I THINK we can generally agree that this hasn't been a classic election, but there is at least one group who will be happy with how it has gone – the commercial lobbyists. That isn't healthy for democracy and it makes me very nervous.
Government is a process of managing vested interests. It's inevitable. Senior politicians exist in the orbit of lobbyists much more than of communities. Ministers have power and commerce always wants to influence it.
That is why election campaigns are usually so important. Imperfect as they are, those are the moments when politicians traditionally shift their focus almost wholly towards the interests of citizens. This is the moment when we get away from what government does and spend time asking what government is for.
I don't think that has happened this time and there are great dangers that come with it. The key issues for the public based on what they themselves are talking about are affordability and the cost of living for everyone, housing for the young and social care for the old – and, of course, public services generally.
This is not an election which has been marked by serious engagement with these issues. The party manifestos contained next to nothing about social care and for all the rhetoric, identifying what they are actually proposing to do about affordability is pretty difficult. I'll come back to housing in a minute.
What have we been talking about instead? This is what concerns me. We've spent an enormous amount of time talking about nuclear energy, tax cuts for oil corporations, AI, planning and supermarket economics.
No-one is going to pretend that this is what citizens are talking about themselves. These are all issues which are of interest primarily to big financial concerns and it makes this election look semi-divorced from ordinary people.
Why is this happening? You can't even begin to make a coherent case for why Scotland should build nuclear power stations but then you can do a web search for "former Labour politicians who are now lobbyists for or advisers to the nuclear industry" and it starts to make more sense.
If the public feel like politics is something that happens without reference to them or their lives, dangerous things happen
Likewise, as far as people are talking about AI, it certainly isn't in terms of "more data centres please" – yet Labour are heavily influenced by the Tony Blair Institute and that is in the pocket of big tech.
Why are the SNP still (utterly inexplicably) calling for tax cuts on the big oil companies who are raking in phenomenal windfall profits right now? Certainly not on behalf of the many households in this country struggling to pay their energy bills. We know who this benefits and it isn't even the oil workers in the North East.
What about housing? It all started so well. The SNP announced a National Housing Company to create a much-needed disruption in the housing market. Then, suddenly, that's not what it sounded like at all. Very quickly it just started to sound like the shopping list of the big housing corporations who made housing unaffordable in the first place.
And while I am unconvinced by either the effectiveness or the legality of John Swinney's supermarket price caps, they were at least a bold attempt to set out a stall on cost of living. That it took less than 48 hours of pressure from supermarkets to produce a U-turn is a worrying sign about who really has the power.
It is perfectly easy to put together a reasonable defence of some of this. Holyrood doesn't have the powers to be able to do anything desperately meaningful about affordability and, in the end, the job of a politician in an election is to get elected. If they can do that while keeping their heads down, perhaps we shouldn't blame them
But hearing these justifications is like hearing Labour insiders at Westminster talking like they've pulled off a major win by saving Keir Starmer's job. Well, perhaps on your own terms that is a success, but for the public it looks more like contempt. He isn't getting more popular…
If the public feel like politics is something that happens without reference to them or their lives, dangerous things happen. It is almost impossible to miss the antipathy towards this election – I haven't heard a single person say a single positive word about it in any conversation since it started.
Meanwhile, politicians will not be experiencing a lot of enthusiasm on the doorsteps and you can forgive them for hoping this will all be over soon so they can get back to the relative safety of Holyrood.
Unless we can make politics a conversation with and about citizens and unless we can stop big financial interests kicking our politics around, politics will continue to sound distant from and irrelevant to ordinary people
That's the worry. If our politics stays bunkered up in a parliament that many people feel is remote from them and then, the one time every five years they really turn their attention to citizens and communities, they do so in a half-hearted way, high-tailing it back to their bunker as soon as possible, no good will come from it.
It is hard to argue that politics is making itself relevant to ordinary people just now and in large part it is because democracy has become a conversation between political power and market power and the rest of us are just spectators.
Unless politicians are brave enough to recognise this and do something about it, the obvious direction of travel will be greater disillusion about democracy and rising public anger.
The alternative is to do some bold things. First, much more should be done to constrain the power of lobbyists. Far, far too much is done in secret. If what these firms are lobbying for is in the public interest, why can't they do it on camera in a committee room? If it's not in the public interest, why are they allowed to do it in secret?
Freedom of information should cover all public funding including that which goes to commercial interests. It is still public money and how it is used should never be opaque. There is a revolving door between government and big business – the civil servant in charge of Scotland's economy spent the past 10 years as Peter Mandelson's right-hand-man at his lobbying company. That revolving door should be welded shut.
The second thing we need to do is let citizens influence politics in between elections much more than they can now. That not only means decentralising this horrendously centralised country so power moves closer to communities (Scotland has the most centralised democracy in the developed world) but using participatory democracy much more effectively to help citizens better shape policy.
Unless we can make politics a conversation with and about citizens and unless we can stop big financial interests kicking our politics around, politics will continue to sound distant from and irrelevant to ordinary people. It is difficult to overstate how alarming it would be if that happens.
Frankly, this isn't good enough and �everyone knows it. I hope this is a turning point.