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The Scottish Parliament (Pąrlamaid na h-Alba in Gaelic, Scots Pairlament in Scots) is the national legislature of Scotland. The original Scottish Parliament (or Estates of Scotland) was abolished by
the Act of Union 1707 to form a Parliament of Great Britain. The current Parliament
was established by the Scotland Act 1998. The first meeting of
the new Parliament as a devolved legislature was in 1999.
Today's Parliament
Constitution and powers
Parliament was reconstituted as a body which deals with matters which have been devolved to it by the UK Parliament. The Scottish Parliament has the power to pass laws and has limited
tax varying capability. Another of its jobs is to hold the Scottish
Executive to account. The "devolved matters" over which it has responsibility include education, health, agriculture, and
justice. A degree of domestic authority, and all foreign policy, remains with the UK Parliament in Westminster.
Although English MPs no longer vote on matters which have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament, there is no separate
English Parliament and Scottish members of the UK Parliament continue to vote on domestic English issues. Why this should be so
is the subject of the West Lothian question.
Current members
There are currently 129 Members
of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). The current state of the Parties is: (1999 seat totals are in italics):
The Independent MSPs are Dennis Canavan (Falkirk West), Margo MacDonald (Lothians), Dr. Jean Turner (Strathkelvin and Bearsden), and Campbell
Martin (West of Scotland).
Voting system
The elections for the Scottish Parliament were the first in the UK to use the Additional Member System (AMS), which is a method of proportional representation (although various forms of PR had already been used in EU
Parliamentary elections, and in Northern Ireland for local councils
and the Assembly).
Of the 129 MSPs, 73 are elected to represent First Past the
Post constituencies, whilst the remaining 56 are elected by AMS. These 56 are elected in eight different electoral regions
which correspond to the former European Parliament
constituencies in Scotland, with each returning 7 MSPs. The eight regions are: Highlands and Islands; North East
Scotland; Mid Scotland and Fife; West of Scotland; Glasgow;
Central Scotland; South of Scotland; and Lothians.
One MSP is elected by the other MSPs to be Presiding Officer,
a position similar to that of the Speaker of the House in the UK Parliament. The current Presiding Officer is
George Reid.
The Parliament also elects a First Minister, who heads the Scottish Executive. In theory the Parliament also elects the members of
the Executive, but in practice it is the First Minister who chooses them. The current First Minister is Jack McConnell.
Building
Since September 2004 the official home of the Scottish Parliament is a new Scottish Parliament Building at Holyrood designed by Catalan architect Enric Miralles with a distinctive roof in the shape of an upturned boat. The Queen opened the new building on
9 October 2004.
Whilst the building was being constructed the Parliament's temporary home was the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. Official photographs and TV interviews were often held in the courtyard adjoining the Parliament,
which is part of the School of Divinity at Edinburgh
University.
History
Introduction
The first Scottish Parliament arose during the early thirteenth century, and its first meeting (referred to as a colloquium)
was at Kirkliston in 1235 in the reign of Alexander II. It functioned until the Act of Union merged the Parliaments of Scotland and
England in 1707. Long seen as a
constitutionally defective body that acted merely as a rubber stamp for royal decisions, research during the last decade has
suggested that the pre-Union parliament played an active role in Scottish affairs, and was sometimes, particularly in the late
medieval period, a thorn in the side of the crown.
Origins
The Scottish Parliament evolved during the middle ages from the king’s council of bishops and earls. It is perhaps first
identifiable as a parliament in 1235, described as a ‘colloquium’ and already with a political
and judicial role. By the early fourteenth century the attendance of knights and freeholders had become important, and from
1326 burgh commissioners attended. Consisting of the ‘three estates’ of clerics, lay tenants-in-chief and burgh
commissioners sitting in a single chamber, the Scottish Parliament acquired significant powers over particular issues. Most
obviously it was needed for consent for taxation (although taxation was only raised irregularly in Scotland), but it also had a
strong influence over justice, foreign policy, war, and all manner of other legislation, whether political, ecclesiastical,
social or economic. Parliamentary business was also carried out by ‘sister’ institutions, before c. 1500 by ‘General Council’ and thereafter by the ‘Convention of Estates’.
These could carry out much business also dealt with by parliament—taxation, legislation and policy-making—but lacked
the ultimate authority of a full parliament.
The Lords of the Articles
During much of its history, a great deal of business in the Scottish Parliament was carried out by the ‘Lords of the
Articles’. This was a committee chosen by the three estates to draft legislation which was then presented to the full
assembly to be confirmed. In the past historians have been particularly critical of this body, claiming that it quickly came to
be dominated by royal nominees, and thus undermining the power of the full assembly. Recent research suggests that this was far
from always being the case, at least during the fifteenth century. Indeed, in March 1482
the committee was taken over by men shortly to be involved in a coup d’etat against the king and his government.
Parliament before 1400
Between 1235 and 1286 little can be told with
certainty about parliament's function, but it appears to have had a judicial and political role which was well established by the
end of the century. With the death of Alexander
III Scotland found itself without an adult monarch, and in this situation parliament seems to have become more prominent as a
means to give added legitimacy to the council of Guardians who ran the country. By the reign of John Balliol (1292-96) parliament was well established, and
Balliol attempted to use it as a means to withstand the encroachments of his overlord, Edward I of England. With his deposition in 1296, parliament
temporarily became less prominent, but it was again held frequently by King Robert Bruce after 1309. During his reign some of the most
important documents made by the king and 'community of the realm' were made in parliament - for instance the 1309-1310 Declaration of the
Clergy - although the extent to which the 'community' was able to speak independently of the king is a matter of debate.
By the reign of David II the 'three estates' in
parliament were certainly able to oppose the king when necessary. Most notably, David was repeatedly prevented from accepting an
English succession to the throne by parliament.
During the reigns of Robert II and Robert III parliament appears to have been held less often, and
royal power in that period also declined, but the institution returned to prominence, and arguably enjoyed its greatest period of
power over the crown after the return of James I from English
captivity in 1424.
The fifteenth century
After 1424 Parliament was often willing to defy the king—it was far from being
simply a ‘rubber stamp’ of royal decisions. During the fifteenth century parliament was called far more often than, for instance, the English Parliament—on average over once a
year—a fact that both reflected and augmented its influence. It repeatedly opposed James I’s (1424-1437) requests for taxation to pay an English ransom in the 1420s, and was
openly hostile to James III (1460-1488) in the 1470s and early
1480s. In 1431 parliament granted a tax to James I
for a campaign in the highlands on the condition that it be kept in a locked chest under the keepership of figures deeply out of
favour with the king. In 1436 there was even an attempt made to arrest the king ‘in
the name of the three estates’. Between October 1479 and March 1482 parliament was conclusively out of the control of the James III. It refused to forfeit his brother, the duke of Albany, despite a royal siege of the duke’s castle, tried to prevent the king leading his army
against the English (a powerful indication of the estates’ lack of faith in their monarch), and appointed men to the Lords
of the Articles and important offices who were shortly to remove the king from power. James IV (1488-1513),
realised that parliament could often create more problems than it solved, and avoided meetings after 1509. This was a trend seen in other European nations as monarchical power grew stronger—for instance England under Henry
VII, France and some of the Spanish Cortes Generales.
The sixteenth century
During the sixteenth century the composition of parliament
underwent a number of significant changes and it found itself sharing the stage with new national bodies. The emergence of the
Convention of Royal Burghs as the ‘parliament’ of Scotland’s trading towns and the development of the
Kirk’s General Assembly after the Reformation (1560) meant that rival
representative assemblies could bring pressure to bear on parliament in specific areas.
Following the Reformation, laymen acquired the monasteries and those
sitting as ‘abbots’ and ‘priors’ were now, effectively, part of the estate of nobles. The bishops
continued to sit in parliament regardless of whether they conformed to protestantism or not. This resulted in pressure from the
Kirk to reform ecclesiastical representation in parliament. Catholic clergy were excluded after 1567 but protestant bishops continued as the clerical estate until
their abolition in 1638 when parliament became an entirely lay assembly. An act of 1587 granted the lairds of each shire the right to send two commissioners to every parliament.
These shire commissioners attended from 1592 onwards, although they shared one vote until
1640 when they secured a vote each. The number of burghs with the right to send
commissioners to parliament increased quite markedly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries until, in the 1640s, they often constituted the largest single estate in parliament.
The seventeenth century
In the second half of the sixteenth century, parliament began to legislate on more and more matters and there was a marked
increase in the amount of legislation it produced. During the reign of James VI, the Lords of the Articles came more under the influence of the crown. By 1612, they sometimes seem to have been appointed by the crown rather than parliament, and as a
result the independence of parliament was perceived by contemporaries to have been eroded. This decline was reversed in the
Covenanting period (1638-1651), when the Scottish
parliament took control of the executive, effectively wresting sovereignty from the king and setting many precedents for the
constitutional changes undertaken in England soon afterwards. The Covenanting regime fell in 1651 after Scotland was invaded by Oliver Cromwell whose
Commonwealth government imposed a brief
Anglo-Scottish parliamentary union in 1657.
The Scottish Parliament returned after the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, and, although initially docile, gradually came to exert
considerable influence over the Crown—removing the clergy's right to attend in 1689
and finally abolishing the Lords of the Articles in 1690. Parliament's strength was such that the Crown turned to corruption and
political management to undermine its autonomy. Nonetheless, the period from 1690 to
1707 was one in which political "parties" and alliances were formed within parliament in a
maturing atmosphere of rigorous debate. The disputes over the English Act of Settlement, the Scottish Act of
Security, and the English Alien Act showed that both sides were prepared to
take considered yet considerable risks in their relationships. It is an oversimplification to claim, as Robert Burns memorably did, that the Union of England and Scotland (and hence the
dissolution of the Scottish Parliament) was brought about by the Scots members being
"bought and sold for English gold", but bribery and parliamentary division combined with wider economic imperatives, partly
arising from the disaster of the Darien Scheme to enable the Crown to
attain a majority in favour of Incorporating Union with England in the Act of Union 1707.
The new Parliament
For the next three hundred years the Scottish Parliament remained an important element in Scottish national identity, and
suggestions for a 'devolved' parliament were made as early as the late 1900s.
The triggering event that caused an increase in Scottish nationalism was the discovery of oil in the North Sea in the late
1960s. Scottish nationalists began to argue that the funds from this oil were not
benefiting Scotland as much as they should.
The 1979 Scotland referendum to establish a devolved Scottish Parliament failed. Although a slim majority
of voters voted for the Parliament, the referendum failed to reach the 40% of the total electorate threshold deemed necessary to
pass the referendum. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s demands for a Scottish Parliament grew in part because the government of the United Kingdom was controlled by the Conservative Party while Scotland itself elected very few Tory members of Parliament. Devolution
became part of the platform of the Labour Party and in May
1997, the Labour Party under Tony Blair took power.
In September 1997 a referendum of the Scottish electorate secured a large majority in
favour of the establishment of a new devolved Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. An election was held in May 1999, and power was transferred from Westminster on 1 July 1999 to the new Parliament in its temporary home in the General Assembly Hall on
the Royal Mile.
At the first meeting of the Parliament in July 1999, the "mother of Parliament" Winnie Ewing, sitting by virtue of being the oldest MSP at the time, declared that
the Scottish Parliament, which had been adjourned in 1707, was now reconvened, thus
explicitly proclaiming a connection with the previous body.
Criticism
The Parliament has been criticised for various reasons, both pragmatic and ideological. Since 1999, the death in office of Donald Dewar, Scotland's first
First Minister, and the resignation brought on by a business conflict of interest of his sucessor Henry McLeish, have meant that the first years of the parliament have not been easy. The escalating
costs of the construction of the new parliament building have led to widespread criticism, while others still object to the
alleged additional influence that the institution gives to the Scottish Electorate (see West Lothian Question). Popular arguments against the parliament before the UK general election
of 1997, levelled mainly by the Conservative Party, were that the Parliament would create a slippery slope to Scottish independence, and
provide the pro-independence Scottish National Party with a route to power. John
Major, the Tory prime minister before May 1997, famously claimed the parliament would
end '1000 years of British history', although the political entity of Great Britain was still less than 300 years old at the
time. The equally pro-Union Scottish Labour Party met these
criticisms by claiming that devolution would fatally undermine the SNP, and remedy the
long-felt desire of Scots for a measure of self-government.
Perhaps the main criticism of the parliament as it enters its second term is that it has not changed Scotland enough. For many
the entire point of devolution was that things could be done differently. Expectations that Scottish government would
dramatically change as a new, non-confrontational, politics took hold in Holyrood have been disappointed, but were arguably based
on naļve perceptions of the nature of politics. Adversarial politics is still commonplace after devolution, and frequently
overshadow events at Holyrood. Moreover, the electorate has twice chosen a moderate centre-left (some would claim centre-right)
executive, in voting predominantly for the Labour Party. The acid test in judging the success or failure of the parliament may
not be to measure whether it is well loved by Scots, but whether, given the opportunity, they would vote to abolish it. Polling
continues to show that they would overwhelmingly vote to keep it. Regardless, the Scottish Parliament has proved able to act
quickly to deal with longstanding issues that repeatedly escaped action at Westminster. Hunting with dogs was banned (2002) with hardly any of the controversy
seen in England and Wales, 'feudal' land tenure was at last abolished
(2000) and a far more generous subsidy for old age care was implemented (2002) than that seen south of the border.
Miralles' new Scottish Parliament building opened for business on the 7
September 2004, three years late. The estimated final cost was £431 million. The White
Paper in 1997 estimated that a new building would have a net construction cost of £40
million, although this based on the presumption that the old Royal High School would be used, as had long been assumed. After the
devolution referendum it was quickly announced that the high school, which is smaller than many British city council chambers,
was entirely inadequate for the parliament, and negotiations began for a new building on a new site. This led critical media and
politicians to claim the final building was "ten times over budget". Miralles' building was in fact costed at £109 million, prior
to major increases in space. £431 million for a national parliament might still be argued to be within reason when compared to
Portcullis House - a new parliamentary office block in Westminster - built for use by 200 MPs, which cost £250 million. Lord
Fraser's Inquiry reported on the 15 September 2004 and identified the choice of the construction management procurement route as the main factor in the fourfold
increase in estimated costs. This was portrayed as clearing Donald Dewar of any blame. The cost of the building remains more
controversial than any of the legislation so far passed by the parliament.
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