Joyce McMillan: Holyrood's tim'rous beasties

Published on Thursday 9 September 2010 14:59

IF YOU want to see an outward symbol of how political realities tend to betray our dreams, then you could do worse than take a stroll down Edinburgh's Royal Mile, and cast your eye over the unlovely face our Scottish Parliament now presents, to those passing on that famous thoroughfare.

• Spiked gates, blast walls and bollards: symbols of the lack of political courage in Scotland Picture: Jane Barlow

There is a blast wall, constructed at vast expense. There are towering spiked gates at every entrance, often locked, and truly hideous in appearance.

And now, there is also a long row of ugly, stumpy concrete bollards, ranged along the outer edge of the pavement, drastically reducing its width; these are designed, I suppose, to prevent those who are so minded from driving vans full of explosives up to the parliament wall. The place looks, in short, like a prison, or the palace of a hated tyrant, under permanent siege from an angry population. And although the public entrance on Horse Wynd has a more welcoming appearance, the whole security culture in the parliament - far more oppressive than at Westminster, where a visitor can at least walk unaccompanied to a meeting-room - has long since reached a point where it mocks the vision, once held dear by devolution campaigners, of a building that would feel as if it belonged to the people, rather than to some defensive political elite.

In truth, though, the MSPs who gather at Holyrood have a great deal to be defensive about, as the current four-year term of the Scottish Parliament limps to a close. This week, the SNP minority government had a go at launching its legislative programme for the remainder of the session; but as the opposition parties were quick to point out, it was a poor-looking thing, a living monument to the truth that while minority government may work well for a year or two, it tends - as time wears on - to run out of areas of consensus within which it can legislate.

There was a time, back around 2008, when the SNP might have hoped that the Scottish people, next time round, would return them to power with a more commanding lead over the Labour opposition. For now, though, the Nationalist balloon seems to have burst in Scotland; mainly because the SNP, in government, has been looking so lacklustre, and so short of a well-worked out plan for using the powers they have to steer Scotland through the present crisis.

And astonishingly, given the circumstances, it seems likely that the main beneficiary of this cooling of affection between Scottish voters and Alex Salmond will be - well, none other than the Labour Party. Divided, impotent, ideologically brain-dead, and as lacking in parliamentary flair and ideas at Holyrood as it is now bereft of influence in London, the party has never been in worse shape. Yet despite all that, it is now said to stand ten points ahead of the SNP in Scottish voting intentions, according to some polls; and it looks as though Iain Gray, the all-but-invisible Labour leader at Holyrood, is cruising towards the post of First Minister.

Scottish politics, in other words, seems to be vanishing rapidly into a black hole of futility, in which a plurality of the people vote instinctively and tribally for a party that can do nothing for them, while the most able politicians in the land either sign up to a right-wing economic strategy that Scottish voters will not endorse, or cling to a vision of independence that is meaningless, unless it forms part of a persuasive programme for economic recovery and social justice. In crude practical terms, Scots would probably be well advised to keep voting SNP, since Nationalists in power put the wind up Westminster in a way that Scottish Labour never will. But with the curse of incumbency on his head, Alex Salmond can no longer garner that kind of easy protest vote; and Scotland has yet to learn just how nasty things could get, with a right-wing Con-Dem government at Westminster, and a weak Labour minority administration here at home.

Yet paradoxically, it is not all that difficult to see what we need, at this moment in Scottish politics. We need a reopening of our formal political process to all the radical and exciting thought that goes on elsewhere, in Scotland's universities and publishing-houses, and in the creative industries. We need a Labour Party fired by the task of reinventing social democracy for our times, whether that means upsetting London or not. We need an SNP that is crystal-clear about the kind of Scotland it wants to build, and that makes its case for independence on the basis of that vision.

And above all, we need a political class that is out and about and thinking and inventing and co-operating, not walled up in a bickering fortress parliament.

Security, of course, is only one small issue among the many that our politicians face. Yet attitudes to it tend to be strongly symbolic of the absence or presence of the kind of game-changing courage our politics now needs; one of the most likeable things David Cameron has done, since he became Prime Minister, was to tell his own scaremongering security advisers to back off, and give him space to do his job.

And how my heart would lift, at this point in political history, if I thought that anyone at the Scottish Parliament had the guts and the vision to do the same: to look around, 11 years on, at the image our fledgling parliament is presenting to the world, and to point out that if there is an element of risk in ensuring that a parliament continues to look like a civic building rather than a fortress, then that is just the first of the many, many risks that elected politicians should be willing to take; for the sake of the better future they all say they want, and in which - across a whole range of policy - they now need to begin to demonstrate some faith.