Scottish Parliament

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. It gained its full powers on July 1, 1999, almost two years after a referendum on its creation, which took place on September 11, 1997. At the first meeting of the Parliament, held three years later, Winnie Ewing, sitting by virtue of being the oldest MSP at the time (May 1999) declared that the Scottish Parliament, which had been adjourned in 1707, was now in session, thus explicitly proclaiming a connection with the previous body. [1]

The Scottish Parliament has the power to pass laws and has limited tax raising 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. Much domestic authority, and all foreign policy, remains with the British Parliament in Westminster.

Current members

It is currently made up of 129 Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs). The current state of the Parties are: (1999 seat totals are in italics):

	Scottish Labour Party: 50 - was 56
	Scottish National Party: 27 - was 35
	Scottish Conservative and Unionist: 18 - was 18
	Scottish Liberal Democrats: 17 - was 17
	Scottish Green Party: 7 - was 1
	Scottish Socialist Party: 6 - was 1
	Independents: 3 - was 1
	Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party: 1

The Independent MSP's are Dennis Canavan (Falkirk West), Margo MacDonald (Lothians), and Dr. Jean Turner (Strathkelvin and Bearsden).

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 PR had already been used in EU Parliamentary elections).

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 old 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.

Building

The official home of the Scottish Parliament will be at Holyrood, but as the building is still being constructed, a temporary home exists at the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh, though official photographs and TV interviews are 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 1309-10 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 JamesI 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.

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 (1638-51), 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. 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 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.

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. 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.

See also

• Politics of Scotland
• Secretary of State for Scotland
• UK topics

External links

• Home page of the Scottish Parliament
• The Scottish Pairlament (Scots version)
• Scotland Act 1998
• The Scottish Parliament Project

Referenced By