Covid-19: Future UK-EU Relationship

Andrew Griffith Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow so many of my colleagues, including my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow), but that is as nothing compared with my enormous pleasure at seeing the empty Labour Benches, which is the perfect visual metaphor for the party’s absence of a policy on Europe.

Let me turn to the motion and talk about the economy. This week, the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that covid-19 could, and probably will, cause the biggest slump in the UK economy for 300 years. In these difficult times, we need to provide business with as much certainty as possible and do everything we can to help the Scottish economy bounce back after the effects of the pandemic. That includes the enormous generosity of the UK Exchequer, which has stretched to largesse of £13 billion across the job retention scheme, bounce-back loans, kick-start, the VAT cut and eat out to help out, funded by the most successful economic union in history.

But more than anything else, Scotland needs an economy that is confident and outward looking. Although I personally have no doubts about the individual commitment of SNP Members to parliamentary democracy, it is a matter of great concern that the activists behind the anti-English, xenophobic and illegal demonstrations say that they took their inspiration from senior SNP figures.

The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) himself has been reported as having tweeted an image, with an expletive, to the effect that Scotland was shut and that visitors should perform a less polite version of going away. He has slunk away from the debate; perhaps the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) will tell us the truth about whether any of those involved in setting up those illegal roadblocks were members of his party. Will he give the House a commitment that, if that does turn out to be the case, anyone involved will be expelled?

As a direct result of the SNP’s delay in condemning that behaviour at the border, businesses in the tourism sector, one of the largest parts of the Scottish economy, are receiving cancellations of bookings over concerns about whether Scotland will be open and welcoming to them. The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber has returned to his place, but I have to say that, at a time when nationalism globally is on the rise, that is not a good look for his party at all. SNP Members claim to be worried about adding to the costs of covid-19, but they themselves are compounding the damage to the Scottish economy.

SNP Members talk about a power grab from Edinburgh to London. I have much sympathy for the position of a people feeling disenfranchised by decisions taken in a capital hundreds of miles away, but that is why I celebrate the 2016 referendum verdict and am keen to put it into practice with as much haste as possible. Powers held today in Brussels, over which the right hon. Member has no influence, are being returned to Westminster and to the devolved Assembly. Scotland will have over 100 additional powers that it does not currently enjoy. Talk about an erosion of the powers of the Scottish Parliament is fallacious given that that Parliament did not exist until 1999. and our membership of the European Union far predates that.

It is not too late. It is never too late for the SNP to turn around, to be on the side of democracy and to join us on the Government side of the House, seizing back our independence, seizing back control and making a success of global Britain in the world.