Deleting gender details from its website is not a great start for the new parliament

In the days after Scotland’s new cohort of MSPs was sworn in at Holyrood, the parliament’s website removed the function that allows users to filter their number according to gender. In a country of more than 10,000 homeless children that may seem like a minor issue, but for a legislature which supposedly strives for increased female participation, deleting the very existence of women from the internet feels like a retrograde step.

The Scottish Parliament has arrived at this position following the election of Scottish Green MSPs Iris Duane, a transwoman, and Q Manivannan, who identifies as non-binary. The decision followed an interview given by Holyrood’s new presiding officer Kenny Gibson, who said he would take “appropriate action” against any MSP not using a person’s preferred pronouns. It was a rule Gibson himself broke during only his second time in the chair when he referred to Manivannan as “he” after the Green MSP raised a point of order during the vote to select a first minister.

The vote itself was illustrative of how much time our elected members waste on matters which are little or no interest to the people who put them there. As the leader of the largest party, John Swinney was always set to become first minister following a majority vote in the chamber. Before we could get to that point, however, we had to endure Holyrood at its performative worst as each party leader put his or herself forward for the job, receiving the same number of votes as their party has MSPs before being eliminated. 

Only time will tell how effective this parliament is at legislating for the challenges facing the country. Legislating is, after all, what MSPs are paid to do, although anyone who followed the deliberations of the last session of the Scottish Parliament – surely the low point of the devolution era (or the low point of the devolution era so far) – would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. 

It didn’t get off to the best of starts; convened during a pandemic, new MSPs often worked remotely, failing to build cross-party relationships in the way their predecessors had done. It helped create a parliament of politicians as doctrinaire as they were dogmatic, a situation best highlighted by the fractious debate surrounding the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Arguably the standout piece of legislation from the last parliament due to the amount of time and debate it took up – not just in parliament but in the media and wider society – it ultimately failed to make it onto the statute book after being torpedoed by the Conservative government at Westminster. 

When not in the trenches of the culture wars, our MSPs were given to mawkishness and virtue-signalling, passing legislation to ban dog theft (already a crime) and greyhound racing (already fallen into abeyance). When it came to the issues that really matter to vast swathes of the population, reforming social care for example, the government brought forward skeleton bills with minimal detail, hoping to put more flesh on the bones at some later date. A note to the Class of 2026: If you are a legislator, you are there to legislate not just bring forward a nice-sounding bill that collapses at the first sign of scrutiny. 

And scrutiny is another thing the Scottish Parliament has not been good at. An SNP backbencher before he took up the post of presiding officer, Gibson won plaudits for his chairing of the finance committee in the last parliament, unafraid to make himself a thorn in the side of his more senior party colleagues. We must hope he brings a similar level of fearlessness to his new role. 

It would be a mistake to look at the SNP’s victory in this election as a vote of confidence in the status quo or validation for the party’s stewardship of the Scottish economy and public services. The election of 17 Reform MSPs, a party with only a limited foothold in Scottish politics before 7 May, is proof enough of that. But there is arguably a bigger story, one of apathy and disengagement. While overall turnout was in line with previous Holyrood elections at 53 per cent, that’s no reason to be comfortable with it. In Dundee City East, which contains some of the country’s poorest neighbourhoods, turnout was down at 47 per cent, which to state the obvious, means more people chose to stay at home than to vote – if they knew there was an election taking place at all. 

The early days of this parliament have not got off to an auspicious start. The first week was taken up with ill-informed debate about whether the aforementioned Manivannan, who is in the country on a student visa, has the right to sit at Holyrood, much of it spread by the very MSPs who unanimously backed the relevant legislation in the last parliament. 

As the largest party by far, the SNP has it in its gift to help build consensus and move Scottish politics out of an era consumed by identity politics into one that takes seriously the big issues which face us all, whether that’s the cost-of-living crisis or the challenges facing the NHS. After the past five years, the bar for what constitutes success has been set incredibly low.