THE 1990s devolution campaign that led to the creation of the devolved Scottish Parliament and the many political parties, civic groups, churches, and trade unions that comprised the Scottish Constitutional Convention were infused with enthusiasm for a new Scottish politics.
Their 1995 report, Scotland's Parliament: Scotland's Right, characterised the Convention and the consensus around that report as a "beacon of hope for a new and better politics in a Scotland running its own affairs".
The Scottish Parliament was envisioned as a body that would govern by cooperative and constructive deliberation, engaged in consultation and encouraging of civic participation in policymaking.
Even the physical arrangement of the Parliament, with MSPs in a horseshoe rather than sitting opposite one another, was intended to represent this.
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And like the physical arrangement of the Scottish Parliament, the vision for how it would govern and do politics was explicitly cast against Westminster.
Westminster politics as adversarial, opaque, and divisive. Scottish politics as cooperative, open, and consensual.
As the Convention put it, the Scottish Parliament would "usher in a way of politics that is radically different from the rituals of Westminster; more participative, more creative, less confrontational […] a culture of openness".
The Convention, and subsequently the architects of the Scotland Act, put their faith in institutional design to bring the new politics into being.
Our institutions are, of course, transformed. The formal structures by which policy is made in Scotland today are unrecognisable compared to their pre-1999 incarnations. Decision-making power on healthcare, education, policing, transport, taxation, and numerous other policy areas has been closer to the people over the past two decades than ever before.
And yet, despite the overhaul of our institutions, even early in the devolution experiment, it was becoming clear that institutional design couldn't be relied on to bring a new politics into being single-handed.
At the beginning of the SNP's first period of minority government, Professor James Mitchell pointed out that the institutional compulsion to realise the new politics gave that prospect its most significant opportunity since 1999 but that it would be up against the intense electoral competition of Scottish party politics.
By 2011, as Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Tavish Scott pointed out, the new politics had lost out to the "visceral hatred between the Nationalists and Labour […] it just transferred from London to Edinburgh".
Yet, as a project, it persisted. In 2014, the institutional overhaul allowing the new politics to flower would come with independence.
The iterative resuscitation and renewal of the new politics as a political project betray two core beliefs: that the status quo is failing Scotland, but the Scottish body politic is better than that. It merely needs better institutions to bring that better self to the surface.
This is nothing but exceptionalism. Like most exceptionalisms, it is a conceit.
That same conceit, central to so many iterations of the new Scottish politics and visions of a different, better Scotland, is also central to the SNP's argument for independence.
If only we were free of Westminster's adversarial, opaque, divisive politics, the Scottish body politic's better angels would triumph, and a better nation would be born out of that triumph. The SNP's strategy since 2007 has been to try to build this case by showcasing an alternative Scotland through the Scottish Parliament and government.
But the SNP's recent scandals leave the new politics in its weakest health this century.
With them go any notion that Scotland's party of government is more transparent, accountable, or trustworthy than its counterparts.
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Even the seemingly banal controversy over the party's membership numbers tells us enough. The party's leadership were happy to obfuscate and lie to their colleagues, members, the press, and the public to conceal a politically embarrassing fall in membership.
Two senior members – the former Chief Executive and the current Treasurer, also an MSP – were arrested concerning an investigation into the party finances, a lack of transparency around which led to a former Treasurer resigning.
Does this look like cooperative, open, consensual politics?
The architects of devolution put their faith in institutions to bring about a new politics. I cannot recall a time when Holyrood's politics looked more like Westminster's.
New institutions were never going to be enough. To rephrase Peter Drucker's maxim: culture eats institutions for breakfast. Holyrood's political culture remains a product of Westminster's. While we might be happier taking comfort in the narcissism of small differences between the two sets of institutions, that would be to bury our heads in the sand.
It might also be tempting to accept the death of the new politics as inevitable and any effort at renewal as futile. But this would be to concede that merely because things haven't gotten better, they cannot.
And looking at the failures of the current government – the state of the Scottish NHS, the ongoing ferries fiasco, the growing attainment gap in Scottish education – I refuse to make that concession.
We can still have the new politics dreamt of by Scotland's devolutionists in the 1990s and many of its secessionists in the heady days of the 2014 referendum campaign. But we must recognise that institutional change will never be sufficient to bring it about. Nor can we leave it up to individual leaders, governments, or parties.
The change we desperately need is cultural, not institutional, not party-political. It means a purposeful effort by our politicians, across the constitutional and party-political divides between them, to reorient away from the "rituals of Westminster" and towards new rituals, new ways of thinking about politics, and new ways of working together.
And it means changing ourselves and how each of us – politicians, activists, commentators, academics, journalists, citizens – engage with one another.
Seeking compromise, not conflict. Persuading, not alienating. Holding ourselves accountable, not avoiding the scrutiny of our peers.
We can fulfil the promise of a new politics and the benefits that it might bring, but it lies with us – not our institutions – to do so.
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