IN view of wild but merited accusations and the general hullabaloo that constitutes the normal discourse of politics, I propose that the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood be renamed The Stairheid.
This is unfair on Holyrood in the sense that the motivation for this arises from bickering among Westminster MPs, albeit Scottish ones. But the expression “stairheid rammy” has been used about Scottish politics on many occasions and seems apt, just as the House of Commons might be renamed the Drones Club after the riotous PG Wodehouse social hub where morning rolls and sugar bowls are bunged about with abandon.
This week, Stewart McDonald, the SNP MP for Glasgow South, accused Stephen Kerr, the Conservative MP for Evil, of trying to stir up a stairheid rammy during a debate on devolution down at the Drones Club.
If you are unfamiliar with Mr Kerr (I see a sea of hands), he described Prime Minister Theresa May’s recent disastrous conference performance as “the epitomy (sic) of real character, perseverance and tenacity”. Apart from this being a prime example of how the need to list things in threes so often leads to tautology, it speaks also of a Scotsman on the make (me a minister).
Tory logic is something you couldn’t make up. Mr Kerr’s case was that the Scottish administration in Edinburgh was “remote” from the people of Scotland and that the House of Commons in London was, by contrast, a “Scottish Parliament” that worked in our interests.
In Scottish politics, this is known as the Northern Isles Distance Inverter, as a result of Unionists there frequently arguing that Edinburgh is too remote and so they’d be better being ruled by London.
Unfortunately, Mr Kerr wasn’t finished there but produced a bag of clichés from which he brought forth a classic about nationalists “stoking up grievance”.
The accusation is absurd. All movements for change are based on grievance. It’s a sine qua non, ken? Did Nelson Mandela not have a grievance? Did the White Russians not have a grievance against the Bolsheviks?
In a sense, all non-Tory political movements (with the exception of the pointless Liberal Democrats) are motivated by grievance. Indeed, even Tories in opposition become aggrieved on behalf of the wealthy and wicked. But, in power, their role is to deflect all grievances against the existing order.
At the moment, for example, the poor and their advocates are stoking up grievance against the grotesquely malevolent Universal Credit system. The Tories would rather that, instead of moaning about starvation and eviction, the poor just accepted it and kept their mouths shut.
Mr McDonald declined to keep his mouth shut about the Tories’ performance during the debate – one of them was later alleged to have laughed throughout the hardship stories – and gave vent to his stairheid rammy hypothesis.
However, it’s not just Tories who can be accused of stirring up stairheid rammies. Indeed, when I was a sketch-writer at Holyrood, I applied the term as a nickname for Labour’s Margaret Curran, who epitomised (must remember to double-check spelling of this) the screeching, “Leave it, Jack, thur no’ worth it” style of the stairheid.
Several Labour wifies behaved similarly – one, Johann Lamont, later became leader – and the party was always by far the worst for destroying any decorum to which the chamber might aspire. The Tories, by contrast, were relatively well behaved.
But the chamber in general became a headquarters for Westminster-style hullabaloo, betraying its founding ambition of doing things differently. Even sitting round in a cosy wee semi-circle, instead of a bun-throwing’s distance from each other as they do at the Drones Club, was meant to make proceedings more consensual than contemptuous.
Oh, those innocent hopes. Too many MSPs had their careerist hearts set on Westminster. Others had imbibed its morés from the television news. Several Tories assayed the ghastly braying that gives the “Mother of Parliaments” the air of children wailing in a sandpit.
Thus, as so often in Scotia Minor, we ended up with an imitation. I cannot see it now becoming a more Scandinavian, thoughtful place, as originally planned. Not while grievances of all sorts are aired with such gusto.
So we might as well bite the bullet and rename Holyrood The Stairheid. It’s a place where elected representatives go to strike attitudes, to remonstrate hands-on-hip, lips pouting, foam spouting, all shouting, bawling and having a ball.
You say: “That’s not what we pay them for.” Good point. And it’s fair to say that fine work is done in the committees, far from the debating chamber where the spotlight encourages graceless strutting and vacuous declamation.
Mr Kerr, meanwhile, we leave to practise his braying down in the House of Grievances. He could go far, that boy. But not far enough.
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