A 000m monument to MPs' yam
David J. Black charts the scandalous rise of the Scottish Parliament building
SO FAR, so good. The iconic Scottish Parliament building may have notched up vertiginous budget overruns, but it is a devolved matter, and UK ministers can relax. The Scots voted for devolution and, if they mess up, what's it got to do with London? For Tony Blair, the Holyrood project, like its Cardiff equivalent, is strictly a hands-off show.
The problem with this comforting view is Holyrood's London dimension. Consider, for example, the role of the BBC. When the new Scottish Parliament at Holyrood is ready next September, expect to be treated to a £600,000 documentary, The Gathering Place, which will tell the story of the building. The company responsible is owned by Newsnight diva Kirsty Wark and her husband. Ms Wark was a member of the selection panel which chose the design of the late Enric Miralles. If this suggests that the editorial balance of the programme might be skewed, it could equally be argued that it will inhibit general BBC coverage of what is, by any measure, a big political story. Wark is one of the BBC's top currentaffairs assets, and, human nature being what it is, Portland Place will instinctively protect her. Could this have any bearing on the fact that a Frontline Scotland treatment which I was commissioned to write for the BBC in Glasgow was dropped? The reason proffered was that the subject 'wouldn't be of much interest' to Scottish viewers.
The reality is that this isn't just a Scottish story. Holyrood has broken all records. No other public building in the world — Sydney Opera House included — has achieved a cost overrun approaching the 3,000 per cent which, by some calculations, this will achieve. The government is damned by its own figures. The 1997 Bill on devolution referred to £10 million to £40 million for the provision of a parliament. Despite the latest official cost of £280 million, even tightlipped civil servants are prepared to concede that the final bill will be £300 million plus.
Cost is only part of the problem. Initially most Scots believed that £10 million to £40 million would fund a refit for the existing classical chamber on Edinburgh's Calton Hill, already converted by a Labour government in 1979, but a clutch of mandarins and the Downing Street praetorian guard had other ideas. Scotland would get a 'signature' parliament on another site.
It was Tony Blair who decided. in June 1997, to veto Calton Hill. Some suggest that Peter Mandelson persuaded him to back a project in Leith, Edinburgh's run-down port. Mandelson has enemies with agendas of their own, yet there is something plausible about the motives ascribed to him. These range from his frosty relationship with John Smith (a Calton Hill enthusiast) to his rebrander's love of glitzy grand gestures reflecting the 'buzzof New Labour. There was also a concern that devolution's built symbol should be regulated by London, given the inherent risks of the devolution project itself. After months of speculation, Donald Dewar declared for Leith at Labour's 1997 Brighton conference. The plan went pear-shaped, however, when Scottish delegates rejected Leith, with its poor access and reputation for prostitution.
This was a quandary for Dewar. A return to Calton Hill would have been a reversal; yet Leith was a lost cause. He needed a compromise. Within days he was on the telephone to Sir Alistair Grant, head of Scottish and Newcastle. owners of the Holyrood site. By early October a deal was struck. The parliament would be built at Holyrood. This was kept secret, however, while debate raged around the issue of Leith v. Calton Hill, culminating in a packed public meeting in December 1997 where Leith was overwhelmingly rejected. Suddenly, the Holyrood rabbit leapt out of the hat. The two-month-old secret deal became an '11th-hour' entrant which Donald Dewar described as 'smashing'. Few critics were won over. The baronial brewery, which was to be demolished, was a long way from transport links, and occupied cramped, sloping ground in a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The key decisions emanated from Westminster, since Scotland was not yet devolved. Holyrood is the outcome of a presidential fiat. It was never discussed in Cabinet, never debated in either House and could never have existed if the Prime Minister had not decreed it. The architectural competition which followed was likewise sanctioned by Blair, who was kept informed throughout. Given suspicions that the intention was to deracinate the symbol, few were surprised when Barcelona-based Enric Miralles won the commission.
Could Holyrood yet be Blair's Achilles' heel? Tony Blair himself set it up in June 1997. It was adopted by the Scottish Parliament in June 1999; thus for two years the project was a Downing Street responsibility. Even the machinations of Edinburgh civil servants were, and still are, the business of London, while Donald Dewar, as secretary of state, was acting on behalf of the British government.
This raises some disturbing questions. Was Blair party to the secret deal to purchase Holyrood? How much influence did he and his advisers exert on the architectural competition? Then there is liability. Despite 1997 headlines announcing that 'all UK taxpayers' would fund the project, the cost will fall on Scotland's budget — hardly a vote-winner in a country with Western Europe's worst health and poverty indices. Another point not lost on Holyrood's critics is that it was adopted in Edinburgh by a minority vote of 64 out of 129.
Worse still, MSPs were given information which understated the cost. Even Donald Dewar believed this had risen to £109 million, when it was already over £150 million.
Harry Truman's desk homily — 'The buck stops here' — belongs in Downing Street. It is the last thing Tony Blair needs or wants. He is unlikely to come clean and offer to split costs, English voters, naturally, would be livid. More to the point, any overt link with the PR nightmare his decision set in train would have repercussions in the parliamentary Labour party, and even within a Cabinet where tensions between Scottish ministers like Brown and Darling and the more Anglo-centred Blunkett and Straw are never far below the surface.
Yet Scottish voters know only too well that Holyrood was a Cool Britannia gesture dumped on them by a New Labour prime minister in London. Patronising mantras about the 'new building for the new Scotland' are not so much falling on deaf ears as causing offence among the country's non-political classes.
For Tony Blair, the distance between Downing Street and the chaotic project in Edinburgh could narrow. Neither Dewar nor Miralles are around to take the blame and, by the time the building is ready for business, its presiding officer and staunchest defender, Sir David Steel, will have retired. The question now is whether the Prime Minister (who, ironically, spent his early infancy in the Blair family home on the edge of Holyrood Park) will find either the time or the courage to attend the opening ceremony in the city of his birth. It could be a tricky call.
David .1: Black is the author of All the First Minister's Men: The Truth Behind Holyrood
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