Meeting of the Parliament 23 February 2023
I will not. I have very little time.
Otherwise, there will be two separate statute books, with completely different interpretive principles and case law.
In addition, the so-called dangers of the bill have, in my view, been overplayed. The UK Government has repeated its commitment across a number of sectors, including those of our international obligations, employment rights and environmental protections.
In contrast, the opportunities for the Scottish Government have been downplayed. It is Scottish Government policy to keep pace with EU law and the bill facilitates that. It allows the Scottish Government to maintain alignment with EU law. The Scottish Government can now choose to adopt any EU laws that it sees fit as either primary or secondary legislation. To that end, I understand that UK Government officials have offered to help the Scottish Government with the task of identifying which retained EU law is devolved or reserved. I hope that the cabinet secretary will take up that offer, because Scotland is of course best served when our two Governments work together.
We retain some misgivings with regard to the timeframes in the bill, but we also believe that the Scottish Parliament should give consent to the bill. It offers Scotland an opportunity to remove outdated EU law that is no longer right for us and replace it with Scotland-specific legislation. For those reasons, we will vote against the motion.
14:48