The politics of legislative ownership

When parties agree on policy but compete over who gets the credit, reform slows, fragments, or disappears. Scotland’s plural parliament was designed to foster cooperation – but its incentives often produce the opposite.

There is a tendency in Scottish politics to treat legislative pettiness as a matter of personality – a clash of egos, a bad week at Holyrood, a comms strategy gone too far. But that explanation is too easy. What looks like pettiness is, more often, structural. It is a product of Scotland’s plural parliament – and the political incentives that pluralism creates. 

The Scottish Parliament was designed to be plural by intent. Unlike Westminster’s majoritarian model, Holyrood was built so that no single party could easily dominate. The Additional Member System (AMS) blends constituency MSPs with regional list MSPs to produce proportional outcomes. In theory, this should produce cooperation, consensus, and cross-party lawmaking. Committees are stronger. Backbenchers have more routes to legislation. Minority or coalition government is normal rather than exceptional. 

Pluralism, in short, was supposed to civilise policymaking. But in practice, it has produced a different pathology: competition over legislative ownership. When no party can monopolise power, they compete instead to monopolise credit. 

This helps explain a recurring pattern in Holyrood: the Scottish Government frequently claims to support ‘the principle’ of opposition or backbench legislation – while voting down the bill itself. 

The official reasons are procedural. A proposal is said to lack time, resources, or legislative competence. Committees are overstretched. Financial memoranda are insufficient. More consultation is required.  Yet the political effect is consistent: the reform is blocked – only to reappear later as government legislation or incorporated into executive-led reform processes.

The question this raises is simple: if ministers agree with the principle, why was the government not bringing the bill forward in the first place? And why should parliament accept procedural objections at face value when the same policy later re-emerges in government form?

This pattern has been visible across multiple reform areas. Freedom of information reform is a clear case. Successive attempts – often driven by non-government MSPs – have sought to widen FOI coverage, strengthen enforcement, or close loopholes around arm’s-length bodies. Governments have typically responded by affirming transparency as a principle while resisting the specific legislative vehicle. Concerns are raised about administrative burden, cost, or drafting scope. Reform is delayed, narrowed, or redirected into consultation processes.. The result is not outright rejection – but dilution. 

A similar dynamic appears in constitutional reform debates and land reform. Scotland has a long political tradition of rhetorical consensus on land ownership transparency, tenant rights, and community empowerment. Yet legislative progress is incremental, fragmented, and often shaped more by who introduces reform than by what reform contains. 

Private Members’ Bills illustrate the problem sharply.  Measures that later become widely accepted policy have often struggled when introduced from the backbenches. The ban on smoking in public places, free period product legislation, and energy efficiency measures all passed through periods where government hesitation contrasted with public or parliamentary momentum. Even where ministers ultimately supported reform, the legislative journey frequently involved resistance, delay, or substantial amendment.

This is not unusual in parliaments – governments everywhere prefer to control legislative drafting. But the Scottish case feels more acute because pluralism was meant to do the opposite: empower non-executive lawmaking. 

Instead, backbench legislation is frequently weakened, absorbed, or procedurally squeezed. 

Committees – theoretically engines of plural scrutiny – become gatekeepers of legislative viability. A common objection to Members’ Bills is that parliament lacks the time or resources to process them. On paper, this is administratively reasonable. In practice, it operates as a political filter: scarcity becomes a justification for executive preference. 

It is difficult to avoid the impression that technicalities are sometimes doing political work. Rather than contesting the moral or policy argument of a proposal, opposition is displaced onto process. The debate shifts from ‘Is this reform good?” to ‘Is this reform properly resourced?’ Substance becomes secondary to legislative mechanics.

This proceduralisation of disagreement contributes to what might be called the pettiness of plural politics. Not pettiness in the sense of trivial issues – many of the policies involved are substantive – but pettiness in the scale of differentiation. Parties with largely overlapping policy agendas compete to distinguish themselves through sponsorship rather than substance. 

The phrase ‘narcissism of small differences’ captures this dynamic well. 

Across major domestic policy areas, the SNP, Scottish Greens, and Scottish Labour share broad ideological territory. On climate targets, anti-poverty measures, housing supply, public health, and social welfare, there is often policy alignment.  Yet legislative behaviour does not always reflect this proximity.

“Consensus exists in principle but fragments in process.”

Instead, parties compete to brand reforms as their own. It is politically preferable to pass a government bill than a backbencher’s bill – even if the policy content is near-identical. Ownership matters because ownership translates into electoral credit, stakeholder relationships, and narrative control. 

This helps explain episodes where government votes down a proposal only to introduce a similar framework later. 

The climate emergency debate provides an instructive example. Opposition-led and backbench-driven efforts to formalise emergency framing and accelerate targets met resistance in parliamentary process and framing, before elements were later incorporated into government strategy. Housing emergency declarations have followed a similar arc: initial reluctance at national level, followed by executive adoption as political and institutional momentum becomes unavoidable.

From a policy perspective, this duplication is inefficient. Legislative time is scarce. Committee scrutiny is resource-intensive. Civil service drafting is costly. Re-litigating reforms because of sponsorship disputes is not good lawmaking – it is institutional friction. 

Nor is this dynamic easily comparable to Westminster.  The UK Parliament operates under a majoritarian model. Governments there typically command stable Commons majorities and control most legislative scheduling. Private Members’ Bills exist but rarely pass without government backing. Executive dominance is overt rather than contested.

Holyrood’s pluralism was supposed to soften executive control by distributing legislative initiative.  But when executives remain agenda-dominant while also competing within a proportional, multi-party ecosystem, a hybrid pathology emerges: governments still control legislative machinery, but must constantly defend political space against ideologically adjacent rivals. 

The result is defensive lawmaking. Ministers resist external bills not necessarily because they oppose the policy, but because conceding legislative ground weakens executive authority and brand differentiation. In this sense, what we are seeing is not simply political ego but institutional incentive. 

Plural parliaments reward cooperation rhetorically but competition operationally. Parties must collaborate to pass legislation, yet also differentiate to survive electorally. Legislative ownership becomes one of the few available arenas for that differentiation – especially when policy disagreement is shallow. 

This tension produces what might be called Scotland’s legislative ‘small country syndrome’ – or, more bluntly, a Scottish parliamentary disease. Reform is rarely killed outright. Instead, it is delayed, thinned, repackaged, or re-authored. Consensus exists in principle but fragments in process.

The danger is cumulative. 

When parliament repeatedly signals agreement with the principle of reforms while procedurally obstructing them, public trust erodes. Stakeholders learn that winning the argument is insufficient; they must also secure executive sponsorship. Backbench initiative – theoretically central to Holyrood’s founding vision – becomes performative rather than decisive. 

Over time, this hollows pluralism of its democratic promise. A plural parliament should expand legislative routes. It should enable coalition building around ideas, regardless of sponsor. It should reward policy merit over institutional origin. If instead it incentivises brand protection and procedural veto, pluralism risks reproducing the very executive dominance it was designed to temper – only with added layers of inter-party pettiness. 

None of this is inevitable. Procedural reforms could strengthen committee capacity to progress Members’ Bills. Legislative time could be more formally protected for non-government proposals. Pre-legislative collaboration frameworks could allow governments to co-sponsor rather than absorb external reforms. But these fixes require political will – and, crucially, a cultural shift away from ownership politics. 

Until then, Scottish policymaking may continue to exhibit this paradox: high consensus on what should be done, low consensus on who gets to do it. And in that gap between agreement and action, plural politics risks looking less like cooperation – and more like competition dressed in procedural language.