David McCrone

“There is, however, a more fundamental and interesting issue behind the apparent receding popularity of the Parliament, and that relates to the 'ownership' of the institution. Put simply, whose Parliament is it anyway? This is a serious question which grows out of the long process of Home Rule. The failure of Westminster parties to deliver devolution - and let us remember that a majority voted yes in the 1979 referendum meant that it was left to civil society to agitate for the Parliament. The twent-year campaign since 1979 was waged by a motley crew of campaigners and civil associations from trade unions to churches and women's groups, all unelected, but all donning the mantel of speaking for Scotland. Some parliamentarians like to think that as elected representatives, they alone represent the nation, but that is not how the nation sees it. Parliament became the people's forum, on loan to the political class, as long as they treated it, and them, with some respect, given the partiality of poitics in the twenty-first century. Power sharing - between government, parliament and people - is a three-way system, and not the preserve of any single agent.”
― David McCrone, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“Thus cooperation and trust make contracts work, not the other way round. Outsourcing contracts rest on the fundamental failure to draw the distinction between statistically calculable risk and fundamental uncertainty. Handling the latter is manifestly the role of the state. There is a 'fantasy of controllability' over future costs which appears to shield the state from risk, while leaving it vulnerable to future uncertainty (like Carillion). This leads to blame shifting when things go wrong. The then-Prime Minister Theresa May's argument (16 January 2018) that 'the government is just another customer of Carillion', like many others, fails to acknowledge the prime role of the state as the political vehicle for handling uncertainty.”
― David McCrone, Who Runs Edinburgh?