Meeting of the Parliament 15 November 2018
That was not a Government statement from a serious minister. It was a cocktail of contrived grievance from someone who, even two years on, has never accommodated himself to the democratic will of the British people that we leave the European Union. I voted remain, too, but the difference between Mike Russell and me is that I respect the results of referendums and he does not. Unlike some, I was not surprised by yesterday’s events. I always thought that the Prime Minister would get a deal with Brussels. I have never advocated a no-deal Brexit and I have never thought that that would be our fate.
None of us knows whether yesterday’s draft withdrawal agreement will survive intact. Getting a deal through a fractious House of Commons was always going to be more difficult than getting a deal with Brussels, and that task has not been made any easier by the sad and unnecessary Cabinet resignations that we have witnessed this morning. The deal is not perfect. It may or may not survive. With regard to key elements of the deal, I would reserve judgment. What I support, and this is what the Cabinet decided yesterday, is that it should now be subject to intense parliamentary and external scrutiny.
I do not rush to judgment, neither to celebrate every clause of the agreement’s 585 pages nor to condemn it out of hand, as the minister just sought to do.
I want to ask the cabinet secretary about differentiated deals. He wants a deal so differentiated that Scotland would remain in the European single market and customs union, even while the rest of Great Britain withdraws from both. Is it not the case that he wants that for the very reason that I am resolutely against it: namely, that it would destroy the integrity of the United Kingdom, which Scotland voted to remain part of in 2014? Does he not accept that the draft withdrawal agreement published yesterday contemplates nothing of that sort? Its detailed, lengthy and—yes—complex provisions on Northern Ireland are miles away from the Scottish National Party’s disastrous proposals for an altogether different sort of Brexit.