In 2004, Edwin Morgan wrote that Scots wanted their new parliament at the foot of Edinbrugh’s Royal Mile “to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.” What Scots did not want of their parliament, however, was a “nest of fearties.” Ultimately, continued Morgan, “the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want.”

Today, ‘it wizny me’ appears baked into Holyrood’s vocabulary. The Scottish Parliament presides over a litany of botched infrastructure projects, bungled schemes and broken promises. Alistair Grey’s plea to ‘work as if in the early days of a better nation’ has fallen on deaf ears as politicians accept, rather than push the boundaries of, Scotland’s current constitutional settlement.