Great Holyrood Bubble hits the bursting point

IN ONE week, Scotland’s Parliament building has acquired the status of a national debacle. Greater than the latest arithmetic progression of its cost is the shift in public anger. And within the Scottish Executive the change in atmosphere is as pronounced: nervous apprehension giving way to panic.

We are now at the bursting of a Bubble. It is a Bubble in which the political class has been living since this project was conceived and it has swollen with every new estimate of overrun and announcement of delay. And it shares similar dynamics to those bubbles of the stock markets: a suspension of disbelief as a great delusion takes hold, each new excess excused away as a vital and necessary part of the whole.

Today, 30 months late and with the latest overall cost forecast at more than nine times the original estimate, the Scottish Parliament project has become a great Bubble. As with financial bubbles, its bursting will bring a necessary corrective catharsis. But it is set to shatter the Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition now facing Lord Fraser’s official inquiry. For this is the coalition that has presided over the greatest public project mismanagement in Scotland’s history.

From 40 million to 120 million; 200 million to 340 million, this project has traced a vertiginous ascent. Each new level has been marked by a ringing declaration that this was the top, the final summit, the financial "topping out". Each new assurance buried all previous solemn assurances. But still the Bubble grew.

That is why, in the latest 35 million ascent to 375 million, its character has undergone a dramatic and ominous change. In the latest breach of formal assurances that the cost was under control and would not go higher, the project has switched from being the greatest creation of the devolution project to its greatest liability.

Few in the Bubble could conceive that the new Scottish Parliament would not be worth the money and a building that would win national pride. Its apologists still hold that it will be an architectural and visual triumph, a proud monument to devolution and worth every penny - once the fuss dies down.

But that is not how the voters see it. It is not how shamed and embarrassed MSPs now see it. It is not how a panicking Executive, scrambling to contain calls for a full-scale judicial inquiry, now sees it.

And it is not how the lay public will ever see it. For this building has been poured into a cramped, pinched and quite inappropriate site. From the Royal Mile, it presents daunting walls of concrete. From Holyrood Road, the view is marred by a concrete fly-over. There is just no space for the whole to make visual sense. Only viewed from the top of Salisbury Crags will it offer some idea of the huge sums that have been so helplessly and catastrophically decanted into it.

Nor is there any confidence that 375 million will be the end of the matter. For this has been a highly complex and technically challenging construction, set to require high levels of maintenance and upkeep. Little wonder a fear has now taken hold that the building, far from ennobling the Parliament, will come to destroy public trust and confidence, not just in the Executive, but in the devolution process.

Such is the scale of the debacle it is now doubtful that ministers will stage anything that could be publicly construed as an opening party. They are more likely to creep into their new offices in Holyrood out of public view. Indeed, for many MSPs it will be hard to walk into it without a twinge of shame.

For no project has more comprehensively betrayed the ideals and purposes of its creation. Here was a Parliament intended to draw government closer to the people. Instead, it risks separating government and people as never before. It was intended to inspire and enthuse the voters. Instead, it has alienated voters and hammered in a wedge of disillusion and anger between electors and politicians. It was intended to unite the Scottish people. Instead it has divided us profoundly.

For there are now two Scotlands. There is the real Scotland, struggling with a slowing economy, its little businesses and family firms battling to cope with rising costs and scrimped resources.

And there is the Scotland that lives in the Bubble: the governing class and its ever-expanding salariat of ministers, advisers and minders and gofers, the bureaucracy of a thousand action plans, task forces, regulators and co-ordinators, whose headquarters will soon be housed in a building that has smashed through all efforts at control. And nothing about this Parliament, from its ridiculous windows to its 80,000 reception desk, suggests anything that will be in closer touch with the concerns of real Scotland. Quite the opposite.

And what of that other Scotland, the real Scotland that lives outside of the Bubble? Last weekend, I went to the valley of my birth, through the lowering towns of Lanarkshire into East Ayrshire, to the little Irvine valley towns of Darvel, Newmilns and Galston. These were the vibrant places of my childhood. They battle now to keep their vibrancy and their pride. For they are blighted, beaten, broken towns, with high unemployment and an ageing population.

From the lilac growing out of the windowless buildings to the bleak rows of boarded up little shops and businesses, the dereliction speaks to a long, continuing recession on which the Bubble People continue to be in denial. For in the Bubble there is growth and employment and expansion, and they cannot see this recession for all their looking. The official laminate reports slide across the Scots pine designer desks in a pleasing simulation of activity, a disengaged world in which so much is done and yet so little connects to the problem.

It is not the Bubble People who will come to bear the real cost, by that I mean the opportunity cost, of this Parliament building. It is the real Scotland of these little towns with broken hearts that have been passed over and forgotten. How much even an 80,000 clean-up project might have helped to keep alive some pride and hope, instead of being spent on a reception desk for MSPs.

One might even speak of a massive betrayal of real Scotland. But then, I suspect there never was a great hope in these valley towns to betray. In the forgotten Scotland, there never was an expectation that the Parliament would do much for them, but everything for the people who had well-heeled jobs inside of it.

And that is more or less how it has turned out. Not just in the SNP strongholds, but in the Labour heartlands, there is less anger and disillusion than a sullen, broken, defeated shrug that says: "What else did you expect?"

So, as this Bubble bursts, and with it all the Bubble talk of how this building will re-engage the people, raise their aspirations and inspire their pride, then, and only then will there be hope. For it will be as a snapping of fingers out of a collective hypnosis about the nature and the limits of government, and the collective mirage that more politics and more money necessarily means better.

And only then will we see that it is the state of real Scotland that truly matters and which demands our eyes and ears and attention, not the artefacts of politics, and least of all this ill-conceived, woefully-managed, grotesque and vainglorious national insult.