Meeting of the Parliament 21 March 2018
I will have to disappoint Mr Findlay and go on for just a little more than a minute.
I think that, fundamentally, Parliament has done its job in this process—a process that we did not wish to face and one that is, inevitably, imperfect.
We should not be here at the stage 3 debate rehashing debates about competence or about whether the bill is an emergency bill. We have already agreed to the emergency procedure, and we have already agreed to the general principles. Parliament has decided that the bill should be considered. Frankly, if its competence is ultimately challenged, I want the Scottish Government to defend the bill robustly once we have passed it.
Instead of rehashing that debate, let us recognise the work that has been done since the introduction of the bill. Under extraordinary time pressures, we have maximised committee scrutiny as much as humanly possible. We have maximised the chamber debating time with innovations to the emergency procedure. We have shifted the balance in the bill, taking some power that would have gone to Government and ensuring that it goes to Parliament instead, and we have made significant changes to the contents of the bill.
Both Mr Kelly and the minister are right that that could not have been done without the support of a great many people—the committee clerks, the legislation team and a great many others, including our own teams in our party groups. I know that, across the parties, our teams have worked hard not just to put forward our own propositions but to try to achieve consensus.
Indeed, some of the most important changes that we have achieved in the bill have been done by cross-party agreement. That is the way that this Parliament was supposed to work in the first place. We were never built to be a Parliament like the bear pit of the House of Commons, with two sides opposing each other, two swords’ lengths apart. This Parliament was always supposed to be about trying to cultivate some cross-party agreement. We often fail on that, and our politics often falls back into tribal lines. However, on this occasion, we have managed, where possible, to achieve agreement with the Government on some significant issues of policy, and to push the Government beyond its comfort zone on a few points.
As a result, serious regulation-making powers in the bill have been restricted, both in timescale and in scope, and major improvements have been made in relation to environmental principles, social rights, scrutiny and challenge. Those not only improve the bill as introduced, but they clearly improve on the UK legislation that ultimately we would have been forced to accept—if not for the introduction of the continuity bill, we would have given the UK Government a pretext to impose the UK legislation on us without legislative consent.
Over the months and years to come, we will no doubt disagree on many issues. We will disagree when Conservatives such as Adam Tomkins, who voted remain because he knew the damage that the Brexit crisis will cause, chant “Take back control!” We will disagree with some Labour members of the Scottish Parliament, who promise a deal that will secure the exact same benefits of membership of the single market but who are not willing to commit to freedom of movement as one of those fundamentally important benefits of being in the single market. I will disagree with those in the Scottish National Party, for example, who have never supported international agreement on the control of fish stocks and who seek to achieve changes in that regard that I will not be able to support.
There will be a great deal on which we disagree, and—fundamentally—I will disagree with those who say that we should give up the ghost and give up the principled position for which the clear majority of people in Scotland voted. We should respect how they voted. We should oppose Brexit. We will disagree on that, too.
However, I am delighted that there has been enough of a measure of agreement on changes that were necessary to the bill. It is a better bill that we will pass than the one that was introduced, and I will vote for it.
18:45