McLeish / Mitchell Unfinished Business

The Evolution of Devolution in Scotland
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80425-270-3
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

We want to move beyond politics in which each party seeks to outmanoeuvre others and score a decisive victory. This leads to political stalemate. We want to reflect on the successes and failures of devolution and offer a series of proposals for reform that could be embraced by a broad swathe of opinion. What were the hopes and aspirations of devolution? To what extent has devolution been successful? What are the challenges and opportunities ahead? How can we meet the challenges and best take advantage of opportunities? Where is Scotland heading on its unfinished journey? How will changes in the rest of the UK impact on this journey? In 1999, legislation was passed to create the Scottish Parliament and the Consultative Steering Group (CSG) issued its report on the Scottish Parliament's guiding principles. Four key principles were set out in the CSG report reflecting the hopes and aspirations of campaigners for a Scottish Parliament: sharing power between the people, legislators and government; greater accountability from government to Parliament to the people; facilitating accessibility, openness and responsiveness; and promoting equality. These principles remain as relevant today as they were at the Parliament's establishment though much has changed in the intervening quarter century. In this book, former First Minister Henry McLeish, Minister responsible for devolution and chair of the CSG, and Professor James Mitchell of Edinburgh University consider the journey Scotland has been on - the challenges, obstacles and opportunities in seeking to achieve these hopes and expectations.

Rt Hon Henry McLeish began his political career as an elected member in local government in 1974, and was leader of Fife Regional Council for five years. In 1987 he was elected as a member of the UK Parliament and acted as Minister for Devolution and Home Affairs in the Labour government from 1997 to 1999. In the first Scottish Parliament he was Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning from 1999, and in 2000 he became First Minister of Scotland until 2001. Retiring from politics in 2003, he is now an adviser, consultant, writer author and broadcaster and lectures in the USA and elsewhere on the European Union and politics. He chaired the Scottish Prisons Commission, which produced a report into sentencing and the criminal justice system entitled 'Scotland's Choice'. In 2010 he conducted a major report on the state of football in Scotland, which had been commissioned by the Scottish Football Association, and chaired a commission into sport requested by the Scottish government. He is now an honorary professor at Edinburgh University.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mcleish, Henry

Mitchell, James

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2

Early Experience: Bedding Down, Challenges and Successes

There shall be a Scottish Parliament. Through long years, those words were first a hope, then a belief, then a promise… today there is a new voice in the land, the voice of a democratic Parliament. A voice to shape Scotland, a voice for the future.

Donald Dewar at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, 1 July 1999

Introduction

HAMISH McDONNELL, a well-informed journalist and close observer of the Scottish Parliament, noted that the first decade of devolution had been ‘momentous, exciting, extraordinary’. But looking back at these years today, they look like a period of relative quiet compared with what followed. What is most striking in retrospect is how quickly devolved government was taken for granted. The creation of a new Parliament is a complex business. While the focus was on the building project, it is what goes on inside the building – the debates, committee work, inquiries, processes, rules and regulations, standard operating procedures and crucially the relationships – that make a Parliament. The internal relations and those with other institutions and bodies – with the executive branch, civil servants, the range of non-governmental public bodies, local authorities, civil society organisations and other interest groups and of course Scotland’s communities and citizens – are central.

Devolution was an opportunity to start afresh, a chance to innovate and create a modern institution, though it would inevitably inherit much from Westminster and UK Government. David Steel, as the first Presiding Officer, listed a ‘dozen differences’ that distinguished the Scottish Parliament from the House of Commons: fixed terms of four years; no annual sessions with Bills falling at a certain date in the calendar; a proportional element to the electoral system; a U-shaped chamber; more ‘civilised’ hours, rarely meeting after 6.00pm; a high proportion of female members; scrutiny before subject committees before debates in the chamber; a petitions committee; a weekly public ‘time for reflection’; proceedings that were webcast; more accessibility with frequent visits from school children and young people; and a new modern Parliament building. But the creation of the Parliament also had unintended consequences, some foreseeable and some unforeseen.

Some of the differences outlined by David Steel were symbolic, perhaps trivial, but all reflected a desire for the Scottish Parliament to be different, more modern and effective. It created considerable interest beyond Scotland. In September 2001, Robin Cook, Leader of the House of Commons, and Lord Williams, Leader of the Lords, visited the Parliament to learn about its procedures. Cook returned with members of the Commons’ Modernisation Committee two years later to consider the electronic voting system and Public Petitions Committee, though neither would be incorporated into reforms at Westminster. One Conservative MP remarked that,

At Westminster you place a petition in a bag and it disappears and that’s the end of it. I think you have a system here that appears to be very effective in looking at issues of genuine public concern.

Electronic voting was not adopted in the Commons for reasons explained by Cook, ‘The Commons still sits in the design of benches that they inherited from the chapel Henry VIII gave them at the time the Commons walked out of the Lords’ and there were too few seats for the MPs, making it difficult to provide a voting console for each.

The Scottish Parliament became an accepted part of the furniture of government, with only those on the far-flung fringes of Scottish politics calling for its abolition. The controversies that marked its early years were less existential so much as they concerned the escalating cost of the Holyrood building project. The building controversy had the greatest potential to undermine the public legitimacy of devolution. The Holyrood building was formally opened for business in October 2004 and the controversy has since receded in memory. The decision to build a new Parliament would in itself prove an object lesson in the gap between a policy decision and its implementation. The media played a significant part in how the Parliament was seen by the public and it would play an important role, as in any liberal democracy, in making it accountable to the Scottish public. It had been assumed that there would be more scrutiny of government decisions by elected Members but there would also be far more media scrutiny of government decision-making in Scotland. It was wholly legitimate to question Holyrood’s rising cost, though at times this created tensions. Presiding Officer David Steel complained about the ‘bitch journalism’ in reference to the coverage of the issue. Journalists were only doing their job. Robust, even unfair, criticism is an inevitable part of democratic politics. The decision to hold a public inquiry into the Holyrood building project went a long way to drawing a line under the episode, though whether the inquiry resulted in substantial changes in how major infrastructural projects were conducted is less clear.

Sometimes a lack of controversy can be just as telling. The Church of Scotland General Assembly building was used as a temporary home until the new building was ready. A few decades before, such a temporary home would almost certainly have provoked opposition, but it was a sign of the times that nobody had a problem with the use of the Kirk’s own Parliament as Scotland’s temporary Parliament. Scotland is a multi-faith community, acknowledged in the weekly ‘time for reflection’ in the Parliament. This does not mean sectarianism has disappeared or racism no longer exists, but there have been efforts, notably across Scotland’s main political parties, to recognise the importance of celebrating diversity.

New Politics

While an emphasis on ‘new’ emerged powerfully under Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party, it had appeared before in debates on constitutional change. The promise of ‘new politics’ following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament had been part of the rhetoric of the Scottish home rule movement during the 1990s. The nature of new politics was never precisely defined but some of its features can be discerned from statements made by senior figures in the campaign, the publications of the campaign groups and the ‘Scotland Forward’ umbrella organisation that campaigned for a tax-varying Parliament during the 1997 referendum. What was clear was that the new Parliament, with a new electoral system, was expected to create a more consensual political culture. The adversarial culture of the Commons was something many reformers wanted to avoid.

The experience of the Constitutional Convention, when Labour, Liberal Democrats and much of Scottish civil society had worked together, encouraged a belief that a different kind of politics was possible. The 1997 devolution referendum campaign, when Labour, Liberal Democrats and the SNP cooperated, amplified this sense that a model of constructive consensual politics could be achieved and contrasted sharply with earlier experience. The reasons each supported devolution differed: the SNP saw it as a stepping stone to independence, while Labour saw it as a way of consolidating the union and the Liberal Democrats saw it as a step towards a federal UK. Each saw it as an opportunity to democratise Scottish politics and wanted the same result. In October 1999, Donald Dewar, Labour First Minister, Alex Salmond, SNP leader, and Jim Wallace, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader shared a platform for the launch of the ‘Scotland in Europe’ campaign for the adoption of the Euro. Once more, this helped highlight the extent of cross-party support and the apparent marginalisation of the Conservatives in Scottish politics.

There were few differences between Labour and the SNP on a range of matters. Other than on the constitutional question, Labour and SNP had more similarities than differences. These parties would have made obvious coalition partners but remained adversaries pursuing disagreements confrontationally. It was not only the constitutional question that loomed large but that they faced each other directly in electoral competition. Labour and SNP were fishing in the same pond for votes and seats. Trust and good working relations had been developed between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the Constitutional Convention. And there were fewer seats in which Labour and the Liberal Democrats were in direct contention than Labour and SNP seats. This made a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition all but inevitable in 1999.

The probability that no single party would win an overall majority had implications for government. There had been scant attention to how Cabinet Government would operate. In a think tank paper written before devolution, Bernard Crick and David Millar, leading authorities on Parliamentary reform, had noted the ‘silence of the [Constitutional] Convention on the structure of government’. There had been a limited debate on whether a different model might be possible but this was never developed. Something more akin to the operation of local authorities in which all MSPs, not just Ministers, would have direct access to civil service support, had at one point been suggested by a leading Liberal Democrat. Nor was there much discussion on how the executive branch and cabinet government should operate. The emphasis had been on the prospect of coalition with little concern for how that might operate. Collective...