The Inaugural FirstFoot Scottish Political Awards

FirstFoot used to do a fair old bit of political satire. But, we defy anyone to write often and informatively about a vacuum.

Shagger came in and promised to do "less, better".

Well, he's certainly doing less.

FirstFoot can't help feeling that Scottish politics is reaping what it sows. Since the advent of the Scottish Parliament, the Labour Party machine, in all it's cumbersome ineptitude has swung into action. If you go through the biographies of the Labour Party Members of Scottish Parliament., it makes depressing reading. There is not a single individual that has a working life experience outside of the public sector.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with public sector experience. But the public sector, bloated and inefficient as it is, accounts for only 45% of the working population of this country.

Scotland has always been Socialist with a small "s", and sometimes also with a big one. When the Tories avowed "one nation policies", Scotland split more equally across the political divide, and in the fifties and sixties, the Conservative Party in Scotland regularly polled 50% of the popular political vote.

Since the advent of the free market economics of Maggie Thatcher, Tory popularity has plummeted in Scotland and shows no sign of recovering. Certainly, it doesn't deserve to when free market loonies like Brian Monteith hold senior positions in the party.

And with the advent of the Scottish Parliament, there was an aspiration that those small "s" policies that differentiated us from Southern England would be realised in a Scottish context.

Henry McLeish, for all his faults, started the differentiation. Henry even had the temerity to suggest that the Scottish Executive should be called the "Scottish Government" (an early indication of Westminster centralism was the vehement opposition to this suggestion). Henry supported and drove through Parliament, differentiated social care and education policies for Scotland.

Henry got his personal sums wrong and had to resign, and we got Shagger as his replacement. We didn't vote for him, not first time round anyway. And, with a mission to do "less, better", we ought to have been more wary.

Come back Henry. All is forgiven. At least with Henry we were doing something Scottish, Socialist with a small "s", and something that gave a purpose and credibility to the Scottish Parliament.

Shagger is doing almost exactly the opposite, derogating responsibility to Westminster where possible, and dragging the business of the Scottish Parliament further into "toon cooncil" territory.

As a result, we, the Scottish nation, suffer from the lack of purpose and ambition, and the cause of an independent Scottish nation suffers more. Parliament behaves without dignity, because they have no matters of any dignity to debate.

20 years ago, we first realised that there was the real opportunity to inaugurate Europe's first non-violent new democracy. And what an opportunity. A country that within its own social constructs, had all the attributes of a modern, left-of-centre, community based democracy.

The current Parliament disgraces that vision.