Holyrood’s self-protection racket

IMAGINE A WORKPLACE where you can decide never to come in or, if you have hybrid working, never to log in. Nobody will ever ask if there’s a problem and nobody will ever challenge you.

You can just put your feet up, go travelling or whatever you like, and you will be paid in full, no questions asked.

Imagine if in that same workplace you are convicted of a crime, lose an appeal and are slung into jail. That’s okay too.

And imagine in this same workplace you do something that merits disciplinary action. Well, don’t worry because you can’t be sacked.

MSPs have voted to protect themselves.

Surely, no such place exists.

Welcome to the world of being a Member of the Scottish Parliament.

For the past five years I have been working on a Bill that would have sorted out this nonsense. It has just been voted down by the SNP and the Greens with the Tories so confused that they couldn’t make up their minds and abstained. To their credit, Labour and the Nats’ new best pals the Lib Dems voted for it.

I wanted to end the scandal of there being no requirement to actually attend parliament. When I was a councillor I knew there was a law which meant that if I didn’t attend for six months without good reason I could be removed and I wanted that to also apply to MSPs.

The committee looking at the Bill didn’t agree so that bit of the Bill was sacrificed.

I also proposed that MSPs should lose their jobs if they were jailed for six months or more. Being jailed for six months is a very unlikely event in Scotland but I wanted to avoid a repeat of the situation where Bill Walker was jailed for 12 months, where the law said he would only lose his job if he was incarcerated for more than 12 months.

That section of the Bill was also sacrificed.

So we were left with a Bill which would have introduced a system of recall under which voters could have been asked whether MSPs who were jailed for up to a year or barred from parliament for 10 days or more should either face a by-election or – if they were a regional member – be removed straight away.

Parliament had accepted that we should legislate. The question was, how?

The fundamental challenge for me was to design a recall system that works for both constituency and regional members. It is impossible to have the same system because we are elected differently and my initial effort was clunky and potentially very expensive. I accepted that and went back to the drawing board.

The difficult bit was the regional element but luckily I had engaged with the Senedd standards committee in Wales, where its government was legislating under its new entirely list system, crazy as that seems.

It seemed to me that I could largely adopt the Welsh system for recalling regional members, which was to ask voters only once whether a member should stay or go if they had met the threshold for being recalled.

That’s a poll, rather than a petition used for constituency members.

That system is far easier to understand than my initial two-stage proposal and is obviously a lot cheaper.

So that’s what I proposed at Stage 2. I had responded to the committee’s concerns, though it never actually said what it would like instead.

My officials worked with the government on amendments but when we got to Stage 2 the minister revealed he wasn’t entirely happy with one of the amendments. He wanted more detail. So I did that.

The minister, Graeme Dey, backed all my amendments at the final stage but then ordered his SNP troops to oppose the Bill.

I saw all this coming a mile off.

When I left the Scottish Conservatives and joined Reform in August last year, I said that one of the biggest risks was that other parties would vote down this Bill – simply because I am now a member of a party that is challenging the establishment.

I felt sorry for the officials and the government drafter who worked on this because they were wasting their time. The die was cast and it was party political.

MSPs have voted to protect themselves. It is a terrible look and it cannot stand.

When the new parliament forms in May we must revisit this at pace. One suggestion has been that a special committee could be formed. Well, fine, but it must have a convenor who wants to work at lightning speed.

I wonder who that might be? This will happen. Bring on the reform!