TRIBALISM in Scottish politics has “blunted” scrutiny at Holyrood, a new report has concluded.
Two decades after the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, members of the group which drew up the blueprint for it said while there has been a “great deal of success”, there are also disappointments in how Holyrood has developed.
The Consultative Steering Group (CSG) said one of the biggest disappointments is that “the Parliament’s committees have not emerged as a power in the land in the way that we had hoped”.
The group, which includes former first minister Henry McLeish, ex-deputy first minister Lord Wallace and former presiding officer Sir George Reid, also said that with “immense” pressure on MSPs, it may be necessary to increase their numbers.
But the group admitted “any call for more members is one that is unlikely to be popular with the public”.
It added: “If we are serious about looking to our Parliament to lead on the big issues of the day and to do so in a collaborative, mature, cross-party way, this should not, in our view, be automatically discounted from discussions.”
Their report, commissioned by Holyrood’s current Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh, considered whether the Parliament has lived up to expectations.
McLeish, chair of the CSG, said: “While we could never have imagined in the late 1990s what Scotland and the world would look like in 2019, we are pleased that the foundations we recommended for the Parliament were solid. It has been a huge success in its first 20 years.”
While the group had hoped for “a new approach to politics” when Holyrood was established in 1999, with a more “deliberative and consensus-driven” style, their report said that in reality “parliamentary discourse in Scotland is driven much more by party political tribalism than we expected”.
They said: “The tribalism we have seen has blunted the scrutiny function of the Parliament and has prevented, in most cases, a pluralistic approach to policy scrutiny.”
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