitate the dubious talking points of taxpayer-funded lobby groups rather than doing their jobs as legislators.
Pursuing self-ID was a Nicola Sturgeon pet project, but it was also necessitated by her reckless decision to bring the Greens into government, handing ministerial power to an anti-capitalist doomsday cult that hitches its yurt to every policy fad on the go.
This included the deposit return scheme, a thoroughly reasonable notion in theory, until Lorna Slater got her hands on it and drove it into the ground, alienating small businesses along the way.
And in return for the votes of these ego-warriors, sensible, long-standing Scottish Government positions had to be jettisoned.
An undertaking to fully dual the A96, a notorious accident blackspot, was diluted down to the weakest water.
Despite the inclusion of an environmentalist party in Scotland's government, St Andrew's House missed target after target in its loudly proclaimed quest to cut emissions.
Eventually, Holyrood scrapped annual and interim targets altogether.
Failure has been a hallmark of this parliament. Take the PISA report confirming that performance in maths, science and reading continues to slump and Scottish schoolchildren lag behind their English counterparts in all three.
Take the attainment gap, the closure of which Sturgeon asked to be judged on. It has widened, but that cannot be pinned on the former First Minister alone.
It was the duty of parliament to hold her to account, but this parliament could not rise to its obligations.
In this session, Holyrood has seen three First Ministers (so far) and neither Sturgeon, nor Humza Yousaf, nor John Swinney could be said to have feared parliament very often.
All three warrant a share of the blame for the post-Covid NHS recovery that never materialised.
For the habitually missed emergency care and cancer treatment waiting times.
For the shame of elderly people forced to part with their life savings to pay for hip and cataract operations.
Holyrood, the guardian of the people's interests, has attached no meaningful political price to this dire record.
The same can be said of the Ferguson Marine fiasco, a slow-motion catastrophe that a more diligent and effective parliament could have stopped in its tracks.
Yet as with so many of the topics at issue, MSPs, and we're talking specifically about Nationalist MSPs, chose to put party before country and keep their mouths shut.
They saw their remit as that of parliamentary clapometers, there to make noise but not trouble.
Taxpayers, especially those who rely on islands transport, bore the brunt of their cowardly partisanship.
That word right there – 'partisan' – might just be a one-word summation of Holyrood's problem.
Too many of its members regard themselves as components of a political bloc instead of elected representatives tasked with challenging, scrutinising and checking executive power.
Recall how Nationalist MSPs rallied round Michael Matheson after he tried to bill the taxpayer for his holiday iPad use.
A more basic test of fidelity, whether it is owed to parliament or exclusively to party, there could not be. And dozens of MSPs failed it.
Holyrood is a parliament in which parliamentarians are in the minority.
There is very little reason to expect things will improve in the eight months that remain when MSPs return from summer recess.
This session will end with as much distinction as it has conducted itself thus far, and of what comes next we can only guess.
Donald Dewar promised so much of Holyrood but even if he had been more circumspect, what we've got could only be a source of acrid disappointment.
Who can say if things would be better had devolution never happened, but it's hard to imagine they could be any worse.
This column began with a thought experiment, and it ends with another.
Imagine you were given the opportunity to return to September 11, 1997, the day of the Scottish parliament referendum, retaining full knowledge of what has happened in the quarter century since Scots voted for legislative devolution.
You head to your polling station, go into the booth, and poise your pencil over the paper.
This time around, you know what's coming.
The paucity of ambition, the dearth of delivery, the inevitability of failure. Much will not get better, some things will get worse, and the poor and vulnerable will pay the price.
There will be mediocrity, ineptitude and cliquishness.
The thinly veiled resentment towards its own people of a provincial elite that yearns only for the approval of international elites.
A culture of secrecy, an aversion to scrutiny, and a closed-ranks hostility to anyone who speaks out of turn.
This will be a parliament in which truth and conscience are in constant submission to party and power.
The ballot before you asks you to choose between two options: 'I agree that there should be a Scottish parliament' or 'I do not agree that there should be a Scottish parliament'.