YOU can only feel for the SNP’s NATO twins, Stewart McDonald and Alyn Smith. Having spent the last few years forming a robust tartan alliance against all manner of Russian iniquities the least they might have expected was for their fist-shaking to get noticed by the Kremlin but, alas, no.

Russia have issued a long list of MPs banned from entering the country and accused them of fuelling “Russophobic hysteria”. Mr McDonald and Mr Smith, who have been indefatigable in their efforts to traduce Russia and its president weren’t included. Just what more must they do to win a hallowed place on Russia’s “for the watchin” list?

Imagine their despair at discovering there were 287 politicians on Russia’s banned list and discovering their names were nowhere to be seen. Yet, all might not yet be lost for the NATO members for Glasgow South and Stirling. Liz Truss, the UK Foreign Secretary, thinks the war in Ukraine could last for another five to ten years, so there might still be plenty of time to enhance their CVs.

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The news from Russia comes in a miserable stretch for Scotland’s political classes. At least Messrs McDonald and Smith were spared the calamities that have recently befallen several other politicians at Holyrood. This week their party colleague Keith Brown was forced to hide in the Holyrood canteen to dodge questions over his role in the CalMac ferry fiasco.

It emerged that Scotland’s current Justice Secretary signed off on the deal to award a contract for two ferries to the Ferguson Shipyard in 2015, despite warnings from senior civil servants. The vessels are now seven years behind schedule and £150m over budget. Nicola Sturgeon had earlier tried to pin the blame on Derek Mackay, until it emerged that the then Transport Minister was on holiday at the time.

Unlike Boris Johnson, the First Minister of Scotland doesn’t tell lies, so this was probably just an oversight. The battalion of party and government advisers now under the command of the Scottish Government (cost: £1m a year and rising) really must get their acts together.

Not that we’ll ever really know the truth: the Scottish Government neglected to take any notes at one of the crucial meetings where the ferry contract was being discussed. A few hundred million of public money is at stake here. Perhaps this didn’t meet the cost threshold at which the public are entitled to scrutinise such discussions.

The previous week, another senior SNP politician, Willie Coffey, read from a pre-scripted conclusion to a planning debate that hadn’t even started. Let’s not be too harsh, though. At least Mr Coffey had succeeded in accurately logging the correct day and time of the debate, unlike the convenor of his committee, Ariane Burgess, whose task had simply been to kick it off.

Ms Burgess is a member of the Scottish Greens, a party which hasn’t managed to win a single electoral contest in the entire 23-year history of the Scottish Parliament. This, though, hasn’t prevented it forming part of the Scottish Government’s ruling coalition where one of its two ministers is Lorna Slater, a politician who couldn’t even muster more than 40 votes from her own party, let alone win an election. Ms Slater’s only significant ministerial contribution to date has been to make absurdly false accusations about women’s rights activists in the GRA debate.

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Glaswegians have recourse to a suite of colourful metaphors and similes when conveying organisational fecklessness. “He couldn’t run a minodge” is perhaps the most commonly-known of these (a minodge being a rudimentary, neighbourhood mutual assistance scheme). It’s the first one that springs to mind when assessing what more than two decades of devolved government have brought Scotland.

We had reasonable expectations when devolution was gained that the country would be represented by our brightest and best. Many of us were minded even to grant Holyrood a measure of latitude before it settled down to become an institution of which we might all be proud. We’ve had six Holyrood elections, yet following each one the quality of representation and standard of what passes for debate has reduced exponentially.

Holyrood is now a place where anything resembling original and independent thinking withers and dies. The only currency that proceeds unhindered in the Scottish Parliament is mediocrity and forelock-tugging loyalty to an anointed, middle-class legion of leadership lickspittles.

This shower couldn’t even fulfil the simple task of getting the population to fill out a simple census form. They had ten years to get this right, but as tomorrow’s deadline approaches, less than three-quarters of Scotland’s citizens have completed it. Last year, in the teeth of the pandemic, 97% of households in England and Wales completed the census. For reasons they haven’t yet shared with the country, the Scottish Government chose to delay the census and is now having to spend an extra £10m in extending the deadline.

Angus Robertson, the “Constitution Secretary” and MSP for Vienna Central blamed the low completion rate on “world events”. Behave yourself, Angus.

Most of our main parties don’t even represent the main interests of their core supporters. The SNP have mutated into a managerialist cult in hoc to global corporatism while peddling their annual pledges about independence. The Greens in government have crossed more lines in the sand than Lawrence of Arabia.

Scottish Labour is led by a multi-millionaire whose fortune is derived from a family business that doesn’t recognise trade unions and whose children are privately-educated. He’s wrapped his party so tightly in the Union Jack that it starts singing Rule Britannia if you press it too hard.

This week he pitched up in Aberdeen to campaign ahead of the council elections and said his party would never enter a coalition with the Tories. A pledge that obviously doesn’t extend to the nine Aberdeen Labour councillors who chose to do just that in 2017.

When we complete our census forms we trust that our political elites will use the data to tailor services to the diverse needs of Scotland’s communities. Good luck with that. With this lot in charge there would be little difference if we all completed the questionnaires blindfolded.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.