In the earliest days of the newly-reconvened Scottish Parliament a tired refrain could be heard from assorted Unionist curmudgeons. “It doesn’t even begin to compare with the majesty and grandeur of Westminster,” they said. They had noted the presence of several party backwoodsmen, jumped-up town hall panjandrums and small-town lawyers amongst the Scottish parliament’s first draft … and dismissed them accordingly.

It was a predictable response, but one easily dealt with. You merely had to point out that Westminster had been almost 800 years in the making and that it would take several diets of the Scottish parliament to elapse before we saw a settled cohort of political heavyweights and policy-makers emerge.

In time, a class of serious men and women making serious decisions in the best interests of the Scottish people would emerge. They would then set about working mainly for the benefit of those neighbourhoods left twisting in the wind by two decades of Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes waging a class war against them. Full autonomy in health, education, transport and policing provided sufficient scope to unstitch the Tories’ social pogroms against working-class communities.

And besides, how many MPs out of 650 in the Mother of all Parliaments could anyone name? Outwith the cabinet, and a few of their opposition shadows few others – apart from Dennis Skinner – were known beyond their constituency boundaries. On those occasions when they rose to speak in the chamber, the Tories especially were wretchedly exposed in all their braying, inelegant, scrofulous awfulness. Some house-masters in Eton, Harrow and Westminster must often have held their heads in their hands to see this league of rather ordinary gentlemen that their esoteric........

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