Continuing the series of blog posts looking at the chapters of the 2001 book ‘What future for Scotland?’ from the Policy Institute, we now turn to the second chapter ‘A constituional sleight of hand’ by Gerald Warner, columnist at the Scotland on Sunday and Telegraph.

The Executive Summary states: There is one ‘nuclear option’ open to Westminster, which would make accountability real and would bring the devolved parliament into stark interface with its electorate. The Scotland Act could be amended to include a proviso that any Scottish election where the turnout fell below a certain percentage would be ipso facto invalid. By imposing such a qualification for Holyrood, the prospect of four consensual parties carving up power, to the exclusion of their own electorate, would be eliminated.

There’s a lot that can be said from even the several short sentences above. For one, the indication that the writer was not in favour of the Scottish Parliament comes through (to me at least) loud and clear. For a book looking at Scotland’s Future, it is odd to decide to talk of Westminster neutering a Parliament that is only two years old when there is no reason to believe that Holyrood would work just as effectively as any other Parliament across the world. It is an exanmple of the negativity that Holyrood itself was built to shake off Scotland’s back.

Another interesting point to note is that, far from four (three, two or even one in the SNP’s case) conensual parties “carving up power”, each of the three Governments that have been formed in Scotland and completed their terms have largely delivered, or at least attempted to deliver, what they promised to in their manifestos. Compare and contrast with the current UK Government (a comparison I won’t dwell on) and the Scottish Parliament looks positively buxom in its healthiness. It does beg the question therefore why anyone would assume Holyrood is any more likely of falling short with a democratic deficit than Westminster (or, say, the European Parliament) would.

However, at its core, this chapter deserves to be taken at face value whereby turnout needs to be above a certain level in order for an election to be valid. So, where better to start than by looking at turnouts in Scottish Parliament elections in the past four elections:

1999 – 59%
2003 – 49%
2007 – 52%
2011 – 50%

Technically that is a declining trend which would, strictly speaking, support the notion that interest in Holyrood is waning. However, the turnout in 1999 is presumably higher simply because it was the first election and there was a novelty to going out to that ballot box the first time. The bump in 2007 may be due to the election being so close that year (I am not going to entertain the notion that 2011 should have seen a bump with Scots rushing out to vote Yes or NO to AV).

Gerald writes with typical intellect and literal references that I shan’t reproduce, other than to note his opening mentioning of the earliest Scottish soundbite from the Roman era, coming from a defeated Caledonian chief – ‘They make a desert and call it peace’. So born, according to Gerald, was the grievance politics that has supposedly plagued Scotland for much of the time since.

It is this grievance that devolution sprang from, the “weasel worded” ‘democratic deficit’ supposedly used to cloak more selfish interests by the parties of the left in Scotland. Gerald charts the history of the Scottish Parliament, from 1967 when the Tories supported an Assembly via Edward Heath’s Declaration of Perth, through to 1999 when “at the zenith of (the Scottish Parliament’s popularity”, the number of people voting Yes was 1,775,045, out of an electorate of just under 4 million.

Gerald goes on to point to further democratic deficits in the system, the first of which lives on today and is surely unsustainable. “Out of
129 MSPs, 56 are ‘elected’ from closed lists, drawn up by the party leadership. The elector is constrained to vote for an anonymous ‘regional’ candidate by endorsing a political party rather than an individual.”

I agree with the unsatisfactory nature of this method to Holyrood elections. We are seeing voting fodder being put into the Scottish Parliament and it seems undemocratic that, of the 8 MSPs that represent any one Scot, he/she only had a direct say in the suitability of one of them.

Granted, this, to an extent, is the price we pay for PR and we can (and should) join parties to ensure a healthy democracy resides within political parties as well as outside of them. However, there is no valid argument for closed lists over open lists that I can see if we not only want a stronger democracy but want to attract more quality and more variety to the ballot slip.

Gerald continues the article by arguing that Holyrood safeguards the vested interests of the four main parties, either through increased representation relative to Westminster (SNP, Tories) or increased power and privilege (Labour/Lib Dems) and, under such circumstances, who is is going to “actively seek root and branch reform of the Scotland Act, for fear of becoming turkeys voting for Christmas”?

It’s a good question but it’s relevance hinges on the question of how bad things really are. Are the people really shut out from debate? Is there endemic corruption at the Scottish Parliament? They are notions that would appeal to the conspiracy theorists out there but my impression is that the Parliament is, and largely always has been, a tight ship run efficiently by whoever happens to have their hands on the tiller.

Perhaps the most cutting part of Gerald’s piece is the needlessly personal attack that “MSPs are recruited from the most venal and least articulate elements of the nation”. Now, to be fair, the broad argument that is being made here is something that I have voiced before so I can’t be too critical. Holyrood is a far cry from the greatest minds of the nation wrestling with the economic, science, sociological issues of the day and, often, merely a miserable extension of student politic with salaries attached.

However, natural selection at each election has largely driven standards higher to the point that the SNP is now a professional outfit and is being rewarded accordingly, with the other parties playing catch up in a ‘race to the top’ that will serve Holyrood very well indeed. Gerald’s expectations started out low and, if anything, when looking forwards sunk deeper. That is not the positive, optimistic outlook that I wish to see in our political culture and it betrays a defeatism that has been the scourge of Scotland for far too long.

The pinpointing of the shortcomings of the d’hondt system is the shining light of Gerald’s article but his proposed solutions are a regressive rather than progressive step:

(1) 118 MSPs elected through FPTP, two each from the 59 Westminster boundaries that currently exist (presumably this dropping to 50 constituencies would reduce the number of MSPs to a positively anaemic 100?).
(2) “The Scotland Act could be amended to iclude a proviso that any Scottish election where the turnout fell below a certain percentage would be ipso facto invalid”

Both solutions are terrible ideas. The first suggestion would lead to a very poor Parliament with smaller parties not represented at all and, much of the time, one party dominating proceedings even more so than the SNP do currently.

The second suggestion is unnecessary as, as I have shown, turnout is holding up reasonably well, and, anyway, this suggestion insinuates that politicians currently believe that the public exists to serve MSPs rather than the other way around. I have no doubt that politicians of all parties in Scotland would dearly love for turnout to be 100% and they certainly put the hard yards in to ensure that this is the case. To punish the very people who are holding democracy together in Scotland, the people who join parties, put policy papers together, deliver leaflets and organise hustings would be to deal a needlessly self-inflicting blow on ourselves and create a hole in our society. Who would write the cheques if the 2011 election result, for example, was deemed invalid? What chaos would ensue then?

The Scottish Parliamet deserves to be held to the same standard as other Parliaments across the world, no higher and no lower. In trying to apply unique constraints on Holyrood, an instiution that the writer clearly didn’t want created in the first place, one has to question the motives behind the largely unnecessary suggestions put forward in this article.

However, on moving from closed party lists to open party lists at election time, Gerald Warner has a proposal that is still relevant today, even if it is perhaps the right answer for the wrong reasons.