Milly Hean
Recently, my colleague Tom Gillingham built a game which instantly captivated the team: ‘Guess the MSP’. Initially designed as an office experiment to test our knowledge of the new cohort of Holyrood politicians, the multiple-choice quiz has now been played more than 8,800 times. And what it has revealed is more uncomfortable than a few gaps in name recognition.
You might be forgiven for not recognising all 64 new parliamentarians, many of whom had near-zero public profiles before May. But the game also exposed how little visibility some long-serving incumbents have built. Jackie Dunbar has represented Aberdeen Donside since 2021. Marie McNair has served Clydebank and Milngavie for the same period. Liam Kerr and Finlay Carson have sat in the chamber since 2016. The puzzle isn’t that voters don’t know the newcomers. It’s a parliament that has made itself easy to disappear in.
Look at the contribution data and the picture becomes clearer. A Daily Express analysis of activity in 2025 placed three re-elected SNP MSPs near the bottom of the table: Colin Beattie (Midlothian North) with 71 contributions, David Torrance (Kirkcaldy) with 68, and Collette Stevenson (East Kilbride) with 62. Nicola Sturgeon managed just 18 in her final year, though by then she had announced her departure and was effectively a lame-duck backbencher. Compare any of those figures with Conservative MSP Stephen Kerr’s table-topping 2,065 and the gap stops looking like personal style and starts looking like a question about acceptable standards of engagement.
This lack of activity might be overlooked for MSPs winding down for a departure from politics, but returning backbenchers must face more scrutiny over their effectiveness in parliament – especially when new faces absorb the attention.
This is more than an issue of so-called individual “laziness”. It is an issue of the institutional culture at Holyrood and a mirror image of a national sense of political listlessness.
The “scunner factor” was arguably overused during the Holyrood campaign but it is an accurate depiction of the mood leading up to 7 May. Voter turnout was down, asexpected, to 53.2%, just over 10 points lower than 2021, when the record turnoutwas buoyed by a high number of postal votes due to the pandemic. And the institution of Holyrood has done little over recent years to interrupt this sense of disengagement from the levers of national decision-making.
Some of the structural conditions that enable low accountability are well-established: regional list members elected by party, not by name, with no single constituency to whom they must answer for their record; a parliament that already sits fewer days and shorter hours than Westminster; and remote voting that means the public has no reliable way of knowing whether their £74,507-a-year MSP even turned up in person. Hiding requires remarkably little effort.
Many of these measures were designed to make Holyrood a fairer place to work, more family-friendly and more accessible than Westminster. However, as James Mitchell, a professor of public policy at the University of Edinburgh, has argued, adaptations such as remote voting should be allowed as an exception for those with remote constituencies or scheduling conflicts. Used as the norm, they erode the cross-party encounters and robust debate that devolution was supposed to enable.
Holyrood’s new presiding officer, Kenny Gibson, has acknowledged the problem directly, stating “the status quo is not an option” and calling for “renewal” to fulfil the expectations of effective collaboration envisaged before devolution.
His early reforms to parliamentary proceedings are meaningful signals: an extra FMQs session for backbenchers and an end to the pre-publication of FMQs, more general questions, and more interventions without penalties on speaking time. The question is whether these changes produce real scrutiny or simply give ministers more polished ways to deflect. Rules and timetables matter, but Gibson cannot legislate a will to engage. That has to come from MSPs themselves – and from a public, and a press, willing to keep score.
There are reasons for cautious optimism. This parliament, governed by an SNP minority, is arguably the most diverse in Holyrood history, with fragmentation set to make cross-party collaboration a necessity to get work done.
While the poor attendance of MSPs who quietly wound down their political careers at the end of the last term may have escaped widespread public criticism, there should be no excuses for a laid-back approach to this parliamentary term.
A new cohort, bright-eyed and arriving in numbers, has a chance to do something different: shape Holyrood into the mature, effective and trusted institution its founding generation imagined. One that younger Scots might one day feel inspired to work in and one where we don’t need a game to swot up on its members.
You can play ‘Guess the MSP’ here: https://mspgame2026.netlify.app/