Five more glorious years?

Tuesday was quite a day. My first back at Holyrood since the election, and an atmosphere like nothing we’ve seen.

Disappointment of course within the Green group – we had hopes of gaining a few seats and I’d have been delighted to be able to share the workload with a bigger team. But in the face of the SNP tidal wave we remain the only opposition party to have increased our vote, holding our two seats, and in this context mere survival is an achievement.

There has been quite natural jubilation among the SNP ranks, and a degree of confusion among those who have lost colleagues. Across the political spectrum congratulations have been offered to the SNP on what is undeniably an astonishing result. In a system which mitigates against majority government, they have broken new ground. The positivity of their campaign is surely a large part of the reason, and has not gone unnoticed.

I’m proud of the Green campaign, which I think was honest, ambitious and distinctive. But while it helped increase our vote it left us short of the breakthrough we sought in most regions.

While returned MSPs offer each other polite congratulations, Labour increasingly seem to be recognising that they are facing not simply a poor election result but an existential crisis. When Motherwell and Wishaw becomes a marginal seat, it’s hard not to wonder what Labour is even for in Scotland.

And of course we’ve seen a string of resignations from leadership roles. Annabel Goldie’s announcement earlier this week completed the set of resignations from the three political parties who lost votes and seats in this year’s election.

I’d like to wish Annabel, Iain and Tavish well. At a personal level know from experience how painful it can be to lose so many friends and colleagues in a bad election result, and in the face of the SNP surge last week I’m grateful to everyone who voted Green for keeping us in Parliament.

But it’s time to move on and focus on the five years to come. Even before the election, there was a growing consensus that Holyrood’s procedures were in need of reform, and that we would need to change the way we work. The election of the first ever single-party majority government underlines that. Parliament will need to find ways of holding the Government to account, ways which don’t depend on votes at 5pm, but perhaps focus more on information and intelligence.

It appears that this task will fall largely to a new generation of front bench politicians and Parliamentary figures, and it’s vital that they don’t revert to type or stand in the way of new ideas. The candidates for the roles of Presiding Officer and Deputy Presiding Officer have been making themselves known, and the key issue for me is whether they will take a stronger attitude to the authority of the chair, in light of the stronger position of Ministers. It won’t be good enough for the PO to hold up their hands and say that Ministerial answers or “veracity” is not a matter for the chair. We will need a PO who will protect our ability to hold ministers to account, or what’s a parliament for?

Later today we swear in, and start getting down to the work of another term. While the balance of votes in the chamber will be in little doubt each Decision Time I suspect that we will still find several issues taken in fascinating and creative new directions in this session, directions which nobody has yet charted.