Assisted dying vote Shows Scottish Parliament is failing
The Scottish Parliament is becoming incapable of changing Scotland. It appears to be caught in a trap where it sees supporting the status quo as risky but equally that supporting change is risky too so instead it just waffles.
The failure of the Assisted Dying Bill is a case in point. First, it is important to note that there are strongly principled positions on each side and those holding them have argued their case, often passionately. That is a sign of healthy democracy.
The problem comes in between. A significant number of MSPs seem mainly to have calculated what course of action will cause them the least political heat, and it is becoming a pattern. We have heard exactly the same thing recently over both the proposed Freedom of Information legislation changes and the pursuit of the 'Nordic Model' on sex work.
In all of these cases the deciding votes came from a group of politicians whose official position is 'I can't support the status quo but also I can't support this particular change so instead I support a third thing that isn't on the table and I'm not going to tell you what it is, when it might happen or even if I’ll do anything about it'.
A case study in the Assisted Dying Bill instance is a comment by Humza Yousaf. He claimed that to leave someone with only the choice of intolerable pain or suicide is unacceptable and that there must surely be a third choice. Mr Yousaf appears to have forgotten that he was the Cabinet Secretary for Health with ultimate power and responsibility for precisely this issue.
He sits in a Government which itself has had power for nearly two decades. It has taken no convincing action on terminal palliative care. A ‘third option’ cannot suddenly emerge as a priority only as a reason to reject two other options. That is fundamentally dishonest.
Likewise the Scottish Government has presided over what is generally seen as a rapid erosion of Freedom of Information rights but has taken a position of saying 'something should be done' but took direct action to make sure something wasn't done, with vague promises that something else might be done in the future.
The case with the Unbuyable Bill is almost identical. The politicians who voted against the legislation largely claimed to support the legislation – just not in this form. Again, it promises that something should be done. Some time.
There are two interpretations of what is wrong. The first is either that Scotland's civil service cannot write draft legislation competently or that back bench MSPs are not getting the support to write competent Members Bills.
The legislative programme of the Scottish Parliament is dominated by filler legislation, with Acts like the Good Food Nation Bill or the recent Land Reform legislation being little more than vague good intentions. Legislation like the Hate Crimes Act has roundly been decried by experts as badly drafted. So there is reason to believe we do have a competent legislation problem.
The second interpretation is that this is cultural, that the politicians in the Scottish Parliament see their salary as reliant on not rocking the boat. The pervasive nature of the Scottish Parliament's small-c conservatism suggest this is a major problem as well.
The former suggests we need reform of the civil service and in particular a bolstering of the legislative support for backbench politicians. The latter suggests a more profound problem. Yes, more use of Citizens Assemblies could help here, as would any other form of participatory democracy for the simple reason that research has repeatedly shown that the public turns out to be less cowardly than the politicians on difficult issues.
But that is not enough. This fundamental fear of making decisions is so engrained in the Scottish Parliament now that it impacts almost everything that happens. 'Safer if perhaps we don't bother' has become a corrosive mantra. We need a better system of creating public policy.
That is why Common Weal has proposed a system of Policy Academies (open-access policy proposing bodies made up of academics, practitioners and civil servants), Civic Forums (where civil society experts shape legislative ideas before they reaches politicians), participatory democracy (so policy-making doesn't disappear into a black box and come out compromised into nothing) and with a Citizens Assembly as a standing chamber of Parliament (to call out politicians on cowardice).
There were very good arguments for and against Assisted Dying. There were no valid arguments for agreeing with both and calling that a reason to do nothing. The Scottish Parliament is failing and needs major reform. We have set out how we would do it in Sorted.