MSPs assess 20 years of the Scottish Parliament
Last updated 17th May 2019
A former First Minister's telling Clyde News that Holyrood has shown up the failures of Westminster.
Henry McLeish was speaking in a special edition of Scotland's Talk In on Forth 2 recorded at the Scottish Parliament to mark the 20th anniversary of its first sitting on the 12th May 1999, hosted by Ally Bally and our political correspondent, Alan Smith.
You can listen back to the full programme with our podcast.
He served in the top job for just over a year after the death of Donald Dewar in 2000 and told the audience: "At the heart of our politics today is a situation where Westminster is not coping, it's not fit for purpose. And we have a chance in Scotland to make big progress in areas like social care and bigger political debate is the one which says 'do we need to go further'?"
Mr McLeish was joined on the panel by Deputy Presiding Officer, Christine Grahame, one of only 18 MSPs who have serviced since day one.
The Lib Dem's Mike Rumbles, who was first elected in 1999, and the Scottish Conservatives Annie Wells, who's been a list MSP for Glasgow since 2016, completed the line-up for the programme broadcast on Forth 2.
Since 1999 306 people have served as MSPs and the Parliament has passed 287 pieces of legistation.
Mike Rumbles spent five years out of Holyrood from 2011 before being re-elected on the list in 2016 and told the programme: "When I came back I found Parliament a much more divided place, where the constitution debate seems to have errupted and divided us, whereas in the first three parliaments I sat in it was very much a shared endeavour, and that's changed."
Annie Wells told the programme she never expected to become an MSP right up until the moment she was elected on the regional list in 2016: "We've got a generation now who only know Scotland with the Scottish Parliament and I would like to see them getting their voice heard and seeing them coming into the Parliament and applying themselves and putting themselves forward as MSPs. We need to listen to the younger generation."
The panel faced questions from an invited audience of listeners to Scotland's Talk In who raised points including the affordabilty of the policy of free care for the elderly, brought in during Henry McLeish's period as First Minister.
He revealed his father had been one of the first to benefit from it when he was diagnosed with dementia.
The referendum held after the Labour landslide in the 1997 General Election included a second question on giving the Scottish Parliament tax raising powers, but it wasn't until the current SNP minority administration led by Nicola Sturgeon that changes were made to income tax rates north of the border.
Christine Grahame told the programme why she believed the Parliament needed to go futher still: "We have to, at some point, bite the bullet as a community and say we have to think about increasing taxation for those who can afford to pay for those who can't. That's a hard thing to do, but that's the way you have a fairer society."
Dr Murray Leith, a politics lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland agreed that the Parliament has perhaps not been radical enough:
"Many of the things the Parliament has done - such as free personal care for the elderly or free tuition fees - these are not hugely redistributive measures, these are not necessarily helping the poorest in society, it's mostly benefitting the middle classes.