Hansard

I want to make one point about what we have just heard because I do not want to allow the debate to descend into the place where, regrettably, Adam Tomkins has gone. I want to make a comparison between 1999 and 2021. I have been in the Parliament—with the exception of four years—throughout that time. If we could go back to 1999 in some form of time machine, we would see a very different form of politics and a different type of democracy. I think that we would say to ourselves, “Thank goodness for the Scottish Parliament. It has changed things and moved things on”. One of the reasons why it has moved things on is because we have regularly recognised the legitimacy of different views. What we have just heard was essentially an attempt to demonise the legitimacy of another point of view. That is regrettable. It was unnecessary and wrong.

I want to dwell on the positivity of the debate. I issue a challenge to all my fellow members who have listened to the debate today, including you, Presiding Officer. Change in democracy should challenge us as politicians. We discovered in 1999 how difficult it was to do politics differently. I came into the Scottish Parliament having been the chief executive of the SNP and opposite me on the Labour benches was someone who had been chief executive of the Scottish Labour Party—indeed, he became First Minister for a time. We discovered that it was really hard to work against the grain of politics as it was done elsewhere and as we had been doing it. Politics is often—then and now—confrontational, point scoring and a case of the winner takes all. The winner expects to take all.

We also use language that puts people off, even if they are not put off by that nature of politics. I want to be nice about Anas Sarwar’s contribution. However, he said that he hoped that the citizens assembly would

“hold our feet to the fire”,

and that is the kind of phrase that people do not like. Who would volunteer to work in a system in which we expect to have our feet held to the fire? We have a way of talking and of operating—not all the time, but we have it—that is not conducive to engaging people and bringing them with us. A culture of confrontation will not produce positive change, but a culture of co-operation might do so. However, it is hard to establish, and the longer that one has been in politics and the more one knows about it—and perhaps the higher one has risen up the greasy pole—the harder it is to recognise that culture of confrontation and work against it.

I agree with Adam Tomkins that, when we find ways of working together, we can make it work. We did that at the start of the pandemic, on the two bills that I was honoured to take through the Parliament. The approach was that we were all in it together and had things that we needed to do together. Regrettably, that approach has broken down. It really broke down over the vaccination programme, when there was an attempt to exploit the situation for political gain. It is always a difficult time in the Parliament when we are coming up close to an election. Tensions run high and people say things that they regret. However, we tried that approach of working together, and it worked for us.

Interestingly, on the point that Adam Tomkins made about the FOI measure that we proposed because of the demands of the pandemic, when it appeared that the measure did not have majority support, we moved away from that. Therefore, it is far from some huge stain on our character. It was proposed as a recognition of exception and, when the proposal did not have majority support, it was removed, and rightly so.

Our culture of confrontation is still in evidence, and we need to do something about it. We also need to understand that the language that we use and what we choose to do are part of the problem. We need to understand a third truism, which is that democracy is never static or perfect and that it continues to change. The abbé Sieyès, the intellectual father of the French revolution, started a great deal off with a pamphlet that was called “What Is the Third Estate?” At the start of that pamphlet, he posed three famous questions. He asked:

“What is the third estate?”,

to which the reply was, “Everything”. He asked:

“What has it been hitherto in the political order?”,

to which the reply was “Nothing”. Then he asked:

“What does it desire to be?”,

to which the answer was, “Something”.

Again and again, the challenge is to consider who in our debates is, in essence, nothing. Who deserves to and should take over the debate and become something, as the driving force of our democracy? The answer now is the type of direct democracy that we see in the citizens assembly.

However, that brings a challenge to each one of us in politics, and John Mason expressed the nervousness about it well. It is not even a question of sharing and still less one of holding feet to the fire; it is about a new order replacing what we have, and that will happen in time. Therefore, although I, too, will not be in the next Parliament, the challenge to it is to accept much of the what—although not all of it, as there are bits about it that we would want to debate—and to accept the coming challenge of how democracy takes place and to keep moving.

To do that, we will have to rise above the sort of regrettable things that we have heard today. I am glad that it was only from a few people, but they have been there. Regrettably, Adam Tomkins and Jamie Halcro Johnston were the divisive voices of the past. Today, we have the chance to be the voice of the future.

We are moving towards the type of democracy in the citizens assembly. It will be difficult and it will not be an even process but, in 20 or 25 years, democracy will be different just as, in Scotland at least, it is different now from what it was in 1999. We need to progress, not regress. The UK is regressing democratically, but I hope that Scotland will continue to progress democratically, and that the progress will be with a citizens assembly.