 Thank you very much, everybody. Good evening and welcome. My name is Ken Macintosh. I am the Presiding Officer here at the Scottish Parliament and it's my real pleasure to welcome you to our debating chamber. To celebrate this important date, the 40th anniversary since the death of one of Scotland's leading intellectuals, academic writer and political thinker, John P Macintosh. Over the years, John B. Macintosh has been described by many as the architect who laid the stones for Scottish devolution, and I can think of no further and no finer venue than our debating chamber for tonight's discussion. In fact, I'm going on to say a few more things about his life, and I'm going to use our distinguished panel shortly. Before I do, I wonder if I might just take advantage—I hope that you'll excuse me if I've abused my position—and just say a few words about John's personal influence on me. John P. Macintosh and my own father, Farkar Macintosh, studied history together at Edinburgh University, and they became very good friends. They were not related in any way, despite the names, but with a plethora of sons, fathers and uncles, all called John Macintosh. John was known simply as John P. Coincidentally, some 30 years later, his daughter Charlotte, who is here tonight, and I ended up also in the same class at Edinburgh University studying history. You'll hear from Charlotte later this evening at the reception. I use the word coincidence, and we all know that Scotland can be a village sometimes, but it is more than coincidence. It's not pure chance that I ended up as Presiding Officer here in the Scottish Parliament, an institution that John P did so much to shape but never lived to see. I have no doubt, for example, that my own father's support for devolution in the campaign back in 1978 and 1979 was shaped by his influence in his discussions, in fact his many arguments, with John P. The seeds of my own belief in devolution, not only in devolution but in the whole idea of a new way of doing politics, were laid at that very stage, leading in turn to me standing for election to the first Scottish Parliament in 1999 and then again two years ago as Presiding Officer. I personally have to say have much to be grateful for in the personal legacy that he left me. For those of you who didn't have the good fortune to know him, a little bit about John's background, he was born in Simla in India in 1929. He first came to Edinburgh at the age of 11 and, following the war, studied history at the University of Edinburgh before going on to read philosophy, politics and economics at Balear College in Oxford in 1950. He then followed it up with a further post-graduate degree from Princeton in the United States. Although it was cut short at the tragically young age of 48, John's life was one of great achievement. He was chair and professor of politics at the University of Edinburgh, balancing his academic career alongside his duties in the House of Commons as the constituency member for Berwick and East Lothian. In addition to that, he somehow managed to find the time to write regular columns for the Times and the Scotsman and to appear regularly on television and also to give many public lectures. His ability to encourage political debate, co-operation and new ideas crossed the political divide and there is no doubt about his influence on the thinking of people of all political persuasions and none. What perhaps less easy to appreciate without having known him was his charm and attractiveness. John Pee had a warmth to match his intellect and I know from both my parents that John liked nothing more than a good old fashioned argument, a robust discussion, welcoming disagreement, not for disagreement's sake but as a way of exploring all sides of a debate. Of course, he was an early exponent of devolution and a leading, sometimes lonely voice within the Labour Party for many years in the campaign for a Scottish Parliament. His ideas and writings have had a lasting influence and, as some of you may be aware, they are actually part of this very building. In fact, every morning as I go up to my office, I step over his words, they are engraved in the threshold to the dual room. It says, people in Scotland want a degree of government for themselves. It is not beyond the wit of man to devise the institutions to meet those demands. Here we gather in the heart of the very institution that John Pee McIntosh foresaw all these years ago to reflect on that statement, how we got here but more importantly where now for democracy, the theme for this evening's discussion. As we get started, I take this opportunity to once again welcome you to Hollywood's debating chamber. I look forward to hearing from you as many people as possible during the question and answer session and to follow the contribution from our panellists. Thank you very much. I am pleased to be joined by four distinguished panellists, Baron Campbell of Pytton-Wheam, Catherine Styler, MEP, Professor Mona Siddiqui and the right hon. Angus Robertson, former deputy leader of the Parliament. For those of you who do not know our panel, Professor Mona Siddiqui joined the University of Edinburgh's Divinity School in 2011 as the first person to hold a chair in Islamic and interreligious studies. She also holds posts of assistant principal and dean at the university as well as numerous visiting professorships at Dutch and American universities. Mona Siddiqui is internationally renowned as a public intellectual and speaker on religion, ethics and public life, who can often be heard on BBC Scotland and on BBC Radio 4, including The Moral Maze, which I tune into regularly. The right hon. Lord Campbell of Pytton-Wheam, Ming Campbell, as he's known to many of us over the years, was Liberal Democrat MP for North East 5 from 1987 until he stood down in 2015. During that time, he was his party's principal spokesperson on foreign affairs and defence. He was elected deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2003 and served as its leader from 2006 to 2007. Catherine Styler is a Labour MEP and member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament. She has represented Scotland in Europe since 1999. In that time, she has held many and varied roles from deputy leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party to the editor of the parliamentary magazine. She has also served as the director office at Andrews University between 2014 and 2017. The right hon. Lord Angus Robertson is now a business, communications and public diplomacy consultant. He also serves as an advisory council of the Scottish Policy Foundation as well as a member of the Privy Council. He is probably better known to most of us as the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party, the Westminster S&P group leader and the MP for Murray from 2001 to 2017. During that time, he was the foreign affairs, European defence and security spokesperson in the House of Commons. I hope that you will join me in welcoming our panel this evening. I would like to kick off if I can and begin already if you can to think of questions for our panel, but I am going to start off if I may by asking our panel to just perhaps say a few words, a few reflections on what John P's legacy means to each of our panel. Bán Camelfa, mwy start with you because you knew John P Macintosh. I think I'm the only one of the four, isn't that right? It's a sign of advancing years, I think. John Macintosh lit up the room, he lit up the lecture theatre, he certainly lit up the television studio. He was a very, very able practitioner as television and politics began to run together. He was very determined, he very independently minded, Harold Wilson regarded him with great suspicion. On one occasion, Harold Wilson said to Willie Ross, whom some of you will remember as a very redoubtable Labour Secretary of State for Scotland, he said to Willie Ross, I think that chap Macintosh is after your job and Willie Ross looked back to him and said, not my job, Prime Minister, not my job. And that's a sense, I think, of the independence that John Macintosh had. I mean he was never put on a select committee and he was never made a minister and yet he had this enormous talent. And of course he was trying to do three things at once, be the Member of Parliament for Birkenness Lothian and be a good constituency MP and of course to be the Professor of Politics in Edinburgh University. His determination was shown in the two elections of 1974, February, he lost to Michael Ancrum, now sitting in the House of Lords as Michael Lothian, but he won it back six months later. And he was one of these sparkling people. We used to go to lunch, Sunday lunch, you had to prepare for it by taking a day off the day before and we were ready to take a day off the day after. And they would start around lunchtime and it was always curry because he was born in Simla, so he knew how to make a proper Indian curry. And around the table there would be unionists, there would be nationalists, there would be liberals, I remember two Russian dissidents on one occasion and the conversation would flow and the curry and the alcohol would flow as well. And if it finished before six o'clock he used to think that this was something of a failure. To call him a bum beaver would be to treat him too light a kind of description, but he was someone who lived a very full life and there's only one thing about him which David Steele talks about quite a lot and that is he could leap like a sieve. I mean you ain't seen nothing yet the political editors of the observer was a woman called Nora Belloff and it was alleged in London when he was in the House of Commons that the two of them would have lunch on a Thursday afternoon, a Thursday lunchtime. And her column on Sunday would consist entirely of the leaks which John McIntosh had given to her. And I remember in the period in the run up to the first referendum on devolution of which of course he was a very, very strong supporter. We used to have these meetings, secret meetings on a Sunday of what used to be called the Rockswell Hotel in Edinburgh and we'd turn up there and we'd agree a programme for the next five days and we'd all be sworn to secrecy and if you opened the Scotsman on Monday morning every detail was there. Journalists loved him for that very reason and of course he was something of a journalist himself because as well as academic writing he did political writing as well. He is much missed what we could do with him now. Indeed. Thank you very much for that very warm reflection. Mona, I wonder if I could turn to you just both perhaps talking about what his legacy might mean to you as an academic as well and perhaps some broader reflections on we're talking about we're now for democracy. Just wonder if you could lean into that. So can I first of all say it's a huge privilege to be part of celebration of somebody who's so significant with their life and their legacy so thank you to the committee. But as I was reading about him and I didn't know him and I was reading about him I thought he was somebody who from an academic perspective really bridged the divide between academic and public life. Really had I suppose today I think politics has been reduced to administration and spectacle and actually politics should be about vision and not just vision for your own life but vision for what's to come after you. And it seems to me that by staying engaged in public life by staying engaged in all forms of writing not just academic writing that you're making your vision accessible to a wider audience. And you're not always aware of the influence you're going to have and the impact you're going to have. And I think again from an academic perspective I think most academic struggle it doesn't matter what discipline they're in how do you engage with wider wider society. And I think that as as universities are publicly funded big civic institutions we have a moral imperative to be more engaged. We can't sit on our laurels thinking that other people will sort life out other people will sort out politics. It doesn't mean that everyone has to be a politician but politics is fundamentally about ideas and if you're not interested in ideas that make the world a better place then I think it doesn't matter what discipline you are in as an academic you're not really doing your job properly. I think we'll return to a few of those ideas including perhaps the difficulty between what's seen as public impartiality and balance and taking a political interest which I think is a difficult. Even if you didn't agree with the devolution the fact that there is a vision means that other people can be part of that debate. It's how you make that vision accessible and people can people can resist that vision people can argue against that. But I think if it's not about ideas if it's not about imagination then we have lost something in our public life. Angus I want to just turn to you that point again one of John P's big ideas was the idea of sharing ideas across party like me used to work for the BBC so you'll be used to the idea that we can have our own internal beliefs but a public engagement on issues in an impartial way as well. Do you look at John's legacy and see it in practice today? Can I start off by joining Mona in taking the opportunity to say thank you very much for the invitation to be able to sit in this amazing chamber which is a great legacy to John's vision and especially for the opportunity to take part as somebody who's not off John's political persuasion. I think one of the things that we lack perhaps in politics or we certainly lack in the public being able to see in politics is that often there is much that unites us those of us in mainstream political parties and that's why I think it's really important that when we have anniversaries such as this where we can look at an over dimensional contribution from somebody that we can look back and we can take encouragement from the things that John P Macintosh did through his academic and his political life and what he stood for and realise that that is something that we all share. I think if we can remind ourselves about the values of education, of arguing one's case on the basis of reason, facts, knowledge to debate in a respectful way with those whose views you disagree with, of being fired by an internationalism which I think like a stick of rock goes through John's life. I should say I don't know if everybody in the chamber has seen this publication but if you haven't I would strongly encourage you to try and, is there somebody at the back who has copies of this? I'm looking around. If there is, please hand it out to those who have not got it because, while Ming had the advantage of knowing John, I didn't. I was at primary school in the 1970s. That wasn't gratuitous. You should be able to have a bit of fun whilst respectfully debating things. I'm trying to make a serious point that when you have somebody who played such an outstanding role in our national life that was some time ago, I think the likes of all of the annual lectures that have taken place and now this new format, however one doesn't have to do that. It does it to be able to remind ourselves of the positive contribution of those who have played an outstanding role. One of the things that I reflected on when having a look at this book—I'm not on retainer but please everybody put your hands on it—is the number of people of that generation of politics who died too young was one of the things that struck me. Obviously John, but you can think of Donald Dure, you can think of John Smith, you can think of Neil McCormack. There are a whole host of people who still had years if not decades of being able to contribute to public life and given the stresses and strains that we're now enduring in democratic politics, it's a huge loss to not have that wisdom to help show us the way. My last thought that I would share is that we need as many people who are grounded in academia and learning and knowledge to help reflect the lessons of the past and make sure that we don't make the mistakes of the past again, which is perhaps a bridge to some other contributions that panellists might want to make. John was clearly a polymath and exceptionally intelligent and we need more people who have a commitment to social justice but also to learning and knowledge in public life. I think we'll probably come back again to the subject of learning and rational based decision making given the state of current democracy. I'm going to turn to Catherine a second. Can I just encourage you, if you do wish to ask a question and make a point even, just catch my eye, wave a hand or wave a leaflet around and just catch my eye and I'll try and bring you in as soon as possible. Catherine, John was a very pro-European MEP, so he left as many legacies. Can I just ask you, just before we go into the fact, I was just thinking, we've got through four contributions so far without mentioning Brexit and I've just brought it up myself. Before we go into that, I know I can't believe I'm doing this. Before we do that, can I just ask you, do you have any friends in other political parties? Yes, I do. A question to start with, your office. The thing that I loved about reading about John, of course I never met him and it was the fact that he, even in the Labour Party, it was Tam Diel that organised his memorial, wrote the National Biography in the Oxford National Biography of John and I think he had that ability to be able to work with people. I think today, you know, our politics nationally, not in Scotland, just across the UK is particularly horribly fractured in my mind just now and I think somebody like him would have been able to bring people together in a way that other people can't and there was no fearfulness of him. He wasn't scared about standing up for what he really believed in and I think if he was here today to think about Brexit, he wouldn't mince his words I think, I think he would be very very clear that it's a disaster, we have to do something about it. We have to work together to stop this from happening but I think that it was his tolerance and the fact that he could bring ideas. He not only brought his academic ideas, he also organised so he created one of the biggest memberships of any local Labour Party legacy I think and believe was there today and I see no foye sitting in the front row here and that's part of that legacy. As an organiser called Uncle Noel, you know that but the thing about that is that that's my connection to GP was that organisational ability that he brought and helped and inspired and led to the legacy that's still in East Lothian Labour Party. To return to the bigger issue of democracy, I'll give you a few for me, I'm not going to throw statistics at you all night but just given that we're in the Scottish Parliament and that I think is a direct legacy from John P. At this last election we have 45 female members out of 129, two ethnic minority members and of course the 2016 election was the first time that 16 and 17 year old voted for the first time and our youngest ever MSP was elected, Ross Greer at the age of 21. Do you think that's a good reflection of our current state of democracy or actually just illustrates the challenges ahead of us? I'll come back to you in a second. I think that it's good to have diversity, it's important to have but I think that we can always do more and I think that certainly in the European Parliament we've now got younger women, women bringing their children into the chamber and that's something that in other parliaments, I don't know whether that happens here but the European Parliament happens is taken as red, partly possibly because we have a Scandic element in our Parliament and that is taken as red but I think that in terms of if we want to keep up diversity within our democracy is up to all of us. Each one of you in this room has a responsibility to uphold democracy. If you want to stand for election, stand for election. If something annoys you put a petition together, we all have to be part of it. In the moment we feel very much that when you look around and you see all these books about the death of democracy in articles about democracy dying and we are at the moment in a situation where in many of our parties we've got extremes which are leading and that's something that's a great great challenge to our democratic and liberal tradition of tolerance of mutual respect and understanding where we can debate each other and come together as well as human beings. I think that's something where somebody said there needs to be a bit more kindness in politics just now and sometimes social media doesn't help with that and tolerance that's out there and some people who make amazing politicians just of that fearfulness of not standing and we have to encourage that. So I think we cannot take anything for granted in our democracy and it's up to each and every one of us to uphold those rights that we take for granted at the moment. I mean I can see you went to dinner tonight. Yeah, I just wanted to add Robin Cook to the heroes who have gone to political Valhalla who of course gave up his seat in the cabinet in order to make one of the best speeches ever made in the House of Commons certainly since 1945 against the Iraq war. We can't represent the country unless we're representative of the country and that's why it seems to me we have a long long way to go in relation to parity between the sexes and certainly by embodying a sufficient range of people from sufficient cultural backgrounds that our parliaments look like the country. Now I spend most of my time in London. I tell you the House of Commons does not look anything like what you see and what you hear in London because London is now one of the most diverse cities probably in the world. And I think the parties have got a lot to blame. Hands up the parties. We've got this wrong. Our structures, the kind of encouragement we give people, the ease with which you can come and join. All of these things seem to me to stand in the way. And although the former leader of the Labour Party now I think regrets saying that you could join up for three pounds and have a vote for the leadership of the Labour Party. Nonetheless, that is actually a very good idea because what it suggests to you is that if you have a sympathy but don't necessarily want a membership of a political party. I mean there are people for me used to deliver leaflets in five who would never think of joining the little Democrats. But why should they be excluded from some of the major decisions in the party simply because they did not want to become members? And so I think that idea is one and understand this is not a commercial but in scables making a speech tomorrow which will be heavily trailed along those lines. We have to be much more inclusive. And the other thing I think is that the, and I say this with some regret but I think it's inevitable, the structure of Parliament itself. There's always this stuff about men and tights carrying funny things over the shoulders and all the form of the heiser commons, the language which is used, the nomenclature, all of that. I think we've got to face up to the fact that these are obstacles and we should find ways of overcoming these obstacles and the Scandinavian models are very, very relevant in all of this. And it seems to me we ought to have, if you like, for a whole variety of reasons, a convention on the constitution. But one of the first things that constitutional conventions should do should be to examine the practices. And I don't exclude this Parliament either, but to examine the practices of Parliament and to try and reach some conclusion as to whether or not if they were changed they would not create a far more sympathetic atmosphere to those who want to be involved in politics. People say to me, not a question of people not being interested in politics. Good God, they're certainly interested in politics but they're not interested in political parties and that's our fault and we should find some way of remedying it. Again, I encourage you to raise your hand if you want to come into this. I'll come to you in a second minute but I'll ask you with that because political parties, I noticed for example the papers this week, the membership of the Conservative parties fallen below the membership of the SNP which is quite a remarkable statistic. But perhaps there'll be a lot of people here who are very familiar with political parties and how they operate but many won't. Political parties themselves, and she recognised this, can exercise a sort of tyranny over their elected members, which you have to be careful about, which I'm sure that some of the elected members here will recognise at the moment. There was an article in the paper last week about Conservative members of Parliament being worried about UKippers joining interests in the momentum around the middle of possibly trying to deselect MPs. In the SNP, I'm aware that there's that dilemma that the First Minister faces of whether or not she addresses the nation as the First Minister or the wishes of her party as the leader of her party and it's a dilemma that all elected members have to do. Do you recognise that democratic processes within parties can be tricky to get right to reflect the wider democracy? The first thing is, I would want to encourage everybody and anybody who cares about wanting to move things left or right up or down to get involved. I know as soon as you join a political party before you know it, you'll be asked to be signed up as a local branch treasurer or social secretary and beware because that is definitely a cross-party reality. I don't want to put people off getting involved. In the SNP, we had a huge surge of membership after the 2014 referendum and that was people who had invested a lot of time and effort and hopes into an outcome that didn't come about in the way that they wanted to but didn't want to give up on politics and didn't want to give up on democratic change and didn't want to give up on what they believed in. What is perhaps easier for the SNP is that they were joining the political party, not with a view to changing it fundamentally which I don't want to go into the internal challenges of some other political parties but that appears to be the realities elsewhere of trying to change the way things are as opposed to putting one shoulder to the wheel. To answer your question about political parties and how they work, politics, by and large, needs to be understood as a team sport. There are rules in your local football club or golf club or whatever you're involved in and there are different cultures and different clubs about how all of that works. I have to say that my experience within the SNP is that it's a tremendously open organisation to people who want to become more involved, do things differently, change things and that was born out after the big surgeon membership where there was absolutely no sense of here are the newbies who want to change everything or here are the people who've been around for decades feeling pituit because there are all these newbies coming in. Can I just drop a little pebble in the pond because we've heard Scandinavia prayed in aid quite a lot and I think that's right if we take a linear view of how democracy and our institutions change and we think change for the better, it should represent the public better, it should be more inclusive, it should involve those who haven't traditionally been involved in politics and that is in large part a development that has been led by Scandinavian countries. The pebble that I'm about to throw in the pond is for those perhaps who have not watched what's happening in Scandinavia at the present time. We have a general election in Sweden happening in the next few days where the Swedish social democrats have been in power for the best part of the last century are probably going to lose the election to a populist right wing party. Suddenly our whole mental furniture about progressive politics, linear, societal and political development is going to be questioned. That's not a Scandinavian challenge alone. It's happened in Italy in the last year, it's happened in Germany, it's happened in Austria, it's happened in the Netherlands, it's happened in France. It hasn't happened here yet and so my pebble in the pond, because this is the thing that we all, I imagine all of us are mainstream moderate democrats, is how do we do our best to make sure that our institutions can grow and do all of the right things to reflect society as best as it can. But there are political culture and our political debate manages to effectively combat the risks of the populism of the extremes. I don't think that's about institutions so much as the failure of what jokingly described as the liberal elite. I often ask myself what liberal democracy means and I remember going to visit a person who fulfilled this category. Someone who lives on the sixth floor of a high rise flat, unmarried mother with two children living on social security. What does being a liberal democrat mean to a person like that? I think we have allowed a sense of expectation to arise, sometimes called the crisis of expectation, of which name a problem we say we can fix it. The truth is there are a lot of problems that are very, very difficult to fix and unless we can find a way of converting the good ideas like freedom of information, things of that kind into something that means a great deal to those who we want to become more engaged in politics and by that I mean the public in general, not the recidivists that want to go out on a wet Tuesday night and put in the room handing out leaflets. Unless we can find a way of demonstrating that we give undertakings, we do so in good faith that we'll do everything in our power to keep these undertakings and we will not abandon them because it becomes politically expedient to do so. I mean the disillusionment is not with the institution I don't think, the disillusionment is with the people who are in the institution. I'm going to come out to you Mona, but I just want to get it because John Hume Robertson who is of course a successor to John P Macintosh in the East Lothian seat I believe, is that right John? It was indeed. You've indicated that you want to ask a question and I want to encourage everybody to ask questions so I'm going to teach you just to chip in if I can. If I may, I want to come back to Brexit please, because I think that this is so, so, so important, but it's just okay, yes you're right. I voted for John Macintosh. I first met him when I went to an election meeting in the village of Paxton down in Sleepy Berwickshire and I heard this guy for the first time and I thought wow, this is thrilling. He was talking about the Parliament for Scotland and it led to this. He was talking about European nations coming together in what was then called the common market and what became the European Union and we've achieved that so much has been achieved. I joined the Labour Party to support him and yes, I often wish he was still here. Now I could be still running a farm, but Brexit I can just imagine what John would be saying about this issue just now because we're talking about democracy here. We're in a situation where we are being told that a referendum result trumped the principle of parliamentary democracy, the sovereignty of parliament. That referendum result, okay it was a simple majority for Brexit, I think it's 37.5% of the electorate voted for Brexit. Is that enough to justify running the risk of trade wars and maybe worse in the future? Is that enough to justify depriving my grandchildren of their European citizenship? Surely there must be some democratic way of ensuring that Britain, preferably and if necessary Scotland, remain in the European Union, but I don't know what John would be saying about this but it's eating me up. We'll definitely come back to that. I'm very conscious that we've got a panel entirely of remainers here so I'm going to act differently. Can I come back to that in a second just because I think the whole issue of participative versus representative democracy is important and you know one does one trump the other. If I can first, the issue of candidates, and I'd love to say that people came to hear me or any of our colleagues in the Scottish Parliament speak in Paxton and Ella Village hall and were inspired. I doubt that's the case, to be honest. I really do doubt that and John P even in his own day was exceptional. Most representatives are not great orators. But you said earlier, Mona, you'd like to see more academics. We've got Professor Adam Tomkins joined us and I think across the board people have welcomed that contribution but he had to give up his job. If you hold down two jobs as a politician these days you are almost certainly going to be savaged in the papers for it. So what hope is there? Well, if I could just backtrack for a little for a moment. I think we're focusing too much on chambers and candidates and elections as the reflection of democracy and what we're really talking about is a threat to liberal democracy. You can have all kinds of forms of democracy. And so we're in a paradox really, which is that if we if we dispense with the liberal story, what are we going to replace it with? And I think for me, and I imagine a lot of people in this room, the liberal story with which most of us have grown up with is despite all its issues is too precious. And it's precisely because people have lost trust in many of the wranglings of democracy that the liberal story itself is under threat. So it makes me feel how do you hold on to what is good about liberalism when it's coming under attack? And it's not just about Scotland. And as you alluded, it's happening everywhere. And it's not happening everywhere because people are being forced to vote in another way. People are choosing to vote in another way. People are choosing to go towards populism. People are choosing to say, I'm going to vote with my heart rather than my head. I'm going to vote for what is good for me now rather than what might be good for the whole country in 20 years time. And I think for me, it's not really just about saying academic should be more involved. I think there is a way of the biggest problem for me in our political conversation nowadays is so many important things have been reduced to soundbites. And you cannot have a proper conversation. I'm referring back to John McIntosh. You know, a liberal democracy must make room for the most feisty debates. If you don't have the feisty debates, you don't have a liberal democracy. That's what freedom means. But now we don't have feisty debates. We have name calling. We have silencing. And you opened up by saying how do you get more people involved? Well actually the very fact that you have relatively still few women, ethnic minorities or people who may be feeling very certain trepidation, they don't want to be public figures because they don't want to be put in the spotlight. And I think it's happened quite quickly but there's something about the nature of our political rhetoric now which is less about ideas and more about identity politics, more about the fact that if I can silence you, I will, the fact that what you say I don't agree with so it must be wrong. And I think, you know, we blame what's happening in the United States. Actually I think a lot of it's happening here as well, that you're either with us or you're against us. And we've seen this in some of the debates around antisemitism, some of the debates around Islamophobia, that there is only one way to think about these things. And if you start telling people there's only one way to think about these things, you're not in a liberal democracy. Well indeed and I think, I imagine a lot of people will share that but isn't the problem that liberal democracy has failed so many people. I mean it has failed if you were to take a campaign like Black Lives Matter or even trying to win the battle for gender equality. Or just recently we've had a successful campaign here against period poverty. These are single issue identity politics issues that have been successful in a way that liberal democracy has not been successful. Is it any wonder people are turning to identity politics? But I think that the issue is that liberal democracy has almost become a victim of its own success by allowing people's space to talk, to express themselves, to have freedom, to have access. I mean if you think about what happened in the Middle East, people wanted a taste of freedom. That's what. And I never liked the phrase the Arab Spring because I always knew it would end up in massacre and bloods and slaughter. But very quickly, despite the fact that people wanted freedom, people wanted liberalism, people also knew that actually sometimes the rule of tyranny might work better for cohesion in society. That actually you cannot and it's in the nature of these societies. So everything that happens in distant countries affects us. Everything that happens here affects those. I don't think liberal democracy has failed. I think what we need to be thinking about is how do we strengthen it in ways that are not necessarily more inclusive because I don't think democracy succeeds in giving everyone equality. It succeeds when you make people feel that they are citizens who can be engaged in making citizenship better. People, if people don't feel a sense of engagement in politics with a small p, people don't feel a sense of engagement in how can I make my life better as well as those around me, then they will become disillusioned. And at the moment, because people are disillusioned with politics with a big p, they're looking after their own interests. In the middle of that, you touched on a couple of behaviours that go with identity politics, including this idea that you're not even allowed to hold an alternative view and that's often manifested in no platforming people. Can I just ask either Catherine Angus or Fadden Campbell, if there have ever been a situation where you have refused to go on a platform with somebody or been tempted to, because I know that it was a potential for me at the last election when we were going to have an extremist candidate, and it didn't happen in the end, but it was a real dilemma. So, do you go on or do you not? And it is actually an accepted behaviour now that you don't. You don't share a platform with people from the far right. What do you think, Catherine? I think it's a difficult one, isn't it? But I think that the thing about sharing a platform with an out and out fascist, I would certainly have a real challenge with. I think in the European Parliament we have a group that are fascists. We have the national front from France and we've got that group there. I'll just give you an example. I'm about to chair the Icelandic delegation and one of the people on that delegation is from the ENF, that's the French fascists. You're kind of like, should I even be chairing a delegation with a French fascist there? And this isn't a dilemma. I think we still should have the Icelandic delegation and she's chosen not to speak, so that's the decision. But it is a hard choice to make within a Parliament where there is a recognised group. It's very difficult to draw up red lines. I think I would refuse to share a platform with someone who did not subscribe to freedom of information, the right to assembly, recognition of diversity. I would refuse to share a platform with someone who would abuse the very right to be on the same platform as me. I'm not putting it very elegantly. But the point really is that, and if you remember the question time when Banas Varcy took, what was your name, Griffiths, took absolutely, took him to pieces. And if ever there was an occasion when it was right to share a platform because you had an extremely eloquent person on the other side, so far as he was concerned, you had a very sympathetic audience and in the end he was pretty, he was a very poor performer. So everything, all the ducks are in a row in order to ensure that what I thought was the right result came about. But I don't think I would be willing to share a platform with someone who did not subscribe to what I regard as the very fundamentals of democracy. And here's an interesting question. You've got people now like Erdogan who get to power using democratic means, and as soon as they are in power, what do they do? They start to haul up the ladder. They start to destroy the very democratic system which allowed them to triumph. Now how you deal with that, I think, is a very, very difficult question. Angus, before you come in, I could hold that thought because I've got a person right at the very back there and another person here, yes. David Burrell, when we came in this evening we were kindly reminded to turn off our devices because it interfered with the sound system. Of course that's just another example of the digital revolution in which we're living through and when there are things like soft power, social media, data analytics. In many quarters the argument would be that so far the greater use of these tools has been disruption, distrust, distorted diplomacy. So in all the great ideas and of course there's going to be violent agreement of the things that we want for the future, my question to the panel is within the context of the new digital revolution which is no longer a choice, it's part of who we are and what we do. How do we reach or deliver a lot of these objectives in that digital world? Okay, I want the panel to think of that while we hear the other, the lady just there, yes? I was thinking about Kenyon Wright when I was listening to some of the comments earlier and I think Ming's comment in particular about Westminster because this is a Parliament that's 19 years old. I was comparing it to my 19 year old son and saying it's still a child really and it's got a lot to learn and a lot to do but I remember Kenyon saying the one threat it could offer is the threat of a good example to Westminster and I'd rather like that. But coming back to the other point about Brexit, I heard Ken Clark speak at the COSLA conference last year and he made me realise that if you were to count of the 650 MPs in Westminster the vast majority are in favour of remaining in the European Union and yet they seem to have forgotten that once they get there their job is to do what is best for the country and best for their constituency. Coming back to the Scottish context, the one thing I was thinking and Mona's point about engagement, this Parliament signed up to a participative approach to things and I remember Susan Deacon challenging me early on and saying participation is not enough, it needs to be more. I can remember when we were selling the idea of this Parliament we used the information that this is the most underrepresented country in Europe and it still is. The real answer to the disaffection that we've got here isn't just about more engagement, it's about that principle, I hate the word, of subsidiarity and beginning to push the power that sits here further down into local government and into local communities so that people can feel they have power and control over their lives, not just engagement in a process that happens in this building. So I'd like to think that as we come of age as a Parliament that will be the focus going forward. I noticed by the way that Susan is sitting two seats in front of you in a row. Angus I asked you to hold a thought there and you can bring it back up and pick up in either of these two points if you wish. I probably won't do justice to the questions that have been raised but I just wanted to throw another pebble in the pond about the nature of the threat to democracy as we face it. It's not necessarily by people wearing uniforms and jack boots as it was in previous decades, it's by people who are in many respects sadly more intelligent than that and realise how they can subvert the democratic process by positioning themselves in an electoral sweet spot which doesn't see them banned because there are countries that have very, very strict laws against political extremism. Germany and Austria are two examples where it's a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust, it's a criminal offence to use the symbols of the 1930s, it's a criminal offence to question the existence of a constitutional state. They are clever enough not to be there although they believe in much of that and they are campaigning on the issue of the age which is rocket fuel in many countries which is the issue of immigration. The difficulty for the mainstream liberal elites, as Ming rightly described many of us as we are, is that we in whatever the countries that we've been mentioning are not able to assuage the concerns that people have. And the irony of all ironies is where these messages are most powerful are in the areas where immigration is lowest. So the highest level of support for the AFD in Germany is in Saxony which doesn't have a problem of immigration as a problem of immigration, internal immigration within Germany. You could say the same for Brexit, communities in the north of England where levels of immigration is very low but if you ask what the motivations were of people voting for Brexit it was to kick the system and all that and all that and the number one issue was immigration. The point about the challenges of the populist extremes is that we need to understand the level of threat that we face which segues into the challenge of social media and such like which I don't want to overstate because I think on the one hand there is a democratisation of information and access to information. We think of things like Wikipedia which is a fantastic resource. It's excellent if you speak to and I'm glad that there are some young students of school age in the audience who I'm sure will attest to this of the ease of being able to research and work and learn it is at your fingertips. That is a great thing but what is going on in the darker recesses of social media of the dark net of what's happening with the internationalisation of political extremists working together and seeking to subvert election results, subvert referenda. It's not just about the near state actors in Russia. It's about the coalition of political extremes. If you look at the top 20 hashtags in the German election last year, seven out of 20 were generated from alt-right sites and that is the level of the involvement of the political extremes. Part of the challenge that we face is that many of us, to a certain extent, and I include myself in the police so I'm not trying to attack anybody as we are to an extent, we have been operating in an analogue political system using analogue structures and analogue thinking at a time when politics and democracy is now in the digital age. The intergenerational gulf between people involved in politics and a younger generation is larger than any gulf that there has been in recent times, if ever. That's a wake-up call for all of us older folks looking at the younger ones in the audience because we really need to get our head around what does that mean and this shift is only going to accelerate Moore's law tells us that. Angus, in the American elections, it wasn't young people on social media that the problem was. It was over six years using Facebook and believing everything that they read. That was not my analysis of the Knight Foundation's look to what happened in the American elections. I think with technology how we solve the problem of where it becomes echo chamberish and where it becomes aggressive and the only time I've ever had to go to the police on a social media issue was when it was an e-cigarette campaigner who threatened me. So it's very interesting how you can end up in situations but what I would say as well about technology, this also leads to why people and what Mona was saying about why the public are so disillusioned at the moment with politics as well as being interested. If you think that in the 80s, and this is an American statistic I read about yesterday, that over 50 per cent of the population in the 1980s either worked in a factory or in some clerical work come 2016, that was 15 per cent. The change that we see with technology and it's going to get greater. I don't think that as politicians we've got the answers to what the AI revolution, AI is just data science, people talk about AI, about the data revolution, of what that means for us and where that takes us. We are not giving the answers to these big questions that are out there and I think that that is also a responsibility to not just how we use technology but how technology is changing the world that we're living within. And you're right, we're going from an analogue to digital age, we're in this revolution that we're really only coming to terms, we're not really coming to terms with that actually because it's changing all the time. So I think these challenges that we face we have to have political answers and I'm not sure whether any of the political parties are really answering those key concerns and that leads to fearfulness as well because there's so much change. Sorry, I actually worry that they're feeding it, not just answering it but feeding it. I'm just going to say that power now lies in big data firms. People who have access to our data have huge power and we don't know the cost of that yet because technology and algorithm and that whole world has come to us really without too much of a struggle. It's come to us and made our lives easy in so many ways that many of us have embraced it and not thought about what the long term costs of that might be. Not just about looking at your phone too much and things like that, the influence on children etc, which are serious issues but I'm talking about more globally in terms of shifting paradigms. But I do think that just following on from the immigration thing, when I was chairing the Scotland Stronger in campaign, when I went to the meeting in London, they would always say to me, oh economics is the big thing and I would always say no it's not because people will vote with their hearts on this. You tell people, you know, big banks are saying this, people don't care, they just care about what's going to be in my pocket and people did to a large extent vote with their hearts. But I think that the whole issue of immigration in Europe is really about Europe's own soul searching, not just reduced to what does the EU stand for but actually it's becoming easier and easier to say to Europe. Because in some ways you see a lot of us think history is this linear process and that we're living in a world of technology and progress and advancements. But for a lot of people they're still living in the past, they haven't forgotten their history, they want to be in a position where they think I know where I belonged, I know what I believed, I knew what family life was, I knew what my community was. And even if for a lot of us we can say well actually that's not really what it was like at all, you're imagining this because you're playing into the hands of people who want to make you think like this, I don't think this is a problem that's going to go away. Even if immigration is reduced and characterised to get votes I think people have a lot of people including in the UK have some deep seated reservations about what does immigration mean for our long term future. And when they say immigration we don't really know who are the immigrants, the people who have been here for a year, the people who have been here for 40, 50 years, anyone who is not white. And I think it's these issues which we just don't discuss in public life and I think they do need to be because I think while we're not discussing them a lot of people are increasingly feeling unsettled. And when you feel unsettled then you become prey to all kinds of ideologies. I think I'll come back to you second but I want to bring in, there's three members of the audience caught my attention, there was one, yes, yes, the man in the front row with a beard and then the man at the back row. The man in the front row first. Oh yes, a microphone and that's even better, thank you. Isn't disillusionment with politics an inevitable consequence of having to pick the lesser of two evils in the first past the post system? All right, so voting systems could be partly to blame. Can you pass the microphone back and I'll just hear from John on the back row up here. Sorry. Yes, say more in. Yes, because you've got a microphone in your desk, we make your point. Thank you very much. I feel rather hesitant to trespass on this territory where we've had such remarkable contributions from all the panellists. I'd like to pick up on one thing in particular in his characteristically thoughtful contribution, Angus reminded of something which I think is so often forgotten. And he reminds us of the wider common good. It's not just about Britain, but it's about the wider European Union. And in reflecting on some of the rather distressing things that have happened in elections on the continent, we might not feel so secure in this country because we have an electoral system which doesn't tell the truth. And in fact, we might ask ourselves where these right wing elements are submerged as far as our parliament is concerned. But what I am concerned about is we talk about liberal democracies and social democracies, reminding ourselves that perhaps that the European Union is first and foremost about political and social justice, not about economics, it's just the engine. It belongs in the engine room, not on the bridge of the ship. But what we tend to forget, of course, is that those of us who are socially progressive tend ourselves to become part of the elite. And there is a tendency, in fact, I think, to forget those people who have been left behind and unwittingly would become part of an unforgettable new ruling class. And I wonder if that might not be some indication of a lot of work that needs to be done. And I think this echoes very much John Pease's contribution at the time that he was very concerned that politics didn't exist in an intellectual vacuum. Indeed. It was at the very point that Ming made. I'll just hear the chap at the very back first and then Ming. Thank you, Ken. I'm honoured to be a close colleague of Charlotte Barber, John Pease's daughter. And I turn the question around that several of you have posed for the panel that how could this remarkable man have worked so successfully and effectively across several branches of politics before the internet, Really before the internet existed at all. And before there were 10 different news channels, seven days a week, 24 hours a day with the same news with a different slant on it, there was no Twitter, there was no... And he influenced opinion, I think perhaps partly through his university work. He was obviously a top class constituency MP, and he achieved politics the way it was designed to happen. It has been grossly abused, especially by one gentleman who is now under a lot of fire this week about his Twitter and everything else he does wrong. But John Pease set an example, and I think we should look back at how he got it also right, this kind of democracy and his politics, and how the world is crumbling around us with all these appalling over, over use of the new technology that is making it so complicated. Thank you. Min, can I ask you... Fascinating thing is it's all in here, because not only was he highly talented, he was extraordinarily industrious. For example, he wrote his lectures out in Longhand, and the archive apparently to which there's much reference in this document is still available to look at. And it was that industry plus talent which made him so successful. But can I slightly take issue with this question of economics? If you are a steelworker and ever veiled who lost your job, or an auto worker in Detroit who lost your job, then there was very little, if age 50 say, there was very little to look forward to. And if you consider heavy industry, taking Scotland, steelworks, coal, shipbuilding, hard work, but there was a pride and a sense of status among those who took part in these industries. And if these are all swept away, then you get left with a whole generation, which feels that its purpose in life has been taken away from them. And that, I think, is a lot to do with the Trump phenomenon, because in the Rust Belt and across the Prairies and in the Deep South, there are large parts of that great country of America, with the biggest economy in the world, where poverty is self-evident at every step, and where the kind of traditional ways of earning a living and having status in the community have been swept away. And that comes back, I don't think everyone's used the word yet, globalisation, but we've mishandled globalisation, because globalisation had a wonderful capacity for doing good, but we did not understand that if you were giving effect to these technological changes which have been discussed, you had to find a way of ensuring that everyone came along together, that people weren't left behind. I think in a way you're answering the question, which is what I was trying to say, that when people feel left behind, it's very easy to then prey on people's fears. And so you're being left behind not because steel industry vanished or because shipping vanished, you're being left behind because other people have come and taken your jobs, or because you're not qualified enough and there's a whole liberal elite world out there. I mean, I don't even like that phrase, because I don't know who are these liberal elite. But anyway, there's a whole world out there that's just taking all the opportunities and you're being left behind. And I think working on people's fears is really potent. Politicians do it as well. But I think what we're seeing now is that it's becoming easier and quicker and faster to work on people's fears, because language is being translated and transported in thousands of miles and seconds. And so the same thing may have happened with the Trump election, but I know lots of people here in Middle England who are not left behind who voted Brexit, who are not, you know, I have had people say to me, how dare they tell us the shape of our bananas. That's why I voted Brexit. No, but I didn't know whether to laugh or question or take the woman seriously. But then I realised that this person was reflective of a whole neighbourhood of people who voted Brexit for those reasons. And you know how these, but not people who are left behind. They're well off, middle Englanders, not all English, but a lot of them. And they just didn't, they wanted their sovereignty. It goes back to what I was trying to say, which is about people having this nostalgia for something. People, or even misreading history, whether it's true or not, it's very easy to say to people that life was better when we didn't have this. No, it's the way I stick. I'm just going to bring Catherine as an MEP here, just to defend, because to bring it back to democracy, the expression that's often used about Europe is democratic deficit. And the very point, retaining sovereignty, questions about the EU, faceless bureaucrats imposing things like that, these are questions about democracy. Even Trump himself talked about draining the swamp at Washington. They focused on democratic representation in many ways. So isn't the lack of democracy in Europe part of the problem that people are actually addressing? But we've increased democracy in the European Union. And this is the deep sadness that you find about where we are. I mean, why was the European Union created? It was created to make sure that countries didn't fight each other. It's the most successful peace process that the world has ever known. It's not about bananas, it's about peace. And how did we, over 40 or whatever years, how did we not have that conversation in our country? It's all parties have been, you know, what they did was European ice failure and national ice success for all the time we've been a member of the European Union. And sadly, we are now where we are at because it took three words to sell that anti-message, take back control. Take back control of whatever you want to put in front of someone. And that's the tragedy we find today where we're going to leave our most important trading partner where so many people's jobs rely on that trade for we don't know what. I mean, we're seven months away from that 29th of March and still we don't know what the government wants. I mean, I cannot believe we're in this situation and I don't believe many lee voters also want to be in this situation. That's why I really now advocate a people's vote because you have to have something on what deal is going to be struck. Sorry? Another referendum. I do. I absolutely unequivocally think that we need to have a vote on whatever the deal is. Absolutely, unequivocally. Can I ask you this question? Can I ask this one? Would you like another vote on Scottish independence? Too difficult. I've thought about this, Ken, because I thought people who, you know, we're not talking about apples and pears. Here we're talking about two different things. What has happened with Brexit? And now we're seeing, I signed a letter which was saying we should legally challenge what the leave campaign and the money that's been used. We need to look at what is happening. Our government is about to take us to a cliff edge, take us into a situation that's in nobody's interests. You know, nobody, the poorest people in our country are about to be the hardest hit by this decision. And those, the well-off people in our country can walk away and not be touched or damaged by this. This is unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. Is it not democracy? Well, what could be more democratic than putting something as important as this to have voted? We already have. We voted for it. But it was a rotten campaign, both sides of the campaign. Angus, in greatest respect in this country, we didn't vote for it. In Scotland, 62 per cent voted to remain in the European Union. Angus. Can I just make a point about that? I think it's quite interesting to reflect on why that is. One of the reasons why I think that Scotland voted significantly and strongly to remain in Europe is firstly we had had a narrative over 30 years that Europe brought something positive. We could see it. We could see it with the roads that were being built in the Highlands. We could see it with the investment that there was in this country, point one. So unlike the rest of the UK where there was decades worth of daily mail and extreme Eurosceptic arguments against Europe, that was not the case here, observation one. Observation two is that I'm actually a hard place to think of a single person, a significant public standing in this country that was in favour of it. It doesn't matter what party you were in. Across the political divides, we had overwhelming support for remaining in the European Union. As far as I'm aware, we only had one person actually elected on a Eurosceptic ticket on any level of governance in Scotland and then perhaps the odd parliamentarian who I can't even remember or name. So we had leadership which was making the case why membership of the European Union was important in Scotland. And we now have to ask ourselves, and this goes back to John Hume Robertson's point, of what do we do now. And I think we really, really have to think very carefully about where we are being dragged because whether you voted yes or whether you voted no in 2014, you will remember that if you were being persuaded to vote no, it was on the basis that if you voted yes, we would be outside the European Union. And what happened two years later, we are being pulled out of the European Union when we didn't vote for it. Now I'm sorry, that is not normal in a normal democratic country. And this poses a real challenge to those pro-Europeans, many of them in this room, who were not persuaded in 2014 about the case and that's fine. But we are now a few years down the road and we are facing one of the biggest challenges to our social and economic wellbeing and a challenge to our sense of democracy given that we voted to remain in the European Union. We were being promised, we could stay, do you remember this? We could be in Norway, do you remember that? We could be in Iceland. We were told all of these things and not even going on at length about £350 million a week for the NHS. The result was based on a lie and we voted to remain. So the question is, what now? Will we just accept it or not? I know that everyone is infatuated, we are all, we need to resolve these issues. Tonight's discussion is really about democracy, if I may put it that way, and maybe we won't resolve the Brexit one. Angus, I want you all, if I can, as a panel to think of your concluding remarks because the reception is waiting for us downstairs and I hope that will hurry up. Angus, why don't you think of one thing, we talk about democracy and you said that we didn't vote for it but the vote was a UK vote and I think you're suggesting that we should have a selective democracy. So we only accept the Scottish part of our UK vote. So I'm just asking you to come back on that issue and I have one last contribution from the audience just here. John P Macintosh was a very independent minded individual and I'd just like to ask about what his view was in Parliament of the views of the whips. We talked about the tyranny of the party but is there also an element of the tyranny of the whips? Because I think one thing that maybe putting younger people off getting into politics is that maybe they think their own view matters but actually once they get into Parliament they're actually told there's not just one way to think but there's one way to vote including on critical issues Brexit amongst them. So I just wanted to ask the panel maybe could they imagine, would it be complete carnage if everybody had a completely free vote on everything? I'm interested to hear that because I think we've all had different dilemmas on that over the years. I wonder if we can just come back to the panel then just for perhaps some concluding thoughts. If I can start with you, Ming, just because if I may say so, I think the Liberals tend to be less whipped. Can you compute it that way than other parties? Am I right in saying that? Well, but if you become a party leader, and I can tell you how important the chief will becomes, so I have to make that concession. I think you could find more opportunities when there should be free votes, but I think if you're faced with a real choice, for example, the Labour Party's position, as I understand Mr Corbyn, is to nationalise the railways. Now that involves necessarily, you can't partly nationalise them or it involves a real binary choice, and on that basis then I find it very difficult to see how you can conduct parliamentary democracy without having a whip system. The problem, of course, is that it's the nature of the system which is often so offensive. I mean it's alleged all four of the black books in which they write down the peccadillos of their members, and if a difficult issue comes up they say, well, would your wife like to know about this? Or the fatal, absolutely fundamental one for the Conservative MPs was the chairman of your local association and his wife, like going to the Royal Garden Party every year, would they like to be told that they're not able to go this year because you've been rather unhelpful for the government? I mean, there's all kinds of sculduggery of that kind goes on, and I think that's what gives the whipping system as much of a bad reputation as it undoubtedly has. And some of the methods used are pretty awful, and indeed the system does not always stand up because of course the chairman of the Conservative Party had an agreement with Joe Swimstone who was on maternity leave that they'd be paired and what did he do with the chief whip twisted his arm when he went and he voted against the gentle man's and gentle woman's agreement that had been entered into. So I think it has a role but it should not be as deterministic of events as it is. Angus, come back to you. You were a group leader at Westminster as well and deputy party leader. Did you have to access the whip? Well, I've watched House of Cards as well and I'm aware of the stories about black books and all of that. I have never seen that in the real world. I don't doubt that it happened in the past. Certainly it didn't happen on my watch, but herein lies part of the challenge. If we are to say to all of those in the chamber who've not joined a political party that they should do so, and that is a good thing. And we then say to them it's really, really important that you take part in developing the policy of your party, whichever party that is. And then you slog every night of the week for months before an election to get your preferred candidate of your party elected on the policy that you have helped to determine. And then the proposition is that we should just allow them to vote anyway regardless of what the party's position is in the membership of the party determined. There's a tension in that. People are always free to stand for election if they want to be independently minded and not be subject to a whip. And it is up to the culture of different political parties about the extent to which people are allowed to vote against an issue because of ethical or moral questions. That's an established view across the political parties that there are matters of personal conscience. There are not the subject of a whip, point one, point two. Often if there is something that has a direct impact on one's constituency, that one can be freed from the whip. But the whip is there for a good reason. No doubt it has been abused. I'm not aware of that ever having happened while I was in charge of the SNP at Westminster. Perhaps it's easier not being in government, I concede. It's perhaps easier being an opposition party. There are a million reasons why you can vote no to something. It's not the same as having to vote yes to something. And I think we need to be grown up in acknowledging that. But I think at the same time we need to be honest about going back to my point about politics is still a team undertaking. And take that thought a little bit further if you were to say to all 11 footballers or all 15 rugby players or whichever your chosen sport is and just say go out on the field and play however you want, forget about tactics, the strategy is to win but just do your best. It's not really going to work very well. And so I'm trying to explain why things are the way that they are and if you want to encourage people to get involved in politics. I think the more important thing is that your parliamentarians do what the party members vote for and if you decide what a policy is that that is what you pursue in parliament. Now curiously that in itself is causing huge problems for the Labour Party at the present time. So the theory sounds great but in practice sometimes it doesn't work out so well. Catherine Hadescott, Jeremy Corbyn famously voted against Labour Party whip about 500 times. Didn't seem to damage his chances of becoming leader, are there? Well I think that's clearly Jeremy's business not mine. I was the whip of the European Parliamentary Labour Party and I have to say maybe adopting the way that we approached how we whip people would be an example I think for us all where there was more flexibility than certainly the kind of stories you hear from Westminster. But I do think there is that balance you have to have when people do have different opinions how you try and bring that together. We have had this at the moment over a debate on copyright reform just now in the European Parliament and I'm leading on but there's different viewpoints. How do we come together? And this comes back to this about tolerance. I find just now that people are not tolerant if you have a different perspective or a different viewpoint and it becomes this tension that then you don't have that solidarity that you should have as a group. When those tensions exist and sadly at the moment I see that happening more and more. You talked about elections in Sweden next year there's European Parliament elections and my fearfulness in the European Parliament is you'll have more extremes elected. It'll be more difficult to get consensual decisions in a Parliament where consensus is everything and I think it'll be harder to see that worth that you have at a European level if we don't get people who can work together. I'm going back to JP Mackay. That's what he could do. He could bring people together and he did break the whip on many occasions himself but that didn't harm his reputation. It enhanced it when he believed in something he did what was right and that's what we need is more people like him in politics today. So Mona, as the only one not having to follow any whip here. I know Ming has got a good example once he's created one but does the answer lie then in improving social media, in rerunning the referendum on Europe, in enforcing or loosening the whip in Parliament? I was just thinking as an academic it's the one phrase you never use. Can I use the whip? I think you'd get sacked if you wanted to say that. I do think though just going back to I'm just saying 62% was simply not high enough to make such a conclusive case in my opinion. And so therefore I think we do need to go back to think there is something that's happening in the UK as a whole that I don't think any of the parties has really got to grips with apart from those who want to use what has happened and what is happening with Brexit as a tool for enormous change but at the cost of other society, other people. And I also think that in some ways what we're facing now is not just a kind of toxic rhetoric on various sides but actually when people say that we need to debate this, we need to discuss this, before the debate has even started people have chosen sides, people have called each other names, people have said you're against this, you're against that. And I think a lot of people including a lot of politicians are actually quite nervous about being part of that debate. So if our politicians themselves are nervous about being part of that debate, where is our democracy going to go? We've talked a lot about the mechanics of democracy today here. For those of us who aren't politicians, we're not fair with how that really works. But we do know as a wider public what you hear can often be sound bites about things. And if we are not getting to grip with the biggest issue that we're facing in terms of reason debate which is not necessarily about a second referendum, which is not necessarily about decrying everything that's happening but actually thinking this is a result that seemingly most people have taken on board because one thing that's really challenging for me is why isn't there a more robust counter narrative to the Brexit? You know, we have a lot of politicians who are saying that there are remainers but we don't have a robust counter narrative that can challenge it. So what has happened to create this almost chasm and it's a moral decision. In the end, it's not a political decision. All these decisions are moral decisions. Thank you. I'm going to end. I'm actually going to let Ming have the last word. A sobering reminder of democracy. In 2010, the Little Democrat manifesto pledged that there would be no increase in tuition fees. And I stood on the steps of the student union at St Andrew's University of which I happened to be the chancellor. We've had a very distinguished rector, if I may say so. Doctor, as a result, to add to her many other distinctions. And I signed the pledge. I signed the pledge because we were told it was in the manifesto. It was absolutely essential that this was going to ensure that we'd sweep up student votes all over the United Kingdom. And of course, you all know what happened. In the end, people voted three different ways, voted four against and abstained. And it was a clear illustration of what Angus has been pointing to, which is if you stand on a platform and you make a pledge of that kind and you don't fulfil it, then you are deeply, deeply damaged. And the truth is that thereafter, so far as Nick Clegg and the Liberal contribution to the coalition government was concerned, it was all seen through this prism of a broken promise. You break your promises. People take revenge is perhaps too strong a word, but they take the opportunity to remind you that you've done so and children have done so. And that's one of the reasons why the Liberal Democrats remain in the doldrums at the moment. So democracy is liberal, but it's also brutal. If I may say so, can I just say... That's a very good motto for the scene. Can I thank you very much? I'd like to ask you to join me, actually, in thanking our fantastic panel here. Baron Campbell of Pittenweem, Catherine Steylor MEP, Professor... Doctor Steylor. Doctor Catherine Steylor MEP, Professor Moris Ddickey and Angus Robertson. I believe we can now all, if you wish to, now adjourn to join Charlotte, Ian, Peter and Susan and our hosts in the reception downstairs to again look at the life and legacy of John P McIntosh. Thank you all very much for joining us this evening.