Once upon a time I heard Billy Connolly to refer to Holyrood as the ‘wee pretendy parliament’; I was deeply offended. How dares he, I thought?

Back in ’99 I was a postgrad at New College, sharing the building on the Mound with the new institution. The atmosphere was electric, there was a promise of a real change for better in the air, and I, for one, was a believer, for even after just three years in Scotland I could see the country deserved better, could do better.

Those days are long gone.

A quarter of century later I can see that Billy was right, for wee and pretendy is all that is left. Some good things came out of it in the beginning, the Land Reform (2003) being a prime example, but the signs of things to come were there also from the very beginning. The Lib Dems selling out their commitment to abolishing tuition fees for a seat in Government was a foreshadowing of their propping up a Tory government in the English parliament years later, and a sure sign this was just politics as we already knew it.

But perhaps more than anything it was the Wee Pretendy Parliament commissioning for itself the most un-Scottish building in Scotland, at a silly cost, as if Scotland had no history, no architects, no materials worthy its new political class. It was the beginning of the hardcore professionalisation of Scottish politics that rapidly followed, a tangible setting itself apart of the new political class from us the great unwashed.

The raft of retirements at the end of the last parliamentary session brought this transformation of a promise of bright future into a run of the mill political gravy train to a symbolic completion; cushy jobs with cushy pensions, hop on if you can.

The professionalisation brought with itself raft of mediocrity, shortage of both lived experience and intellect, even political skill, as is typical of institutions where ‘management’ is a track in its own right. Party leaders and government ministers who never worked outside of politics since leaving school.

As the old saying goes, ‘those who can do’ — the Wee Parliament, just as the other parliament down the road, is a parliament of Can’ts.

The evidence is there for all to see. The last session was a train wreck of silly power games and failed legislative efforts (GRR, bottle recycling, marine protection). The current session is already on track to beat that record.

A local government reorganisation announced without any real thought put into it.

An NHS reorganisation which self-evidently was conceived by someone who knows absolutely nothing about how the individual NHS trusts work (e.g., Forth Valley is to be merged with Edinburgh, though in reality its day to day working relationship is with Glasgow — I guess someone, somewhere, grossly overpaid, envisages ambulances sailing down the Forth).

And there is the selling off of Scotland for renewables and data centres, with the political classes, (regardless whether green or yellow or red, or a shade of blue), again not having a clue about what they are doing to the nation and the land, and the climate (and how could they, their expertise is politics, nothing more).

And so I ask myself what is the Wee Parliament good for? And, to the shock and horror of my younger self, I have come to the conclusion that the answer is ‘not much at all’.

For someone who believes in the independence cause (and I do), this is hard. But independence with what became of the Scottish Parliament in charge is a poor prospect, an out of the frying pan into the fire scenario. For Scottish Independence to benefit the people of Scotland, the Wee Parliament would need to change radically first to represent the interests of the people of Scotland, rather than just being a theatre of personal ambitions.

Shutting down the gravy train would be a good first step, time-limiting the MSP position to at most two terms, and cutting down the MSP pay to a less obnoxious level.

My petition for the latter will be discussed in the Committee on 8 October, still time for you to sign.