Chris Murray

I think the hon. Lady may be psychic, because she makes exactly the point I am about to make. I could not agree with her more. What this breeds is a culture of gesture and tokenism. That means we side-step tough choices in Scotland. We duck the trade-offs that are required to implement policy change. We now have roundtables and co-production as substitutes for reform, and consultations and strategies as substitutes for action. I would take that argument one step further. When Labour came to power in 1999, it set about tackling Scotland’s pressing problems, as the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson), referred to: free bus passes; banning smoking in public places; repealing section 28, for which I will personally be forever grateful; and pursuing radical homelessness and housing reforms. But fundamentally, that policy agenda had been developed in the 1990s and the Government set about implementing it when they got in. When the SNP took office in 2007 with its fundamental policy goal of independence, all policy development was shaped around that objective. I have to say that the fact that independence has not been realised has become the alibi for every policy failure on its watch. What that means is that the Scottish Parliament never became the policy development hub in Scottish political life. It was denuded of its ability to form ideas and for those to be turned into action, and to do the full spectrum of policy development in Scotland, such as identifying social problems, working through how reforms would work, weighing up the trade-offs, brokering the consent among the people and then turning those ideas into tangible reality in people’s lives. I am a devolutionist not just because I believe in Scottish representation, but because I believe in the power of the state to change Scottish lives. The Scottish Parliament gave us the locus to debate that, but the Scottish Government have failed to give us the mechanism to operationalise and turn it into reality. It is my assertion that the Scottish Parliament now stands, along with Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Good Friday agreement, as a firmament of the British constitutional set-up. Donald Dewar said it should be not just an end, but a means to a greater end. We have the means now, but it is lamentable that we have not used them to achieve those ends. The last 18 years have been heavy on argument, short on policy delivery. A different direction is needed to fulfil the promise of devolution, which is the devolved Government using the power of the state not to further their own ambitions, but to materially improve the lives of Scotland’s people.