With SNP intent on destroying devolution, it's time to reconsider the Scottish Parliament – Paul Wilson

The late Donald Dewar, Scotland’s first First Minister, set out the noble ambitions for the Scottish Parliament at its opening in 1999: “Today, we look forward to the time when this moment will be seen as a turning point: the day when democracy was renewed in Scotland, when we revitalised our place in this our United Kingdom.”

It’s hard to see how Holyrood has come even close to living up to his hopes. Throughout the Labour leader’s political career, his party’s dominance in Scotland appeared rock solid. To suggest there could soon come a time when it would not be in power at Holyrood, either on its own or in coalition, would seem fanciful.

‘Don’t scare the horses’

Yet for 17 and counting of the Scottish Parliament’s 25 years, the SNP, which is by definition opposed to devolution, has been the party of government. Over those 17 years, its stated stance on devolution has shifted. After Alex Salmond’s surprise victory by one seat in 2007, he and his party’s position could be summarised as: “Don’t scare the horses.” Salmond recognised a wariness of the Scottish electorate at nationalists moving from a fringe movement into the corridors of power.

He normalised the party by focusing on competent governance. Independence could wait. This paid off with the SNP’s emphatic win in 2011 paving the way for the 2014 referendum. Defeat helped reinvigorate the party under Nicola Sturgeon and propelled it to even greater electoral success. The horses weren’t scared. The SNP now began to present devolution as a “stepping stone” to independence.

The bourach of Brexit and the calamitous premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss emboldened the nationalists to up the ante against devolution further still. It’s no longer described as a stepping stone, but a “roadblock”. Any pretence of goodwill or cooperation between Holyrood and Westminster is long gone.

The SNP’s popularity has endured despite the party’s incompetence thanks to independence supporters prepared to stay “wheesht for indy”, and its “heads I win, tails you lose” strategy of claiming credit for any good news while blaming Westminster for everything else.

Unenlightening discourse

Dewar dreamed of a Holyrood chamber that would crackle with “the discourse of the Enlightenment, when Edinburgh and Glasgow were a light held to the intellectual life of Europe”. Finance Secretary Shona Robison’s dismal Budget speech on Tuesday fell somewhat short of this, as she laid bare her party’s dearth of vision and ideas in soporific monotone.

This was a day of reckoning after years of reckless mismanagement of the nation’s finances. Robison announced Scotland, already the most heavily taxed part of a heavily taxed UK, would be taxed even harder. But the money Robison hopes to raise will barely touch the sides of the £1.5 billion hole in Scotland’s finances. Meanwhile, funding for public services and housebuilding was slashed.

Rather than adopt measures that could make a real difference, like means-testing currently universal benefits such as “free” prescriptions and bus passes, SNP politicians prefer to point the finger of blame south instead. Struggling to rouse even herself as she stumbled towards her peroration, Robison got to the real meat of her Budget in the place where her Big Idea should have been. “Devolution has brought many benefits, but it has also exposed quite how beholden we are to the decisions of Westminster,” she said. “We are fighting Westminster austerity with one hand tied behind our back.”

If the SNP wins another Holyrood election in 2026, the party’s unbroken period in office could extend to 24 years. This was not envisaged when plans were drawn up for a devolved assembly that Labour’s Lord Roberson said would “kill nationalism stone dead”. Instead, it would seem to vindicate the concerns of party colleague Tam Dalyell, who viewed devolution as a “motorway to independence with no exits”.

Scotland is stuck with its parliament

There are those who continue to believe that if the UK Government would only grant Holyrood more powers, the nationalists would focus on the day-to-day task of effective governance. They would not. The SNP has no interest in making devolution work, only in seeing it fail, because for as long as there is devolution there is no independence, the party’s raison d’etre.

So if nationalists, along with everyone else, do not believe devolution is working, perhaps we can all agree the Scotland Act should be revisited (again). Because, whatever your view of the Scottish Parliament, we are stuck with it and must try to make the most of it.

We should return to four-year parliamentary terms. Given the calibre of many MSPs we attract, I can see the argument for paying them more money. We should strengthen Holyrood’s toothless committee system, and perhaps have some form of second chamber to give much-needed scrutiny to the duff and incompetent legislation our MSPs seem uniquely talented at drafting. Gender self-ID, the deposit return scheme and “highly protected marine areas” spring to mind.

And we should agree on a threshold that nationalist parties must reach in Scottish elections that could trigger another referendum. This would allow the issue to be at least partly put to one side until the following election, draining some of the toxin that has poisoned Scotland’s body politic for so long. Then, just maybe, Holyrood could live up to the “honourable aspirations for this new forum of democracy” set out by Dewar in 1999.