IN LESS than two weeks time, MSPs will find themselves in their new home, a £431 million building of breathtaking style and flamboyance. Even the most cursory look round the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh leaves one with an overwhelming sense that Scotland has indeed acquired a landmark building that will be admired the world over.
But there is also an uneasy feeling that something is not quite right. One doesn’t want to fall into the age-old Scottish trap of knocking something simply because it embraces quality but a building of such futuristic grandeur seems out of kilter with a devolved Parliament set strict limits on its areas of legislative competence.
The building is too impressive for what will happen within it and it raises the question of whether Enric Miralles, the late Catalan architect, understood the nature of devolution or whether, when he embarked on the project in 1998, he, like many others, tacitly accepted that Scotland was on the inevitable road to independence from the UK and should have a building to match that prospect.
Certainly, that was how it looked even to many political neutrals in 1998 and, perhaps, Miralles should not be blamed too much for such architectural speculation. But, six years on, independence appears like a political idea whose time has come and gone.
There are, of course, many reasons for this. The Parliament has had an uncertain first five years. The building — which the Queen will open on October 9 — has, because of the chaos surrounding the cost and timetable, become a political, as opposed to architectural, embarrassment Above all, the SNP, the party of independence, has floundered, unable to come up with any coherent response to the many Scots who cite their own negative experience of devolution as a warning against constitutional change.
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Only ten years ago on the streets of Scotland the idea of independence manifested itself not only in the national political debate but, at a more lowly level, in everything from car stickers that demanded “Independence Now” to the palpable sense of grievance that left-leaning, statist Scotland was getting a raw deal from a Conservativedominated British state.
There is little grievance around now. Most Scots are content in Gordon Brown’s economic comfort zone of low interest rates, booming property prices and low unemployment. The unknowns of Independence have become irrelevant to the majority and a risk too far. For the rest, politics itself is irrelevant. This sense of irrelevance extends to the contest for who should succeed the hapless John Swinney as SNP leader.
This is a fight for the leadership of Scotland’s main Opposition party and Scotland neither notices nor cares. The media coverage has been dutiful rather than enthusiastic, underlining the feeling that what is at stake is the chance to lead a party whose main policy is unsellable in early 21st-century Scotland.
Yet, there has been no recognition of that bald fact on the leadership hustings as various candidates for the No 1 and No 2 jobs in the party have succeeded only in emphasising that the SNP is an uneasy coalition of men and women from opposing sides of the left/right spectrum, united only in their pursuit of the constitutionally unobtainable.
Certainly there was some excitement engendered when Alex Salmond, whose selfimposed exile at Westminster four years ago has added to the SNP’s woes, announced that he wished to reclaim his crown. Mr Salmond, an accomplished politician of no little self-regard, has been hyperactive on the campaign trail. He has, though, had little or nothing to say about how he intends to rescue his party from its present state of uncomprehending paralysis.
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One way, of course, would be to admit that the independence game is up and that the SNP has to reposition itself as the party that recognises that the real game in the medium and long term is the nature of the devolution settlement itself and whether it should be redefined to give the Parliament a more sustainable set of powers. There is, for example, a growing recognition that a Parliament that simply spends billions it plays no part in raising in taxes is, at the least, vulnerable to notions of accountability.
Such an admission by Mr Salmond — who will surely win when the votes are counted next week — would, of course, split the SNP. The fundamentalists would paint it as the Great Betrayal. But other political parties have had to accept the inevitability of a change in core principle — the Tory leadership’s embrace of independence in Africa in the Fifties and Labour’s ditching of Clause Four spring to mind — if they are not to be rendered completely out-of-date. Moving to a Catalan-style platform of incremental devolution would, for the SNP, be traumatic. The alternative is a slow descent into further rejections at the polls.
The present extraordinary decline in SNP membership, and the unhealthy state of the party’s finances, show the writing is on the wall. There appears, however, to be no sign that anyone in the SNP — beyond the realistic few who daren’t raise their voices — is reading the signs. For Mr Salmond and the SNP the irony is that the Miralles building, far from setting the scene for the realisation of ambitions of independence, may play host to their inevitable decline.