Politics

Is 2021 the year Holyrood came of age?

More diverse than ever, Scotland’s new parliament presents opportunities that transcend the constitutional gridlock

May 10, 2021
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Votes being counted in Glasgow last week. This year saw the highest turnout ever for a Holyrood election. Image: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Scottish political commentators are fond of likening the Scottish parliament to a child growing up. As an institution it had its clumsy infant years under Labour and Lib Dem coalitions, before going through an awkward teenage rebel phase under Alex Salmond; it has since reached maturity under the steady hand of Nicola Sturgeon.

It’s an analogy that feeds into an established rhetoric about Holyrood’s contemporary clothing and its gut institutional instinct: to be, above all else, all the things that Westminster is not. This was a parliament that was built to embody values of reflection and consensus, in a decade when faith in democratic institutions—Germany’s reunified Bundestag with its newly topped glass dome foremost among them—seemed to be at an all-time high.

It was the Bundestag that inspired the Scottish parliament’s use of an additional member system (AMS), which complements a first-past-the-post constituency ballot with a regional “top-up” PR list to achieve greater proportionality. The domestic roots of this decision can be found in anxieties about blanket Labour dominance, even though many now claim it was premised on the unthinkable notion that the SNP would use Holyrood as a cockpit to push for statehood.

Favouring smaller parties, and minority or coalition governments, AMS has underlined a distinct Scottish political culture in the devolution era. Despite a fourth successive victory the SNP’s “failure” to break the system and achieve a majority, as it did in 2011, only underlines the likelihood of another term of constitutional gridlock. But what do the recent results tell us about the maturity of Scottish democracy beyond this impasse?

If you measure democracy by its capacity to deliver change, it’s hard to look at the weekend’s results and see anything other than an endorsement of the status quo. In the year of COP26 coming to Glasgow, the Green vote increased, but only by enough to add two MSPs to their parliamentary group. Attempts to game the electoral system through voter polarisation by the slouching big beasts of yesteryear—Alex Salmond and George Galloway—came to nothing. No party’s seat tally was altered by more than two. Constitutional politics now seems to have embedded itself at election time: with the SNP’s dominance amongst nationalists counterbalanced by tactical voting amongst unionists.

But there is perhaps a more nuanced test which has equal relevance to the constitutional question. The next Holyrood chamber will be more diverse. It comes within touching distance of gender balance, while a third of its members will be taking their seats for the first time. Amongst them will be the first (and second) woman of colour to do so, the first Sikh MSP and the first permanent wheelchair user. If democracy is about representation, rather than the majoritarianism that has plagued the UK for so long, this is a demonstrably positive result: a sign of institutional maturity that really does feel like a life story. That such “firsts” receive significant public attention and celebration reflects a growing expectation of inclusivity in Scottish public life.

For some, this is simply the fetishising of representation and an elitist “woke” agenda. But across the political spectrum, the cultural backlash brigade (Alliance for Unity, Alba, the Scottish Family Party) failed to get anything close to the electoral breakthrough their provocations predicted.

If Scottish self-government is a moral cause, it surely must find its fundamentals in these realities. While this may not lead to the kind of “rising” that Salmond’s Alba Party anticipated, it does put the Westminster system to shame. Pay attention beyond the Yes/No tribes, and there is broad centre-leftwards consensus across the Holyrood chamber. It was a Labour MSP, Monica Lennon, who piloted world-leading legislation on period poverty during the last term; it was the former Green and independent member Andy Wightman who championed Scotland’s increasingly squeezed renters.

It is turning that soft morality into something more muscular that could herald the next stage in Scotland’s constitutional journey and allow it to break out beyond the entrenched assumptions of nationalism and unionism. The electorate has offered a solid basis for this. After 21 years, turnout at Holyrood finally broke the 60 per cent threshold. This is an important factor on two fronts—it suggests that more Scots now look to Edinburgh as the locus of decision-making about their lives, but it also shores up the SNP’s claims for a mandate to hold another independence referendum.

The coming of age analogy has its limits. Humans create institutions, but all too often they become machine-like. The SNP’s undisputed party-of-government status is something that increasingly stifles its sharper minds and more radical instincts. On balance, it’s not clear how much the SNP has changed the way that Scotland is governed or whether the way that Scotland is governed has changed the SNP. Deep systemic issues—like local government funding and reform, mental health provision, the oil and gas transition, drugs deaths and the housing crisis—have too often been downplayed by Blairite spin or outsourced to toothless commissions.

After 14 years running Scotland, the SNP sits atop a mountain of political capital. In its fourth term, the party might finally decide to spend some of it by taking some social policy risks. If, as seems likely, referendum legislation will be dragged through the courts for several years, Sturgeon’s freshly empowered MSPs could instead speed a radical coronavirus recovery and decarbonisation strategy as part of a wider progressive programme. But a just recovery can only be delivered through reforming and devolving power structures within the nation, so that democratic sovereignty lives and breathes in Scotland’s streets and town halls as much as in its chamber of parliament.

In the coming chapter of Holyrood’s development, it is not the postmodern sheen of the 1990s Bundestag, but rather the great surge in grassroots democracy that Scotland experienced in 2014 that offers an example to follow. Because the crucial difference between this young parliament and its increasingly decrepit parent in London is that, having been created by the people, it is nothing without them.