ABSTRACT
Writing at the end of the first year of the Scottish Parliament in June 2000, Mark Irvine in the New Statesman Scotland commented that 'the real success story has been the parliamentary committees . . . They are the engine room of a new politics'. Irvine went on to describe the committee system as a 'triumph of consensus not combat' and the Labour MSP, Mike Watson, in his Year Zero, an insider's account of the first year at Holyrood, agreed that to a large extent this had been the case (Watson 2001: 167). The Presiding Officer, David Steel, was similarly complimentary about the work of the committees in his assessment of the first year of the parliament's work. So, too, was the Daily Herald journalist, Murray Ritchie, in his volume Scotland Reclaimed. 'Most encouraging for . . . the Scottish Parliament is the performance of its committees . . . They are small but quickly proving themselves to be independently minded and efficient. Some have already shown themselves unwilling to be ciphers for the Executive' (Ritchie 2000: 217-18). Indeed, it is fair to assert that when in December 2000 the question of restructuring the committee system was debated in plenary, very many MSPs concurred with Mike Rumbles, the Liberal Democrat member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, that 'the committees are working well. They are the real success story of the Scottish Parliament. In my view, they are effective and very efficient'. 1
