HE was still at school when the Scottish Parliament was “reconvened” in the last year of the last century.

Anas Sarwar was too young to vote in the elections of 1999, among the first to take place on the island of Britain using proportional representation.

Now in his prime at 39, the Labour leader has had his entire adult and political life to get used to PR. And I bet Mr Sarwar knows his way around the system and its consequences way better than most of us.

So why does he pretend he doesn’t? The list MSP – who owes his list seat in Holyrood to PR – has been rocketing about Scotland during the current local election campaign ruling out coalitions, or, as he calls them, “party political stitch-ups”.

I think we should stop for a moment, step back and appreciate Mr Sarwar’s patter in all its glorious weirdness.

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We have had a single transferable vote for councils for 15 years. This – given we have at least five electable parties and an army of independents – makes it extraordinarily hard for any one political force to take overall control of a local authority. In fact, at the last poll in 2017 none did. In the six sessions of Holyrood – with its additional member system – only once has a party secured a majority. Once.

In Scotland, if you want power, in local government or national, you most likely will have to share it. I know this. You know this. We all know this. Mr Sarwar too. So what is with the “no formal coalitions” chat? Post-electoral pacts of one kind or another are not some glitch in our system. In a multi-party democracy with PR they come fitted as standard.

I feel a bit guilty picking on the Labour leader’s low-credibility pre-election talking points. Because most of our politicians, across the left-right and constitutional divides, insist on sticking to the rhetoric of the old winner-takes-all first-past-the-post Westminster system. We punters let them away with it. Why?

I think it might because we have a progressive electoral system which incentivises co-operation between parties but a sclerotic political culture which does not.

Our divided hyper-partisans have spent more than a decade demonising and delegitimising each other over a single wedge issue, independence. So it is maybe not surprising that they cannot admit they will have to work together, even if it is just to make sure the bins are collected and potholes filled.

As it stands Nationalists will not work with Tories; Tories with Nationalists and Labour with anybody. The Lib Dems leader is a bit more open but needs to be persuaded of merits of coalitions. The Greens, to be fair, seem ready to do deals. I guess the smaller parties feel free to be more honest about coalitions.

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We do not just apply first-past-the-post paradigms to our electoral system, but to devolution itself. The SNP’s power at Holyrood is not only constrained by its need for an alliance with the Greens. The pro-independence administration might want to take credit for everything good and its opponents may wish to blame it for everything bad but the Scottish Government is not a Westminster one. Its ministers seem to strut about as if it were. Their critics rarely concede the limits on devolved power, not least over the economy.

SNP leaders boast when, say, employment or wages are higher in Scotland than the rest of the UK. And they are lambasted when they are lower. This is a problem. Because it makes it harder for voters to hold devolved leaders to account for the incremental impact they can have on headline economic indicators.

Devolution – with its PR system – was sold to Scots as a way of delivering a new consensus-focused political culture. It has not worked out that way.

I asked Ailsa Henderson, professor of political science at Edinburgh University, to explain why. “The parliament was supposed to have a transformative effect throughout public life, not just in Holyrood itself,” she said. “And two decades later – and 15 years after the introduction of STV – we do have electoral systems that are designed to push us in that direction, but we also have politicians and parties that, at times, seem rather stuck in the past.

“And if that's not enough cause for frustration, it’s not the battle-weary politicians who cut their teeth in Westminster in the 70s or 80s who seem entrenched in that antagonistic, oppositional approach, it’s folks who would have no working experience of anything other than legislatures elected by PR.”

How did this come about? “My working hypothesis,” said Prof Henderson, “would be that it’s another example of how opposition around the issue of constitution change has so hardened people’s approaches to other political parties that we have a very oppositional political culture sitting uneasily alongside a series of institutional features designed for better days.”

Mr Sarwar told this paper said he wants to change the way local democracy worked, suggesting he favoured minority administrations which rely on opposition on a case-by-case basis.

Former MSP Elaine Murray who – as a councillor – ran Dumfries and Galloway with the help of the SNP for the last five years has urged him to trust local parties. He should.

Amid all the yah boo of Scottish politics we forget that the key skill of a politician is to find ways to get things done, even if that means parleying with the enemy.