STEPHEN DAISLEY: Douglas Ross wants to hold the powerful to account. No wonder the Holyrood clown car mob despise him...

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

For most people, quitting the leadership of the Scottish Conservative party would be a source of relief, if not unbridled joy.
An opportunity to focus on constituency duties, improve your work-life balance, and dislodge some of the knives stuck in your back. A chance to be less political and less combative.
For Douglas Ross, things haven't gone quite like that. No doubt he cherishes the extra time he's had to spend with his wife and their two boys over the past eight months. But instead of settling into snoozy, slipper-clad semi-retirement on the backbenches, Ross is like a bulldog finally off the leash.
He has grown more political and more combative and is visibly frustrated with the Scottish Parliament, its tameness and mediocrity, its culture of failure and inadequacy, its rotten standards and grimy ethics.
Ross spends his days brooding from the backbenches, seething at inept and dishonest ministers, and pouring scorn on their every policy and talking point.
This got him into trouble at last week's FMQs when John Swinney tried, bizarrely but predictably, to lay the blame for Scotland's energy woes at the feet of Brexit. Ross started heckling him and the First Minister struggled to keep his train of thought.
At which point, the Presiding Officer stepped in. Alison Johnstone reprimanded Ross for disregarding the standing orders, the rules which govern the conduct of MSPs.
Rule 7.3 says members must always 'conduct themselves in an orderly manner' and that any who don't can be required by the Presiding Officer to remove themselves from the chamber.
That's what Johnstone did, ordering Ross out and telling him not to return for the remainder of the day.
Although this sanction is infrequently resorted to, it has been clear over the past few weeks that things were heading that way.
Ross has become a thorn in the Presiding Officer's side with his repeated crowing at government ministers.
So much so that Johnstone speaks with a special syntax. Every sentence contains a subject, an object, and 'Mr Ross!'
Ordinarily I'm a stickler for the rules, but watching Ross gather up his things and traipse out on Thursday, I confess to feeling quite a bit of sympathy for him.
If MSPs are scandalised by his impatience and his raised voice, they might want to avoid any future contact with the voters. Because Ross's exasperation is mild compared to the roiling contempt the public feels for Holyrood.
The parliament is largely insulated from public opinion, shielded by an Iron Dome of advisors, quangos, third-sector outfits and compliant commentators who encircle Holyrood in left-liberal received wisdom and keep out any discordant voices, especially those of the electorate.
It's this self-isolation of Scotland's parliament from the people it is supposed to represent that has left so many insiders shocked by the rise of Reform.
As someone who forecast that rise a year ago, I can tell you that some otherwise bright, canny political operatives thought I was mad.
The remoteness of the liberal elite from the people is hardly a phenomenon limited to Scotland.
The American writer Pauline Kael famously declared after the 1972 presidential election: 'I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know.' Nixon had just won a 49-state landslide.
In his post-leadership career, Douglas Ross has dedicated himself to penetrating Holyrood's atmosphere of smug certainty with the concerns and views of ordinary voters.
His Right to Addiction Recovery Bill is an obvious example of that. Parliament wrings its hands over the worst drugs death rate in Europe, belated pouring money into support services while at the same time pressing ahead with de facto decriminalisation.
Whatever the merits of those approaches, they neglect the importance of giving people a chance to get off drugs altogether. It's an unfashionable notion but one Ross's Bill forces them to confront.
That's not the only awkward issue he's hammered the government on.
He has interrogated them on the placement of trans-identifying men in women's prisons and the infiltration of gender ideology into the public sector more generally.
He's pressed the case of Sandie Peggie, the nurse who is taking NHS Fife to an employment tribunal for allowing trans-identifying men to use the women's changing room.
He's taken Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth to task over school violence and for skipping a parliamentary question on attacks against teachers to attend an SNP event in Glenrothes. He has persistently grilled ministers on their failure to keep their promise to complete dualling of the accident-blackspot A96.
This is exactly what a backbench MSP ought to be doing: pursuing the government mercilessly on subjects they would rather not talk about. And so what if Ross lets his temper get the better of him sometimes? Many of these issues are emotive and it is only natural that their discussion would be impassioned.
If the worst that can be said of Ross is that he fails to respect parliamentary niceties when holding the powerful to account, then I reckon he's doing just fine and, more importantly, I suspect many voters would agree. It underscores just how little scrutiny SNP ministers face that a spot of light heckling would have the delicate little flowers wilting in horror.
There is an irony in the SNP making such a fuss over Ross's multiple jobs, telling him to quit one or more and focus instead on his parliamentary responsibilities.
After standing down as Tory leader, he has thrown himself into the number one parliamentary responsibility - holding the executive to account - and it turns out they don't like it. Now they have both Russell Findlay and his predecessor turning the screws on their hapless government.
When Ross was kicked out of the chamber last Thursday, it was illustrative of the problem - well, one of the problems - with Holyrood.
Mouthing off too much when trying to get answers out of the government gets you told to make yourself scarce, but rising from your seat only to pose a softball question or to regurgitate party talking points in a debate is considered the height of parliamentary decorum.
There have been six Scottish Parliament elections so far. The seventh will take place next year.
The calibre of MSP elected was hardly encouraging in 1999 but it has somehow gotten worse. Every devolutionist should be mortified by the gap between the Holyrood the public were sold and the Holyrood they got.
The Scottish Parliament is a national embarrassment. A job creation scheme for party hacks, public sector jobsworths, and multi-lanyarded third sector nuisances. An in-gathering of the useless, the clueless, and the soulless.
A clown car that can never seem to get the key in the ignition but still manages to crash into everything in sight.
Douglas Ross offends them because he puts in the effort. The man has his flaws but laziness is not one of them.
He does the work, tries to get answers, and puts the most powerful people in the country on the spot.
You're not supposed to do that in the Scottish Parliament. Most ideological differences at Holyrood are superficial or irrelevant to the real battle, that of political insiders against the voters. That's why Ross doesn't fit it: he fights for the other side.