Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 22 December 2020
I will come to the wider politics in a moment, but I want to talk about the bill first. At the outset, I should say that I might be coming in at the end for the glory on this, but all the hard work on our side has been done by my colleagues Alex Rowley and Claudia Beamish, and I thank them both for all their efforts in getting the bill to where it has finally got to. I also thank and pay tribute to Michael Russell for his positive engagement with my colleagues and for his openness and transparency throughout. As he rightly noted, we got to a much more robust place in the end compared with where we were at the start of the process.
There are a couple of points that Parliament in the next session will need to reflect on in relation to some of its post-Brexit scrutiny. The Parliament recently had a wider debate on that in debating a Finance and Constitution Committee motion. There are issues to do with transparency, the role of committees in post-Brexit powers and how we scrutinise the keeping-pace powers. There are issues of scrutiny and transparency in relation to the role of the executive and the wider Government. We discussed all those issues in that debate, and I am sure that they will be debated even more in the next session of Parliament.
I should note that my colleague Claudia Beamish will be slightly disappointed that not all her amendments or suggestions were accepted, but I am sure that we will keep the proposals that were not accepted for another day.
I will not dwell on the wider politics for too long, because I know that members have been occupied for quite a long time today. However, I have to ask Mr Lockhart: where is the remorse? We should not be in this situation right now. I do not think that we should be in this situation at all with the mess of the Brexit process, which has caused constitutional paralysis in our country for the past four and a bit years. However, it is completely unacceptable and unforgivable for it to be happening now, at the height of a pandemic, when thousands of our fellow citizens have lost their lives and hundreds of thousands of people risk losing their livelihoods. Where is the remorse?