How to improve Holyrood: double the salaries of MSPs

All of the attendees at the service will have left that day knowing that, in Alistair, we have lost a political and intellectual giant. But, the same day, the Scottish Parliament was witnessing the first debate of the annual Budget process. I walked from Alistair’s memorial service to Holyrood for a late afternoon meeting, and listened to the debate en route. I didn’t last long. I must confess, having spent the day as I had, the juxtaposition between Alistair and the MSPs contributing to the Budget debate was too much for me. I removed my headphones, and walked in silence.

There are many good, experienced, intelligent politicians at Holyrood, representing all parties. But not enough, and it takes a heavy toll on the country, as we saw with the recent Budget. Scotland has problems with a flatlining economy and faltering public services, and it needs people of deep understanding and perspective on all sides of the Holyrood chamber to fully interrogate the routes out of them.

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We will all have heard and talked about the quality of our representatives; “why can’t we have better politicians” is a very popular refrain in bars, cafes, workplaces and homes around the country.

The answer is simple: “we can”. We can have better MSPs, better political parties, better governments, both at local and national level. However, we will have to, ourselves, show maturity and understand that in order to achieve the output we desire, we will need a series of inputs that we may not.

Firstly, at national level, we need to dramatically increase the salary of MSPs and government ministers. I know the horror which usually greets such a call, however this is, I am afraid, a classic chicken-and-egg. This is not to say that £67,000 is a small salary; to most, it is not. However, that is the reward side of the risk:reward of being a politician. The risk cannot be ignored. The job insecurity, the propulsion of you and your family into public life, the scrutiny in the press and on social media of everything you have ever done in your life, and the hours, often misunderstood by those outside politics, which are often debilitatingly long.

When we account for those risks, the £67,000 reward is not enough for many of those high-quality, highly intellectual, highly experienced people we continually demand are our MSPs.

Politics is not a charitable pursuit for most people, and most of those who are theoretically interested in being an MSP, but who already earn a similar salary, simply stay in their job where the reward is the same but the risk is much lower. They would think twice, though, if the salary of an MSP was, let’s say, doubled to £134,000. And if the salary of a minister was doubled from £99,000 to £198,000, and of a First Minister from £165,000 to £330,000.

At a stroke, that would massively increase the available pool of the sort of MSPs we say we want.

There are not enough good, experienced, intelligent politicians at Holyrood (Image: PA)

However, it is not enough. There is another side to the coin; the way that we select candidates for election to Parliament. Too often, becoming an MSPs requires someone to serve their time for their political party, pounding pavements delivering leaflets in the rain, standing several times for an unwinnable constituency, and working for an existing MSP, before then being chosen for a safe constituency or being placed at the top of a party’s regional list, following an opaque meeting with 13 people in a village hall.

This won’t do. So, along with doubled salaries, Scotland should use open primaries to choose candidates. Open primaries are common in many parts of the world, but in the UK and Europe have been used only sporadically. Scotland should pioneer their regular use, so that voters can be involved not only in choosing their MSP, but in choosing their constituency candidates, and in ranking the political party lists to elect regional MSPs. This would put an end to MSPs being chosen according to party loyalty or time served, and usher in an era where quality matters most.

Secondly, though, we must also turn our attention to local politics. Since devolution, local democracy has been defenestrated by a too-powerful Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government, which has simultaneously pulled power down from Westminster, and sucked it up from local authorities.

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This is deeply corrosive; most of the issues that affect people most profoundly in their lives, from transport and education to housing and health, are the responsibility of authorities or agencies at a level well beneath Holyrood, yet their power does not remotely match their responsibility.

Some of this is by design; the debate over independence for Scotland required regionalisation to be suppressed in favour of a "One Scotland" mentality. However, with that debate now nearing its end, we can once again embrace the power of regions and cities. We could, for instance, use the fairly sensible boundaries of Scotland’s 14 health boards as coterminous boundaries for a decentralised and more accountable set of police forces, for some elements of schooling, for transport planning, for housing strategy, for the collection of regional taxes, and critically for the election of mayors to represent those areas, all working in coordination with more powerful micro-councils at community level.

This sort of reorganisation can often be met with an eye roll, and placed in the locked box marked "Too Hard". However, tackling the hard stuff is the mark of a person, and of a leader, and of a country. And it could be the essential facet of a new and improved Scotland.