Hansard

Absolutely. I have written and spoken about that subject, so I think that Mr Purvis's intervention is an irrelevancy. He may have been attempting to make a party-political point, but I am addressing proposals that would have a fundamental effect on the law of Scotland. I fully support the position of Ms McNeill and the Justice 1 Committee and I have no doubt that the minister will be sympathetic to it. We can by all means discuss the proposals in a wider context, but Mr Purvis's point is a side issue.

Society—both in Scotland and in the European Union—has become much more complicated. People have flats in Benidorm and villas in Tuscany; they move to Frankfurt to work; sadly, they die abroad; divorces happen and people marry people from other countries. Many of those developments are good and we should support them. They make the law more complicated, but I believe that our legal system is perfectly capable of addressing such matters because it has always been able to address complicated situations.

As someone who has dealt with numerous matrimonial cases—although not in the same context as my colleague, Stewart Stevenson—I know that there are devices, such as the Hague convention, for addressing situations in which disputes arise over which jurisdiction is responsible for, for example, the domicile of a child. Such cases are often complicated and that is an area of the law that requires to be refined because sometimes different interpretations are made in different jurisdictions. Measures exist to allow individual nations' to interpret laws in their own way. Matters such as how a property that is owned in Tuscany or Benidorm should be dealt with can be addressed in the context of the current Scottish legal system. Developments are afoot in the EU, but our legal system is capable of recognising that.

Turning to broader matters for a moment, I say to Mr Purvis that one reason why I support further progress in the EU is so that we have a bulwark against the United States. That said, there are legal differences even within the USA—the state of Louisiana operates differently from the state of Alaska and the set-up in the state of Texas is different from that in the state of Massachusetts—but the system manages to operate.

There is no need for the EU to dragoon us into going down its preferred route. There are many apocryphal tales that would bring the EU into contempt, such as those to do with the banning of bagpipes or the placing of restrictions on haggis, most of which are not true. Many of us who support the ethos of the institution must argue against the proposals in the green papers because they are fundamentally wrong. Some areas of law are complicated, but the lawyers in our legal system are adequately trained to deal with them.

We should therefore go down the European Union route that the Government and peoples of Finland support, which is the fields-of-responsibility route. For some areas of the law, it is appropriate that we come together on a broader European Union basis, but other matters need to be addressed on a more regional or geographic-area basis—whether that involves an area such as Scandinavia or a part of the British isles. Some matters should be decided by individual nation states; the subjects of the debate fall into that category.

Scotland has distinctive matrimonial law. That is why we have the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006. We also have distinctive law on succession. That is why we have introduced legislation on that and why we consider the Scottish Law Commission's views on a variety of such matters. There is no need for the European Union to impose or impinge upon us; we have shown that we are capable of working with other jurisdictions, whether in terms of the Hague, Warsaw or other conventions. The European Commission should leave Scotland well alone.