At the top of Glasgow’s Buchanan Street there is a statue of Donald Dewar, Scotland’s first First Minister, the so-called ‘Father of the Nation’ and ‘Architect of Devolution’. It hasn’t fared well, frequently vandalised or traffic coned, Dewar’s glasses were damaged so often they increased the size of the plinth to put the eyewear out of reach. Mostly, however, the statue is just ignored by all but the seagulls, though it has been reported that some had assumed it was a memorial to Sven Goran Eriksson and wondered what connection the Swede had to Glasgow. And this is in a city that voted comfortably ‘YES’ in the 2014 indpendence referendum.
This neglect and abuse is hard on Dewar, a decent man with a strong public-service ethic, but it is somehow in keeping with current attitudes to and standing of the Scottish parliament, his signature ‘achievement’. Abused, ridiculed or ignored, 21 years on from its inception, Holyrood has utterly failed in its aims. It was meant to bring democracy closer to the people, but seems more remote than Westminster; it was intended to improve local services, then the opposite has happened. And as for ending the divisiveness of nationalism, well…
From the seemingly never-ending murky machinations of Nicola Sturgeon (she still haunts the building with occasional mute, cameo appearances), to the endless financial, sexual and ethical scandals of her former underlings, to the unwatched, indeed unwatchable, and poorly attended ‘debates’ on gender, Gaza, migrant rights or anything really except the issues that Scots most care about, the parliament has become, if it wasn’t always, a national embarrassment. And all at a cost of £802 million a year, not to mention countless sums squandered on pet projects and legal fees for doomed progressive crusades. Billy Connolly long ago called Holyrood the ‘wee pretendy parliament’ and Tim Luckhurst called it the ‘pantomime on the Mound’. Both seem generous now.
A saving grace is that few Scots pay it much attention, otherwise there might have been more dissent over its multiple aberrations, from which selecting a nadir is challenging. I’d go for the passing of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in 2022, when all parties (except the Tories) voted through a wretched, dangerous piece of legislation that would have allowed biological men who claimed to be women practically full access to women’s spaces. Desperate last-ditch safeguarding amendments proposed by the Tories, such as at least excluding men on trial for sex offences from the new dispensation, were, incredibly, voted down.
None of this seemed to matter, and Holyrood sailed blithely on. The fundamental questions – what purpose does the Scottish parliament serve?; what has it achieved?; who benefits from its existence? – remained largely unasked, let alone unanswered. Yes, plenty of people had their criticisms of Holyrood, which ranged from the serious (its unaccountability, its costs, the calibre of politicians it seemed to produce, the nature and quality of the debates), to the more acerbic (its hideous architecture and even, by the MSPs themselves, the food in the canteen), but few would have entertained the notion of its abolition. That view resided with a fringe.
This, however, may be about to change. There are growing signs that more and more Scots on both sides of the constitutional divide are starting to question Holyrood’s worth and its continuing existence. Three recent developments suggest a vibe shift and a window of opportunity for those that would welcome its end.
The first is the remarkable rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Despite having little presence in Scotland and an abrasive leader who might have been custom designed to put off Scots, the party are on course by some predictions to win 15 seats at the next Holyrood elections. There is even an outside chance they may snatch the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse Holyrood by-election this week, which would be seismic and add weight to the claim that they could soon become the official opposition to the SNP in Scotland.
Reform have not pledged to abolish Holyrood, but rather to, well, reform it, but their ascendancy points to a widespread disillusionment, nay disgust, with all the major legacy parties and by implication, the devolution settlement. Scottish politics has become the ugliest of ugly baby contests and if Reform’s rise in Scotland is real, it surely indicates that a significant section of Scottish society is willing to contemplate something – anything – new. Calls for the abolition of the parliament that has served them so badly are surely only a small step from that degree of animus and despair. Certainly, First Minister John Swinney’s attempt to scare voters with the claim that Reform will scrap Holyrood if it can, proves the idea has entered the consciousness of Scotland’s political elite.
But it will need evidence of a groundswell of public opinion to push the political class towards a serous abolition agenda. And such evidence is emerging. On the unionist side, the group behind ‘The Majority’ podcast, the people who funded ‘Resign Sturgeon’ billboards around Scotland, followed up by ‘Mission Accomplished’ billboards once she had done just that, have launched an Abolish Holyrood campaign. It gained thousands of supporters in a matter of days.
The leader of the campaign, Mark Devlin, has said that the next step is a political party (which alphabetically would likely be at the top of the ballot paper), dedicated to the sole aim of returning power to Westminster. He aims to win eight list seats in next year’s Holyrood election and then plot his new home’s demise.
Even the nationalists seem to have had enough. Last month, the influential pro-independence blog Wings Over Scotland called for a second referendum on Scottish independence, but this time with a difference. Instead of a choice between Westminster + Holyrood (the status quo) vs independence, as in 2014, the choice Wings called for was independence vs Westminster (i.e. the abolition of Holyrood). The site, which many see as the true voice of the independence movement, declared the Holyrood parliament to be not fit for purpose and an obstacle to the progress of the nation. Interestingly, the site also claimed to be aware of support for the idea by members of Reform.
Here’s my view: a vote on the abolition of Holyrood and a return to the status quo ante is unlikely to succeed, at least at the moment. Abolition would be simply too dramatic, too humiliating a step for Scots to contemplate (though Devlin argues that retaining Holyrood is more humiliating). Keeping Holyrood would probably, grudgingly win, though it might be a closer result than many would predict. Nor is the Wings proposal tenable as it would exclude those who, for whatever reason, want to leave things as they are. Plus, there is little justification for another independence vote only eleven years since the last and with polls suggesting little has changed.
But what might just be possible is a new form of devolution, with Holyrood gone, or significantly reduced in scope, and its powers or at least its control of funding given, on a fully accountable basis, to local people. Give the Shetlanders the power to procure their own ferries; allow the residents of Perthshire, with their accident blackspot on the contentious A9, more say on whether the road is duelled; give the citizens of Aberdeen more say in what happens to the oil and gas industry so vital to their region; or the highlanders to their rural homes; and farmers their estates. That might prove attractive given the alternative is allowing these things to be decided, as they have been for so long, by the ‘troughocracy’ as journalist Craig Murray dubbed them, with hefty input by Green party activists with the good fortune to hold the balance of power.
With Holyrood gone, or left to wither on the vine, and better decision making (potholes fixed, safer roads, ferries delivered on time?), Scotland could perhaps relax somewhat. A major source of division, a factory of grievance and waste, a cathedral of cant, would no longer be a lamentable feature of Scottish life. And it wouldn’t be missed.
Back in Glasgow, Donald Dewar’s statue could be left standing as an Ozymandias-like reminder of a gross national misstep. Or, more charitably, it could be withdrawn and placed in storage, saving it the indignity of the vandals and the seagulls, finally letting the poor old ‘father of the nation’ rest and dream his grandiose dreams in peace.
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