Iain Gray - Why it suits the SNP for parliament to look powerless

Published on Wednesday 27 August 2008 19:22

I BELIEVE in Scotland just as much as Alex Salmond does. But I believe in the Scottish Parliament more than he ever will.

An effective, devolved parliament is what the people of Scotland want, and our parliament is a powerful, modern instrument of progress for Scotland.

Alex Salmond and I served in the first Scottish Parliament, passing laws that changed Scotland forever.

Land reform gave Scots the right to enjoy their own country, and to own it collectively for the common good. Four complex acts abolished the remnants of 1,000 years of feudalism. We passed the most progressive incapacity legislation in Europe, and the best homelessness legislation in the world.

Now, under the SNP, we have a pitiful legislative record comprising a few administrative bills, such as setting up a register of tartans.

The SNP excuse is that it is a minority administration, and cannot bring forward controversial legislation. Yet in previous parliaments almost every bill was passed through consensus, sometimes amended, quite properly, in the process to achieve that. Little or nothing was forced through, so the need for consensus is no barrier to visionary or historic legislation.

The SNP knows that a powerful, devolved parliament is the desire of the Scottish people, and it wants to pretend that Holyrood is somehow hamstrung. It suits their case, but it lets Scotland down.

Scotland is also let down by the First Minister's tactics in the chamber. Scots who like his confident and ebullient approach would be shocked to see how readily that becomes graceless bluster and bullying. Attacking opponents by coining nicknames for them is a childish tactic more suited to the playground than a parliament. To pretend to read from his own manifesto and change the wording in order to pretend a promise was never made is to treat that parliament with contempt.

In the wider world too, Salmond's penchant for playground patois can let us down. Calling Gordon Brown, "a feartie from Fife" could at least claim the sophistication of alliteration, but when Kelvin Mackenzie insulted Scots on Question Time, our First Minister's response was to call him a "tube". For once I share the sentiment, but I regret the manner in which it was expressed.

Perhaps the strangest of Salmond's juvenile jibes came when he commented on a book he did not like by pointing out that Scotland's patron saint was real and England's only a myth. Perhaps he was joking, but it sounded like: "My dad is bigger than your dad."

There is something of the emperor's new clothes about this situation, and we should not be afraid to say when the First Minister is letting Scotland down.

When forced off the territory of the smart put-down, he is poor on detail, prone to policymaking on the hoof and far less assured.

Sometimes he even lets the real Alex Salmond show through, as with his comment that Scotland did not mind Thatcher's economics. He did not speak for Scotland there. He spoke for Alex Salmond, no matter how many radio shows he calls to deny it.

We should confront the First Minister's playground politics, and confound him on the serious ground. But the SNP will not be beaten in five minutes in the debating chamber. It will be beaten in the communities up and down Scotland where the elderly, disabled and school pupils are paying the price of the decisions it has taken.

I do not mind humour in politics, nor political rough and tumble, but I do mind seeing the parliament Scotland was so proud of in 1999 treated this way; its legislative powers under-used, its scrutiny ignored and its stature diminished.

On that opening day in 1999, Donald Dewar said that the Parliament would hear echoes of "the discourse of the enlightenment, when Edinburgh and Glasgow were a light held to the intellectual life of Europe".

Too often these days, it is the echo of the schoolyard we hear, and that is not good enough for my Scotland.

&#149 Iain Gray is a Labour MSP and leadership candidate.