IT felt like the start of a new term at Holyrood on Tuesday, all polished shoes and colleagues catching up after a long time away. You could easily have been forgiven for forgetting that apart from its regular Easter break the Scottish Parliament has continued to sit throughout the General Election campaign. With the high profile exception of First Minister's Questions, little has happened. A parliament on pause, to paraphrase Johann Lamont's old dig at the SNP Government. MSPs didn't exactly hit the ground running on Tuesday, either. The government's widely-supported human trafficking bill cleared a first-stage vote but aside from that the most eye-catching business of the day was a petition against cruelty to rabbits. Willie Rennie, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, vented his frustration, accusing ministers of leaving the country on auto-pilot. "My fear is that Scottish ministers will now spend all of their time playing power games at Westminster," he complained.
It's a gripe shared by plenty of others in the opposition parties but is it fair?
A quick glance at the timetable suggests MSPs will have plenty to occupy them between now and the start of next year, when attention will inevitably shift to the next Holyrood election.
There are no fewer than 19 bills working their way through the system and five more waiting in the wings, which means an awful lot of evidence-taking, report-writing and debating.
In addition, the Scottish Government has promised initiatives to increase the number of university students from poorer backgrounds and to improve the gender balance in top jobs.
A long awaited attempt to find an alternative to the council tax has finally been launched, with a special commission under orders to produce a report by the autumn. And more is come. Nicola Sturgeon emailed ministers last month warning against a post-election lull and demanding a blitz of activity.
MSPs will have their hands full, then, but it is doubtful their work will capture the public imagination.
The most important and controversial piece of legislation would have been the criminal justice bill but after the government performed a spectacular U-turn and dropped plans to abolish the need for corroboration in criminal cases, it is now more a tidying up exercise than ground-breaking reform. The remaining provisions will, for example, allow greater use of live TV links in court.
A separate bill, which has already received a lot of publicity, will end automatic early release for prisoners serving more than four years.
The government will complete the formalities to reduce the voting age to 16 for Holyrood elections, reform university governance and re-draw the boundaries of the Pentland Hills regional park.
An education bill will place legal duties on the Scottish Government and councils to improve standards among pupils from poorer backgrounds, something they have presumably been trying to do anyway.
The community empowerment bill, once talked of enthusiastically as a radical shift of power down to grassroots level, has only succeeded in upsetting allotment holders, who fear it could shrink the size of their plots.
Of the members' bills, which stand less chance of becoming law, attention will continue to focus on the late Margo Macdonald's bid to legalise assisted suicide. But there are also bills to designed to make it easier for public bodies to issue apologies when they make mistakes and to promote the use of British Sign Language. Dr Richard Simpson's "Buckfast bill" seeks to ban the sale of booze laced with high levels of caffeine and Labour colleague Michael McMahon has introduced a bill to do away with the 'not proven' verdict.
Lib Dem Jim Hume is trying to ban smoking in cars if children are present.
Of the Bills yet to come, the most interesting cover land reform. It will do away with tax breaks for shooting and deerstalking estates and, somewhat vaguely, allow ministers to take action against landowners who are deemed a "barrier to sustainable development". A public health bill will make it harder to buy cigarettes.
If this lot doesn't excite you particularly, then Willie Rennie is probably correct. Whether you see Ms Sturgeon as "playing power games," as he claims, or "making Scotland's voice heard," as she promised to do during the election, you'll probably be more interested in clashes between the Scottish and UK governments than anything Holyrood serves up. Those clashes are coming daily. In the week since the election, the Nationalists have confronted the UK Government over devolution, migration and even the appointment of a Scotland Office junior minister. The stage is set not for a programme of reform but a cross-border stand-off.
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