Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 30 December 2020
I will be clear at the outset: the European Union (Future Relationship) Bill is a bad deal for Scotland, and I think that not even many of the people who voted leave on 23 June 2016 voted for this. Even on the Brexiteers’ own terms, under this agreement, people will not take back control; they will lose it. It does not mean more democracy, or more transparency, but less.
Boris Johnson promised that the UK will “prosper mightily”, even with a no-deal Brexit, but the stark assessment of the Government that he leads flatly contradicts that. His Government now says that national income per head will be 5 per cent lower than it would have been had we remained in the EU and that we will be poorer. That is what the Johnson Government itself estimates, and that is an average. The distribution of that drop in income will not be evenly spread. I claim no special insight, but I predict that it will be the poorest who will be hit the hardest. I hope that I am wrong, but that is what experience teaches us.
For businesses and workers—even entire industries—in just over a day’s time there will be new barriers, new frictions, bundles of new paperwork and new costs that will be damaging. It is a measure of the irresponsibility of the Johnson Government that it is prepared to leave businesses and working people barely a week to adjust to those significant complexities and new arrangements. A week! That is irresponsible government under any circumstances, but in the circumstances of the biggest economic recession for 300 years and in the middle of an economic shock and rising unemployment caused by a global pandemic it is an abdication of responsibility without modern parallel.