Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Committee

Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee 01 February 2024

01 Feb 2024 · S6 · Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee

Item of business

National Outcomes

Pete Wishart Watch on SPTV

That was a good part of what we looked at in our inquiry. Some of the disputes and fallouts between the Foreign Secretary and the cabinet secretary did, in fact, take place as we were conducting it. Almost concurrently, the Secretary of State for Scotland came to our committee to explain some of his concerns about what he saw as Scottish Government transgressions into what he told us are clearly reserved areas. The first point to make—which Alexander Stewart captured in some of his questions—is that the working arrangements on the ground are fantastic. There has been no complaint whatsoever by any party about how well officials are serving both the UK and Scottish Governments. I know that your committee has taken evidence from a number of the British embassies where the Scottish Government is internationally placed and where Scottish Development International works very effectively with Government officials. We went to Washington, where there is an exemplar of good and positive working arrangements; the Scottish Government has a pretty large mission in the US embassy. We have an ambassador, in Karen Clark, who understands and gets Scotland, who is personally very interested in what is happening here, and who makes a real effort to ensure that everybody is catered for and gets their place within the whole organisation. Washington is also helped because the Department for Business and Trade lead is a Scot who takes a real interest in ensuring that Scottish businesses, particularly, are well advertised across the United States and that support is given. That was all great—then we had a series of disputes and letters, and a number of deputations to our committee about what was considered to be some sort of dispute. The secretary of state got quite exercised about the whole issue of what he observed as Scottish Government ministers speaking about issues other than devolved areas and responsibilities of the Scottish Government. The secretary of state came to our committee with a list of what he considered to be transgressions. I will leave it up to this committee to decide whether they merited the response that was given in terms of a directive to UK missions that everything had to be recorded and that an official had to be present in all meetings between Scottish Government ministers and foreign delegations. For example, we were told that the Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, Europe and External Affairs, during a meeting with the French Minister of State for Europe, discussed the EU Erasmus scheme and the UK Turing scheme and said that “there was no alternative other than Scotland to be part of the EU again.” Most of the comments were about views around Brexit. Another comment was made at a trade event in Poland. Ivan McKee, who was a minister at that point, said that Brexit was a “mistake”. Mr Robertson, again, described Brexit as a “calamity”. Those are from the list that the secretary of state read out to us as transgressions. We offered no opinion about that in our report, but those were the problems and issues that he was keen to communicate to us. The cabinet secretary—he has probably told your committee very much the same—fully understands and respects that foreign affairs is an exclusively reserved matter. However, in the explanatory notes to the section in which it is reserved, there is an inclusion that says that the Scottish Government is free and at liberty to make its own arrangements internationally to communicate with international Governments. There is an expectation that such communication will be confined to devolved issues and devolved matters, but I do not know how to control conversation. My first thought would be, “What if you’re asked a direct question?” You could say, for example, that you are not going to answer that question because you do not have permission to do so, and so will not engage with all that. It is an unfortunate development, and it does not reflect anything that we observed in the working arrangements throughout the diplomatic network of the United Kingdom. As all of you do, we hope that it is resolved. If anything, the ante seems to have been upped with the statement from the Foreign Secretary that support might be withdrawn if there are any more examples of that. We captured the issue in our inquiry. We referred to the conversations that we had with the Secretary of State. In our annexes, we included correspondence from the cabinet secretary, and we heard from him directly about his experience with all that. Everybody was keen and working relationships were good, but the air war that is currently being conducted is perhaps not all that useful.

Search Hansard contributions

Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee 01 February 2024

In the same item of business