HAUD on a wee minute. A cross-party committee in the Scottish Parliament is asking the UK Home Office to tighten restrictions on protests in the grounds of Holyrood? Indeed, to harmonise them with Westminster (and the Welsh Senedd). Did I read that right?

Seems I did. To illustrate: the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Designated Scottish Sites under Section 129) Order 2021 – not put to a vote, just an imposition from the Scottish Parliamentary Management Body (SPMB) – has a graphic on page two.

It’s a line-drawn helicopter view of the Parliament building and grounds. For a moment, you enjoy the beautiful organic sweep of Enric Miralles’ blueprint. In particular, the spread of its ridged lawns, blending the Parliament building into the surrounding landscape.

Miralles’s original manifesto is pretty clear on the political implications of this design. “The Parliament sits in the land ... because it belongs to the Scottish land. This is our goal. From the outset we have worked with the intuition that individual identification with land carries collective consciousness and sentiments. The Parliament should be able to reflect the land it represents.”

READ MORE: Enric Miralles: The man who designed the Scottish Parliament

To make the point even clearer, Miralles tucked an ancient-Greek-style open air forum into the plans. Again, using the Catalan architect’s own words, this giant amphitheatre is a “gathering situation … a subtle game of cross views and political implications”.

And what does Order 2021 do? Draw a crude dotted line around the Parliament’s very own public sphere. Within which, those who appear “without lawful authority … will be punishable by a £5000 fine, or a year in jail after a conviction”.

This is poor on so many levels. Many have already quoted the lines from Walter Scott on Holyrood’s Canongate wall: “When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns. But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.”

It exhausts irony to realise that the SPMB has ready stretched to the “length o’ Lunnon”, asking Priti Patel’s Home Office to designate Holyrood as a “protected site”, under national security conditions, from October.

As my colleague Lesley Riddoch has tweeted: What is the problem to which this is a solution? What protests have become so unmanageable that they threaten the business of Parliament, requiring such punitive measures?

The Parliament’s current pages of advice for organisers of protests is pretty prescriptive – no lasers or projections, no defacement of property, no camping or fund collecting, no blocking of paths for staff. But even when enforced, they would allow for the spectacle and noise of a protest to take place.

This is a Parliament that was designed so that “the people of this land” could amass before it. Is it moving towards suppressing such activity?

Some of these over-mighty parliamentarians have short memories. I remember the vigil that started outside Edinburgh’s Royal High School (always a possible site for a Scottish Parliament), triggered by the disastrous Tory election victory in 1992. A bunch of idealistic souls called Democracy For Scotland occupied their banner-garlanded Portakabin, and kept a fire going until the achievement of a parliament was secured in 1997.

The National: HAMISH HENDERSON - FOLKLORIST , POET AND AUTHOR ..CREDIT GRAMPIAN TV.PIC TAKEN MARCH 1992.

DFS was doggedly non-partisan, and somehow tolerated by the same policing authorities who cleared away the (somewhat less coherent) indy campers from the Holyrood grounds in 2016. Go to Calton Hill this very day, and you will find a cairn surmounted by a brazier, for which DFS even received planning permission in 1993. The constitutional tribes gathered around it that same year, the venerated poet Hamish Henderson (above) giving a speech. More capacious times.

Well, some of the suits might say that was an earlier stage in the struggle. Now the parliament isn’t just settled, but delivering majorities of indy-supporting MSPs. It’s going places in the world. So we should try to minimise such disorderly and disreputable behaviour.

THE Eurocrats, and the bond traders, are regarding us closely. We’re a possible member state, who’ll be examined for our contribution to European stability. We’ll want to be a sovereign economy that looks more like something to invest in, than be speculated against. We need to display our reliability and durability.

So all those caravans in the gardens, shouty anti-vaxxers and GRA activists, Extinction Rebels on the roof of the building? Wrong message. We need a Scotland robustly open for business, not flakily ripe for nuisance, thank you. #WheeshtForIndy, as the hashtag has it. Perhaps we all need to stand back a little, and consider what protest actually is, does and achieves, in open and democratic societies. The Turkish-American sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote well in 2020 about whether “protests even work”. Her answer was “it sometimes takes decades to find out”.

Unstoppable waves of public protest indicate that a state’s “legitimacy” isn’t as secure as it could be, says Tufecki. If the current Scottish Government is somewhat discomfited by, say, GRA or XR protests, then rather than prosecuting them more severely, it should take them seriously as indicators of their own failure to represent.

The National:

Tufecki notes how, even in the midst of a pandemic, Black Lives Matter’s public actions shifted the policy window leftwards in the US on racial and ethnic justice. She also notes how public protest “changes casual participants into lifelong activists, which in turn changes society.” Why? Because “collective action is a life-changing experience”, writes Tufecki in The Atlantic. “To be in a sea of people demanding positive social change is empowering and exhilarating. Protests work because they sustain movements over the long term as participants bond.”

Tufecki concludes that the “most powerful means by which protest works… is when the cause is so powerful that the protesters don’t calculate whether it works or not, but feel morally compelled to show up and be counted.”

Do we want to live in a society where people catch fire, and intensify their agency, like this? Maybe, for quite a few politicians in the managing classes of Scottish life, the answer is, “no thanks”.

The Yes movement strengthened the SNP after 2014. But the party tried to transmute its energies into the usual tasks of party membership. The success wasn’t total, as we know from the plethora of indy-supporting civic networks, and the deeply flawed breakaway of Alba.

But the anti-vax, GRA and eco-radical protesters I’d suggest are also worrying signs. The energies of protest in Scottish society have been poorly managed by our indy leadership, particularly in the Scottish Parliament. If our public realm is slowly returning to us, through vaccine passporting or other measures, I would suggest that ScotGov (and particularly its new Green component) gets out there and into it. More engagements with communities, better policy participations and assemblies … and yes, maybe even a more consciously pro-active use of the agora that stretches out from their Parliament building.

I can imagine Enric Miralles looking at this dreadful Order 2021 graphic, with its dotted line of force demarcating “lawful authority” between the building and the hills, and shuddering to his core. And to take his language more literally than the architect intended, a “gathering situation” it might well be.