Debate on the Address

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Tuesday 11th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP) [V]]

Feasgar math, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). He is a good Tory MP, I have to say, a fine man and a member of the International Trade Committee, which I chair. We are fortunate to have him on the Committee. His courtesy and dedication are almost second to none. I will not damage his political career too much by calling him a friend, but safe to say I hold him in very high regard indeed.

Before I go much further, I would like to pay tribute on a personal level to the Queen. As we know, she is an elderly lady who has suffered a recent bereavement. We feel great sympathy for her, as we would for anybody in that situation, but we were still very impressed with her efforts today and the way in which she delivered the Gracious Speech; she is truly a woman with a sense of duty. If my late Irish mother, Clare, was alive, I am sure that she would be talking much about what the Queen had achieved today. Incidentally, my mother believed in an Irish republic, a British monarchy, and an independent Scotland. Some people might find those contradictory positions, but my mother spoke five languages and she did not find much difficulty in working all that out, and if we think about it, it is not actually contradictory at all.

The speech today was made against the background of the pandemic. It is a difficult situation for many across the world. I would like to quickly mention a constituent of mine who was a missionary in Ecuador, Father Colin MacInnes, who tells me that if he can get vaccines, he can get people to deliver them in Ecuador. With the mention of Ecuador, I am reminded of the actions in neighbouring Colombia today. We all must condemn the human rights abuses against protestors in Colombia. I am told that police dressed as civilians recently killed about 37 indigenous people. I say this to those in power in Colombia and elsewhere who behave like that: we see you, and the world witnesses what is going on.

Freeports were mentioned in the speech. My Committee was told recently by Ministers that there would not be a Bill, and it now looks like there will be a Bill. The one thing we would love to know is what the GDP gain is from freeports. We know that the GDP upshot from Brexit is not good: the UK is forgoing 4.9%, and it has not put in place any deal that might make something up. Indeed, the deals that it does have in place bring in mere pennies compared with the multiples of pounds that have been lost by Brexit. I include in that, of course, the American deal and the Australian deal, which is only one 20th of the American deal. The American deal itself is about one 20th of the damage of Brexit, if not more.

On the wider points, I agree with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) on the problems for the hospitality industry and fishing, particularly shellfish exports. She made some fine points, but time does not allow me to go deeply into them.

The subject of voting ID is about something that has a 0.00007049% problem—I think that is the statistic. What the Government are addressing is not a problem. We know what it is about, and the Government should be honest: it is a denial of democracy to many people. The age-old right of the Englishman to go and vote from his cottage or castle, uninterrupted by a bureaucrat—not from Brussels but from London—demanding to see his photographic ID is about to change. That is an awful curtailing of the liberty of the Englishman. Fortunately, it is not going to happen in Scotland, because we are soon to be independent. Of course, that is the biggest backdrop of the speech today.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) mentioned, the statistics for the SNP were truly remarkable in this election: 48% of the first-past-the-post vote. That is something that has not been achieved in more than 50 years—longer, in fact: such a victory at a general election has not been achieved since 1966. The SNP got 85% of the seats, which had never been achieved in the United Kingdom. We won the first past the post, and we also won the list. The three parties of independence—the SNP, the Greens and Alba—beat Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. The combined vote from the two—for those who disagree with it—was 2,685,805, versus 2,657,698, so the independence side won the election in just about every count.

Tories will dispute that. Some Scottish Tories dispute the facts and present all sorts of specious arguments against them. Well, those spurious arguments can be dealt with in one way: the word is “referendum”. Let’s have it. Let’s see how it gets on. Why would they be hiding from the people? Let’s have the referendum, and let’s see what the people of Scotland want.

I am reminded of the tweet by the leader of the Scottish Tories, the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), who said to voters on the eve of the poll:

“Just a few hours left to show the SNP's indyref2 plan the red card.”

He was making an allusion, of course, to the fact that he is a football referee. Well, the red card was actually shown to the Tories, who got 22% to 23% of the poll. They are on a hiding to nothing, and the Scottish people are coming more and more towards independence.

I noticed that in The Daily Telegraph—not a paper that I pick up very often, I admit, but it came my way —Vernon Bogdanor had an article arguing for going different ways depending on a referendum result. Perhaps he was referring to the 2016 referendum, when Scots voted to remain in the European Union. I wear the lapel badge of Scotland and the European Union, not as a symbol of the past but a symbol of the future and what is yet to come. I am grateful for Vernon Bogdanor’s support, because he clearly means that Scotland should no longer be part of the United Kingdom, and that is the way things are going. We voted to stay in the European Union, and we were promised in 2014 that if we stayed in the UK, that would happen—we would stay in the European Union. Scotland is very much a European nation, and that is where we will find ourselves.

The health response to covid has been used as a reason why the Scottish Government cannot move towards independence. Well, we have had a general election in Scotland. We have also seen in the last week the UK Government managing to send gunboats to the Channel Islands at the height of a pandemic, so a lot of things can happen at the moment.

The Scottish Government’s health response will likely be over this autumn. We cannot allow the economic response to be shaped by Tories from Westminster that we do not vote for, who turn our society in ways we do not want. We are dealing with economic extremists when we talk about the Government at Westminster. They are extreme in everything they do, and in the light of European actions and movement, they are particularly extreme. There is nobody else like them in all of Europe. We can see that from their voter ID policy, which they are borrowing from the crazies in America, and they should stop doing that.

One way or the other, we will have our independence. We will either have it in a referendum or, if that is blocked, we will have it in an election, either in 2026 or in one contrived before that. The Scottish people will speak at the ballot box, and they will vote for independence. It would be better if the UK Government were to behave nobly before that, because afterwards we do not want to see them embarrassed; we want to see them doing the right thing.

Finally, my cousin wanted to go and live in Italy but realised that she cannot because she is not fortunate enough to have an Irish mother, as I have. She said that the answer was independence before I could say it. People are telling me about independence before SNP politicians can, and that is how Scotland is changing.