Meeting of the Parliament 29 November 2022
Now it is Mr Fergus Ewing who is inventing words and putting them in Ed Davey’s mouth. Ed Davey is very pro-European. He has made the case for a closer relationship with the European Union. We will always be pro-European. I remember fighting the EU referendum campaign in 2016, when the SNP was nowhere to be seen. The SNP spent more on the Shetland by-election than it spent on a campaign to keep our country in the European Union. I will not take lessons from the SNP about how pro-European we are.
Why is the UK Government introducing legislation that will make life harder for businesses? Why does it want to make it harder for our businesses to trade with businesses in France, Germany and Spain? Every divergence in standards means that businesses face more red tape in order to export to the EU. It is reckless to take an approach whereby we do not even know whether or not we are diverging.
That goes to the heart of the Conservative Party’s simplistic and inaccurate understanding of regulation. Businesses are attracted to the UK in part because of good regulations. Businesses need the comfort of a good regulatory system. They simply do not want the fantasy deregulatory agenda that lives only in the mind of Conservative members of Parliament. I would have hoped, after the events of Liz Truss’s premiership, for a little more wisdom and caution from the Government. Alas, no. The uncertainty is causing real anxieties.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has described the potential revocation of environmental laws by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as “an attack on nature” and has expressed particular concern about regulation of air and water quality and of prevention of pollution. Ruth Chambers, who is a senior fellow at Greener UK, has said that the UK Government is
“hurtling towards a deregulatory free-for-all where vital environmental protections are ripped up and public health is put at risk.”
The approach to employment law is the same: a host of rights including rights to holiday pay and agency workers’ rights could be downgraded or eliminated. The Institute for Public Policy Research has said that the cliff edge would create
“extraordinary uncertainty for businesses and workers”.
The same is true in many areas, including justice, data protection and protections for consumers.
I am not convinced that the bill is primarily a massive assault on devolution, but we do need a new way of working within the UK. Power is best exercised when it is shared effectively. In a federal UK we could chart a course together that would allow us to reflect our common interests and local needs. Rather than the minister in Whitehall always making the final decision, we should share those decisions.
During the pandemic we saw some of the benefits of devolution and joint decision making through the four-nations approach.