As MSPs clash over seagulls, Scotland is going to the dogs
Scotland’s political elite seems interested only in their own obsessions or narrow party political objectives, says Susan Dalgety
It’s a Monty Python sketch waiting to be written. Two blokes fighting over seagulls. One a part-time football referee and full-time member of the Scottish parliament. The other a government minister in charge of parliamentary business, whose colourful language can best be described (by him) as “industrious”.
A tussle in the corridors of power, with a few curses thrown around. A mildly amusing skit at best, except that this scenario is not the figment of a script-writer’s imagination. It is a scene from our Scottish Parliament, the institution established more than a quarter of a century ago to “do right by the Scottish people”.
Arguably, Holyrood has become instead a parody of a parliament, where second-rate party activists vie with each other for attention, caring less about doing right by the Scottish people and more about acting in their own self-interest. Take the now notorious fight between Douglas Ross, the former Conservative leader, and SNP MSP Jamie Hepburn over the timing of a ‘summit’ to discuss seagulls.
Fighting over Star Wars figures
Ross has accused Hepburn of physical assault and verbal abuse during a confrontation in the parliament on Wednesday. In words reminiscent of my two sons fighting over Star Wars figures, Ross told journalists: “He then started swearing in my face… his grab got stronger and stronger, his words got louder and more aggressive…”
Hepburn countered with a petted lip, saying “yeah, I put my hand on his shoulder and probably used some choice words I shouldn’t have – that’s it.” However he later tendered his resignation as parliamentary business minister over the incident.
The Presiding Officer, Alison Johnstone, intervened. “This is a very serious allegation, and it is important it is dealt with through the appropriate processes,” she said, before passing the matter to Holyrood’s commissioner of ethical standards. The political equivalent of “wait till your father gets home”.
This toy fight between two grown men responsible for the economic and social well-being of Scotland came on the same day that a female member of the parliament pleaded with the First Minister and his government to implement April’s Supreme Court ruling on sex. SNP member Michelle Thomson, who has previously revealed she was raped when she was 14, told the chamber she was “filled with despair to be speaking again in a fight for women’s rights”.
In a spine-chilling testimony, she went on to describe how her early trauma had left her with a compelling need to feel safe and implored the Scottish Government to act on the Supreme Court’s ruling to protect women’s single-sex spaces.
Contemptuous of women’s rights, careless with money
The Scottish Government’s response? A few days ago, it announced it planned to contest legal action by campaign group For Women Scotland, which is suing ministers for falling to abide by the law of the land. But Scotland’s government is not just contemptuous of women’s rights; it is just as careless of the nation’s finances.
On Thursday, Audit Scotland revealed that the government has no plans to deal with an expected £770 million funding gap in its scheme for disability benefits. The Auditor General, Stephen Boyle, told the BBC that there must be “a much more structured plan about how the government is going to deal with the scale of divergence between the money it gets and what it is spending”. Or as my mother used to tell me, “you can’t spend money that you don’t have”.
And on the same day that Ross and Hepburn were – allegedly – fighting over seagulls, the SNP and Green MSPs voted down a proposal to carry out research into the scale of child sexual exploitation during the passage of the Justice Reform Bill. This despite a recent review, commissioned by the Scottish Government, which states that “precise prevalence data for [child sexual abuse] and [child sexual exploitation] is difficult to establish and vary across countries and within research studies”.
Yet Justice Secretary Angela Constance claimed in parliament on Wednesday that research would not be “effective”. Little wonder Labour MP Joani Reid said angrily that the SNP's refusal to accept the need for further research exposed a “deep hostility to telling the truth”.
10,000 homeless children
The litany of despair continues. Homeless figures out on Wednesday showed a 28 per cent jump in the number of Scots sleeping rough before making a homelessness application, up from 1,932 in 2023-24 to 2,465 in 2024-25. The same report reveals the number of people living in temporary homeless accommodation is at an all-time high, with more than 10,000 children without a permanent home.
Ten thousand children. But don’t despair, Housing Secretary Mairi McAllan has a plan. A big one which includes a promise to spend £4.9 billion over the next four years, but presumably only after the government finds the £770m it needs to plug the disability benefits gap.
Most parliaments and governments, as they come to the end of their term, run out of steam. Weighed down by internal in-fighting, exhausted by trying to balance the books, out of ideas, their focus shifts from the difficult job of governing to the campaign trail.
But it seems, as only the seventh election in Holyrood’s history looms into view, that the institution itself has become a lame duck, that it has forgotten its core purpose, to “do right by the Scottish people”.
The Holyrood cocoon
Earlier this month, the new co-leader of the Scottish Greens, Gillian Mackay, told Scots not to vote Green next May if they do not think that trans women are women. She said that not believing that trans women were women was “probably a red line for us”.
Her astonishing arrogance is mirrored across Scottish politics, with voters’ concerns a seeming irrelevance to a political elite cocooned in Holyrood, interested only in their own obsessions or narrow party political objectives. The people’s priorities come second.
But next May, it is the people who will decide what they want their parliament to be: a safe space for activists and party hacks or a legislature that does its best to improve all our lives.
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