Meeting of the Parliament 21 March 2018
Of course I accept that. That is a matter of fact, as Mr Swinney well knows, but there is more than one legal opinion about this. There is also the legal opinion of the Presiding Officer. There are also the points that lawyers who have scrutinised the bill during its rushed, reckless passage through the Parliament have identified, including those that I have just mentioned. The only place where the matter can be authoritatively determined is the United Kingdom Supreme Court. Any Lord Advocate who was really confident about his opinion that these provisions are within competence would have no hesitation but to refer them to the Supreme Court for a ruling.
The bill is known informally as the continuity bill, but its real purpose, which has been exposed time and again during the rushed proceedings, is not continuity; its real purpose is to sow the seeds of division within the United Kingdom. Its real purpose is to create legal chaos and legal confusion. That was revealed even in the Government’s policy memorandum accompanying the bill, paragraph 20 of which states that the bill will “add to the complexity” of Brexit. In the same paragraph, it says that the bill will “present serious logistical challenges”. That is what the Scottish National Party has been about in these proceedings and that is why we have resisted the bill every step of the way.
In addition, there is the extraordinary power grab in section 13—a provision that will enable Scottish ministers to act in all manner of ways without adequate parliamentary scrutiny, notwithstanding the valiant attempts of members across the chamber to improve an odious provision. It will make Scotland a rule-taker and bound by a European Union of which we will cease to be a part. That cannot be consistent with democracy, or with the rights and interests of this Parliament.
What we should have been doing, instead of debating this unnecessary, unwanted and unwelcome legislation, is thinking hard about how we will negotiate, navigate and enforce the common frameworks that the minister and I—and everybody in this Parliament—agree should be agreed and not imposed, as we move into the post-Brexit scenario.
What we should have been doing, instead of debating this reckless legislation in this reckless way, is figuring out how we are going to make the best of the post-Brexit landscape, and seizing the opportunities that Brexit presents us with. How are we going to design an agricultural support mechanism that suits the interests of farmers in Scotland? What are we going to do to take forward environmental protection post-Brexit? At UK level, what are we going to do to ensure that we have appropriate industrial policy with appropriate state aids and public procurement rules?
For the past 46 years we have not been able to debate any of those questions anywhere in the United Kingdom, because that has been done for us by the European Union. Brexit means that we take back control of those issues. [Interruption.] Those are the issues that we should have been debating, instead of this reckless and unnecessary legislation.