Hansard

If Brian Whittle has been paying attention, he should be well aware that the Australia and New Zealand deals were very bad for Scottish agribusiness. If we look at the Brexit deal, we see that we should be back as part of the European Union and having free trade as a consequence of that. We are very much in favour of that.

We will take each trade deal on its merits. Trade deals, as Brian Whittle should know, are a balance of the offensive and defensive. If we think that Scottish business is being harmed by the UK Government rushing headlong into random trade deals, we will vote for Scottish interests.

Willie Rennie and Daniel Johnson make the point that we should engage with the UK Government, and I have made it very clear that we have done so. In fact, this afternoon, we had a constructive conversation with Daniel Johnson’s namesake, Lord Johnson, about our working together to secure an investment, but that does not take away from the fact that the UK Government has dug its heels in on the point and is denying the playing out of the devolution settlement through the powers of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish ministers. If Willie Rennie needed any more examples of the Conservative Party’s unwillingness to engage on the process, the fact that Jamie Halcro Johnston would not take a single intervention from anybody in the chamber speaks to that.

To reflect on a point that Jamie Halcro Johnston made, it is not about Brussels. When we were in the European Union, those powers were not held in Brussels in the way that they are being held at Westminster at the moment. EU procurement directives were implemented by Scottish ministers and not by the European Union. That is the difference. When we were part of the European Union, the powers were here; now that we are not in the European Union, the UK Government has taken those powers back and it is therefore encroaching on devolved areas, such as procurement.

In conclusion, we are not happy that we are in this situation, but I hope that everyone on this side of the chamber will agree that devolution must be protected and that it is important that we protect it when there is an attack from the UK Government. This is one of the unfortunately increasing number of examples where that is the case.