ALAN SMITH

It was genuinely heartening to see world leaders, IT genius Bill Gates and many other top dogs welcomed at Holyrood this week for the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum, which had our parliament and our country well and truly centre stage.

Presiding Officer George Reid outlined the many ways in which Holyrood has embraced IT, enabling the smooth passage of parliamentary business and enhancing citizen engagement. I knew the script better than most because, as the parliament's first head of broadcasting, I put in place the world-leading webcasting service holyrood.tv, which allows Reid and others to share their thoughts with a global audience.

But while visiting delegates would have been impressed by Holyrood's architecture and much of the infrastructure that comes with it, I am also sure they would have been more than a little bemused to find out that their mobile phones could not get a signal in most parts of the building. And wireless internet access? Forget about it. In one of the most bizarre yet largely under-reported failings of the Holyrood project, neither mobile phone signals nor wireless access technologies were designed in. Architectural award-seekers and complacent and under-informed public servants created a wireless wasteland in a £500m building that opened in 2004. In 2007 it's still as bad.

There is better computer connectivity in Starbucks a few hundred yards up the road than in Holyrood. In fact, there's better connectivity in most of Scotland's schools now. The thousands of visitors to Holyrood each week will be surprised to find that there is a grand total of one, poorly located, public-access internet point in the entire building - and, of course, any 3G mobiles or wireless laptops they might have brought with them won't work either. The Holyrood architects, the public servants overseeing them and the MSPs overseeing those public servants were either too timid or ill-informed to think ahead.

But it was no surprise to me, because I found the IT literacy of the average - or even the above-average - MSP to be frighteningly low. The average 14-year-old could knock spots off all but a handful of our MSPs when it comes to an appreciation of the practical value of the digital revolution. Blogs, YouTube, WAP, video diaries, the list goes on. It's all part of their language, a way of life.

If you don't believe me, just look at the embarrassing websites of all but a handful of our MSPs - each of whom has all the advantages of offices, full-time staff and a parliamentary allowance specifically to help them communicate with their constituents. My daughter, who is 13, has a Bebo site that is far better than most MSPs' sites, which she made herself for nothing with freely downloadable software. Hers is bang up to date, with pictures from her school Burns Supper; yet even when Gordon Brown takes over, I'm sure a few of our MSPs' sites will still show Tony Blair as Prime Minister for a few months (or more).

There is a serious point here. Our political classes can't credibly lead an IT revolution when they themselves are at best the equivalent of learner drivers. In my view this all but disqualifies them from any meaningful input to the wider debate on the democratic potential of the internet. Even when dealing with non-interactive and non-threatening technologies, our MSPs act like a group of collective luddites. It is quite amazing that there are no permanent display screens in the chamber to relay video, agenda and speaker information, or vote results, during everyday parliamentary business.

And George Reid, despite his many virtues, has been instrumental in ensuring there are no PCs allowed in the chamber. The wiring is there, at no inconsiderable expense - but supposedly laptops would be too distracting during the speeches, rather than a vital source of information which could inform debate (and save lots of paper as well).

I recall someone saying it would make the chamber look like a call centre. When laptops, PDAs and more are commonplace throughout Scotland, how absurd it is that our MSPs are still shying away from computers to aid their business because they look ugly. (I for one think they would improve the look of the place.) And MSPs have not even begun to engage with the most important aspect: asking the extent to which parliamentary democracy, delegate democracy, has had its day. Maybe not quite now, but very soon, we will have the means to speak for ourselves using secure e-voting and e-deliberative tools that will take citizen power way beyond the right to lobby your MSP, attend his surgery, watch him live on the net or sign an e-petition.

A bigger issue for another day; indeed, another audience. Perhaps we don't seriously expect our MSPs to decide all but to abolish themselves. But in my book the parliament was created to empower all of the people, not just equip 129 of them with BlackBerries.

  • Alan Smart was the Scottish Parliament's head of broadcasting from 1999 to 2005. He has also been head of current affairs at Scottish Television and is now a communications consultant.