Meeting of the Parliament 17 March 2015
I welcome the debate and I thank Humza Yousaf—or, as I like to call him, the minister—for allowing Parliament this opportunity.
The motion and the amendments are somewhat revealing. The Labour amendment, which I am happy to confirm that we will support, sets out fairly the broad benefits as well as some of the specific areas of strength. It also rightly identifies the opportunities to improve things—not least through the Smith commission proposals.
The SNP motion has much of the same, and I very much welcome the conciliatory and reasonable tone that the minister adopted in his opening remarks, despite some of the siren voices on his back benches that perhaps encouraged him to do otherwise. However, the motion could not resist the dog whistle to its party’s base at its end—a little like the Tories’ amendment.
Jamie McGrigor’s amendment achieves the twin feats of being factually incorrect and ideologically misguided. The UK Government does not demand treaty reform and an in/out referendum; that is a Tory Party demand. The Tories appear to be in a bind over UKIP and their long-standing internal divisions over Europe and as a result, despite Mr McGrigor’s reassurance, they seem to be hell-bent on driving the UK out of an economic, social and political union that has served us well for more than four decades. I agree that an in/out referendum is more meaningful than one that is based on the minutiae of a treaty change, but that policy is a sign of the weakness of the Tories and the Prime Minister. It is not a sign of strength nor, indeed, is it a sign of leadership.
As I said, the SNP motion is fine up to a point, but it lapses regrettably into playing the independence card towards the end. Let us be clear: the preferred option is not an in/out referendum. That route holds nothing for business or for safeguarding the hard-fought economic recovery that we are seeing, but if there is a referendum we will need all progressive voices to be united in support of keeping the UK, including Scotland, in the EU. Jamie McGrigor made one point in his speech with which I probably have some sympathy. Like him, I do not recall in the referendum campaign any suggestion of a double lock being offered to Orkney or Shetland in the event that Glasgow and areas of the central belt had dragged us out of the UK.