Leadership Quote by Margo MacDonald

Openness is rarely free; MacDonald treats it like a line item in the budget of democracy. The language is almost stubbornly plain - "passes and things" - a folksy shrug that refuses the high-drama vocabulary of threat and crisis. That casualness is the point. It drains oxygen from the security panic that so often follows any breach of a public institution, and it re-centers the building not as a fortress but as a civic commons.

The intent is defensive without being defensive-sounding: she frames the occasional unauthorized entry as an acceptable externality of accessibility. "Price you pay" is doing heavy rhetorical lifting. It concedes imperfection, which makes the argument feel honest, then turns that imperfection into a moral choice. If you want an "open place for people to come", you accept friction, mess, and risk - because the alternative is a politics that treats citizens as suspects.

The subtext is a warning against the mission creep of security: once you treat the building primarily as a site to protect, you start protecting it from the very public it is meant to serve. In the UK/Scottish political context of the late 20th and early 21st centuries - shaped by terrorism fears, rising surveillance, and the post-devolution symbolism of Holyrood as a "new" democratic space - her remark reads as an argument for institutional temperament. Not naive about breaches, but clear-eyed about what gets lost when the response is to lock the doors and call it governance.