Ruth Wishart: Despite the lunacy of the Lords, a second chamber may help Holyrood

Mr Walker (below) you see, vice chair of the 1922 Tory backbench committee, is one of those doughty freedom fighters who is battling for his right to go about his business ­unfettered by those silly regulations being put in place to stop the spread of a life threatening ­virus.

And to make certain sure we know he means business, he has pledged to walk about for the rest of the lockdown carrying a bottle of milk. Don’t ask. Haven’t the foggiest. Maybe it’s a Broxbourne tradition thingy.

Yet, in spite of himself, Mr Walker has a point. There are almost certainly too many unelected folk dotting about the place, ­affecting to know better than the rest of us. Step forward – those who still can – the members of the House of Lords, now ­numbering 200-odd more than the elected lot along the corridor.

These days most newbies are PM ­appointments (with the obligatory window dressing from Her Maj), yet include, inter alia, 92 men, all men, sitting thanks only to the fact that some ancestor or other was the most proficient land grabber and sheep stealer. I exaggerate, but not by much. ­Include too a fixed number of Church of England bishops, surely the very ­constituency to showcase their multi-cultural 21st century credentials. Interestingly, one of the few clerical retirees not immediately ennobled was the previous Archbishop of York. Then again, he was black.

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Not even to mention peerages for party donors (for bigger sums necessary than ­getting mere knighthoods), an England cricketing hero of the PM’s, his brother, and a raft of Brexiteers, some of them with political past lives best filed under dodgy.

Bad enough that this bloated chamber – only a small number of whom actually take the job seriously enough to contribute – bad enough that they are still being paid half rates to switch on their Zoom, but the most appallingly anti-democratic device is shoving someone into the upper house in order that they can become a member of the governing cabinet.

The most egregious example of this is appointing to the job of Brexit overlord the now Lord David Frost, who took over mopping up the post-Brexit deluge and bourach from what I’m guessing is a not so secretly relieved Michael Gove. It takes a very perverse brand of idiocy to put in the most sensitive job in the ­cabinet, the very man who ensured that EU/UK ­relations would sink to a new, ­embittered low. As witness the current vaccine wars. Then again if your mission in life is to kick sand in the faces of your most ­valuable neighbours it may make sense. Just not of the common variety.

And what has all this nonsense to do with Scotland? Patience. I’m coming to that. Outside of independence, one of the reasons my vote switched to the SNP was their determination to have no truck with peers, peerages, and this brand of naked preferment. And, since our nation is increasingly aware that independence is the swiftest route out of being shackled to a shoddy system, there have been all manner of daft suggestions as to how the restless natives could be persuaded to ditch their ambitions in return for some tawdry trinkets.

Let’s move the Lords to York! (Nice town and all that, but not the salient point here). Let’s ring fence a daud of the red benches for a fixed number of Celtic ­backsides! (You’re just not paying ­attention, are you?. We don’t want seats in the Lords. We don’t want the Lords; any of it.)

Howandsoever, I actually think a ­second advisory and revising chamber is not a bad idea in and of itself. And it may be, in the light of recent parliamentary shenanigans, that there really is scope to improve on the original Holyrood model. Obviously it can’t resemble the contemporary Westminster variety, but a ­Scottish Senate with the right mix of skills could be of invaluable benefit to our still ­fledgling parliament.

It needn’t be a large body; in fact it must have a cap so that it can neither be more numerous than our MSPs or have more clout. It wouldn’t be there to ­second guess, but to reinforce, anticipate, ­research, revise, and add intellectual heft and experience. And stay awake.

My rough draft would include long ­experienced people from every field. From unions, business, academia, the arts, health, education, economics, international affairs, diplomatic relations etc etc. They would agree from the outset to lend our parliament their wisdom and ­experience for one fixed term only so that a) the pool of knowledge would always be refreshed and b) there would be no jobs for life mentality.

While I’ve always thought this could be highly useful in principle, I believe it would be vital in a post Yes for Indy vote, when some very hard work and ­intelligent thought will be required to steer through the choppy waters of withdrawing from the UK in the least disruptive way for both camps. We will always be the closest of neighbours; hopefully we will always be good friends. However this time it really will be a partnership not one legislature handing down tablets of stone as it saw fit. Non-coercive relationships are always the healthiest.

Our Senate could do a lot of its work virtually, a modus operandi with which we’ve all become involuntarily familiar. It would certainly make sense in the area of sharing research findings. It could have its own sub-committees comprising those with similar background knowledge whose deliberations could then be presented to the full Senate when it meets.

Many people have argued that we shouldn’t be too dismissive of Westminster and all its works and that there are areas like parliamentary privilege and the election of committee chairs where we might usefully follow suit. Fine. But let’s not restrict ourselves to examining just one legislature. There are many from which we could cherry-pick the best notions, with the possible exception of the Chinese variety.

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Also in need of a re-think is the civil service. Not just for the obvious recent reasons, but because it too will become independent, no longer an out of sight out of mind branch of the UK one. There are some fine civil servants in Scotland, and some people with valuable knowledge of how it can and should develop. No false pride should stop the new Scotland from dipping into every available well of ­expertise as it fashions a new and exciting identity.

We have to replace “wha’s like us” with “wha wid we maist want to be like”. There are many successful small ­countries, not least that Scot-infested ­territory, New Zealand, which has many elements in both governance and values which we might want to emulate.

There have already been solid ­foundations laid down in terms of our relationships to the EU, especially our friends in Ireland, who have proved so adept at changing an entire cultural mindset whilst parlaying what was once a minor voice in international relations into a major one.

And it goes without saying that there are many other small, successful ­countries, who would kill for the ready access we have to valuable sources of energy and mature businesses in those sectors on which tomorrow’s world will be built.

This is not dewy-eyed optimism. Hopefully, merely, anticipatory pragmatism.