A LOT is said and written about the failure of opposition parties at Holyrood to hold the Scottish Government to account. Much of it is unfair.

For accountability to work, there has to be a process which leads to sanctions. There need to be rules and conventions which are respected. Occasionally, resignations are required from those responsible for particularly egregious failings.

If none of these norms applies, then where do opposition politicians go? When a government operates on the brass-neck principle that nobody admits responsibility and resignations are forbidden, what are MSPs expected to do next? Complain?

To all intents and purposes, a system of self-protecting immunity was created under Alex Salmond and has been enshrined as the first principle of government by Nicola Sturgeon. It depends on shamelessness and the assumption that not enough people care to make a difference, which may well be true.

Westminster is far from perfect but it does demand accountability. No minister would give false evidence to a committee without inviting serious jeopardy. “Misleading the House” is a resignation offence, as even the mighty have found out. None of these safeguards applies at Holyrood.

Last Friday’s sitting of the Public Audit Committee, at which Nicola Sturgeon gave evidence on the Ferguson ferries scandal, was a case in point. Nobody could reasonably criticise opposition MSPs on the committee. They had done their homework and went in hard. In return, they got verbose, carefully contrived answers, some of which were quite literally unbelievable.

But so what? It should be remembered that the committee is investigating the saga only because of a report from the Auditor General for Scotland which was so excoriating that it should itself have led to resignations and censures. Instead, the Sturgeon principle kicked in: “Brass it out and it will go away.” And nobody can say it hasn’t worked for her.

On some critical aspects, Ms Sturgeon’s case was that nobody told her anything. In order to announce the Ferguson yard as preferred bidder, she was merely heading off to Port Glasgow for a routine engagement, according to her own account. There were no “red flags” in her briefing; no reason to believe she was blundering into an intensely delicate negotiating process.

I do not believe a word of this but in the improbable event of it being true, it would reflect an astonishing level of failure on the part of the coterie around her; the senior civil servants, special advisers, press officers who had been pleaded with by CMAL, the nominal client, not to make this a high profile event because of the enormous doubts surrounding the contract. All of that was ignored in order to clear the way for a highly political PR stunt.

Even Jim McColl, who owned the yard at that time, thought the circus which Ms Sturgeon created was premature and ill-advised. It was not the norm, he said in response to her evidence, for preferred bidder status to be trumpeted for the obvious reason that negotiations were ongoing. So if he didn’t want it and CMAL vigorously opposed it, why did Ms Sturgeon go to Port Glasgow that day?

The committee, or at least its opposition members, will do their best to weigh the evidence and reach conclusions on the whole affair. And then if its report looks like being critical of the great leader, it will doubtless be undermined in advance, as happened with the Salmond committee inquiry, before being completely ignored. And so it goes on.

It explains why it remains vital to call for a public inquiry into the Ferguson debacle. Only the forensic, open-ended questioning of witnesses might get at the truth. It would be nice if the same outcome could be achieved through a trusted system at Holyrood which allows for serious scrutiny and treats findings with respect. In current hands, that is an idle dream.

The Select Committee system at Westminster operates in a way that has never been allowed to develop at Holyrood. It is genuinely independent of government and does not fear, on many occasions, to inconvenience ministers and Whips across party lines.

All the noble – some might say, naïve – intentions to make Holyrood a more consensual forum than Westminster have been trashed by an administration which respects only conformity. The committee system, as a serious source of challenge, has fallen victim to that mentality. The Public Audit Committee could distinguished itself by proving itself the exception to that rule.

Another recent example of Holyrood’s failure to demand accountability was its lack of response to confirmation that Ms Sturgeon had repeatedly misled MSPs and other audiences – including one in Washington – on the question of Scotland’s energy mix, her standard claim being that Scotland’s electricity needs are already met from renewable sources.

The claim is complete nonsense and on average less than 30 per cent of Scotland’s electricity comes from renewables while for almost two-thirds of the time we would be in darkness if relying solely on renewable generation. It is a really serious piece of propagandist deception designed to conceal the exceptional inter-dependence for security of supply which exists within our island as a whole.

When Ms Sturgeon’s people were finally forced by a Freedom of Information request to withdraw the claim and correct her statement to Parliament, charts published by the Scottish Government to reinforce the false claim were also quietly revised.

Does it not seem remarkable that the Presiding Officer at Holyrood did not call on the First Minister to explain in person to the Parliament how this sustained misrepresentation came about and to apologise for it? Or is it OK to mislead the Scottish Parliament if one of your flunkeys sneaks in a month later to change the record of what was said?

On a host of issues, opposition MSPs and others are working hard to expose the hidden realities of how Scotland is governed and misled. What needs to be more widely understood is how heavily the dice has been loaded against them.

Read more by Brian Wilson:

Islanders have been betrayed by ferries fiasco but so have the workers of Port Glasgow

The first real test for Sunak: Rees-Mogg and the Brexit bill