Seòmar agus comataidhean

I recognise that you are representing a significant block of MSPs, but would you personally be interested in ideas that would enhance our debate and allow for a little bit more topicality in how portfolio questions are conducted, for example? You would be interested in seeing how that could be done, would you?

And your homework will be marked later by the Scottish Information Commissioner and others.

I will take those seconds to mention one particular idea that is perhaps more major than some of the other ideas that I have been alluding to: that of having committee conveners elected by Parliament. We have raised that point before. Do you have any current thoughts on that? Everyone is talking about how we can enhance the power of committees, how we can make them even more independent and how we can achieve a certain level of scrutiny and inquiry that we all know that Scotland’s Parliament needs. What are your thoughts on that?

Do you think that the Electoral Commission should do a bit more research on that? At the minute, we all seem to be wringing our hands—rightly so, because the number of people in Scotland who do not voluntarily register to vote means that there is a huge democratic deficit—but none of us seems to know definitively why that is the case. You said that there are many variables. In your opinion, is it important that the Electoral Commission does the research and presents those variables to us, so that we can have an informed, structured discussion about that?

Yes—that would help us all.

It could be, though. [Laughter.] You should not shy away from taking the credit if that is the case.

I think that there is an amazing amount of common ground between members of the Parliament on how small changes could bring about dramatic improvements in how we operate.

If I may make one last point—

I am concerned about that happening where the husband and wife are not a package, which is probably the case for the majority of politicians in this Parliament and in other Parliaments. I have a colleague whose wife, because of votes that have been held recently in this Parliament, has been openly threatened because of the way in which he chose to vote on a particular issue.

I wonder whether we should be reviewing the criminal law in relation to protecting candidates, so that people feel that there is at least some deterrent barrier in place that might—I stress “might”—make people think twice about what they say or write. Would you have any sympathy with that line of thinking?

I have a short follow-up question, because the word “culture” was mentioned and I have always been interested in organisational culture. Some kind of culture change seems to be happening among the ministers and the spads as well as within the civil service. Is that a fair comment?