Fairness at Work and Power in Communities

Deidre Brock Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

In looking at the issue of power in our communities from a Scottish perspective, we cannot ignore this Government’s clear hostility to devolution in Scotland and the return of some powers to our country. They have clearly forgotten that it was devolution that revived any sort of Tory presence in Scotland after they lost all their seats there following the 1997 general election. Nevertheless, we hear that in 2020 the Prime Minister told a group of his MPs that the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament had been a “disaster” and a “mistake”. The Minister for Brexit Opportunities stated that he believed the constitution was vandalised with devolution and that the Tories must undo it. So I suppose it is no surprise that this programme for government includes more outright assaults on the devolved settlement. Take the ironically named Brexit freedoms Bill, which seeks to remove and restrict retained EU laws. This Bill, we are told, is to extend and apply across the UK, but many retained laws are incorporated into Acts of the Scottish Parliament. Many, indeed, focus on the standards this UK Government seem so determined to gut. Surely it should be for Holyrood to decide on their future, not this place and certainly not this Government.

The eternal quest of most Conservative Governments, the fabled bonfire of red tape, is promised so often but never really delivered. Indeed, we have seen the pile of red tape multiplied many times over by Brexit-created snarls, but the Prime Minister now promises a bonfire of retained EU legislation. That will see standards slump as the Tories rip away legislation that has protected Scottish interests for almost 50 years.

Brexiters have never shied away from hacking at workers’ rights, as we have heard from numerous hon. Members today. We in Scotland certainly do not trust this Government to maintain even our current standards in areas such as workers’ rights, food and the environment, and we have heard why from Conservative Members.

Remember, this is the Government who appointed the former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to the Board of Trade. Apparently, he once bragged that he was able to fast-track international trade deals because he is not sidetracked by details such as environmental standards and workers’ rights.

Devolution and the power it returns to our communities in Scotland are being further eaten away by this Government’s so-called levelling-up agenda. In January, the House of Lords Constitution Committee’s report on the plan said that the UK Government are simply ignoring devolution and the calls for greater transparency on funding decisions. The Scottish Government have no role in deciding how this funding is allocated, and so which projects might align with their priorities, in order to deliver maximum benefit. This runs completely counter to the principles of devolution. The fact it has been created by a Government of a political hue that we in Scotland have not supported since the 1950s, with priorities and values that we in Scotland do not embrace, illustrates again why the power to make all our own decisions is the way forward for our country.

What guarantees can the Minister give us that the Scottish Parliament will not be forced to amend retained EU law? The Scottish Government intend to stay as closely aligned to EU legislation as possible. What power do Scotland’s Government, Scotland’s Parliament and, ultimately, Scotland’s people have if those decisions are stripped from their hands and made by Westminster?

Why are the UK Government now concerned about retained EU law not having received full democratic scrutiny when they are certainly not bothered about, say, international trade deals returning to this Chamber to be considered by hon. Members before they are signed? That is another question on which I fear we will get no reply from the Dispatch Box.

We were also told that lost EU funding will be replaced with equal, if not greater, funds. Those, I am afraid, are just more fibs from the cast members of Vote Leave. The Scottish Government calculated that £183 million a year is needed to replace the different EU funding streams that Scotland had previously received. This should mean that Scotland receives £549 million over the next three years, but we are getting only £212 million through the shared prosperity fund—a 60% cut in real terms that leaves us with real fears for the future of numerous community groups across my constituency of Edinburgh North and Leith, and across Scotland.

A particularly alarming admission that I must mention is the lack of any replacement for one of the most valued EU-funded schemes in Scotland, the LEADER programme, which supports more than 900 projects across rural Scotland, including 400 initiatives for young people and disadvantaged groups. The shared prosperity fund does not replace it, and nor can we see obvious opportunities to access similar support. When questioned in the Scottish Parliament on the rationale for levelling-up fund priority groups, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said:

“The conclusion about whether funding has been distributed equitably will come at the end of the process.”

That is an extraordinary admission from a Minister. Surely allocations should be continuously reviewed, evaluated and then reported; I am pleased to hear that the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who is no longer in her place, agrees on that. Shortfalls in this funding will likely mean the end of many organisations and services that have provided vital services to communities for years or even decades, damaging even further the fabric of our society. In the midst of a cost of living crisis and the biggest fall in living standards in recent memory, the Government’s flagship policy to rebalance power and resources swerves Scotland’s elected Parliament and leaves our communities with many, many pounds less in funding than we had with the EU. How can this be justified in a country where every local authority, all 32 of them, rejected Brexit? All this is not to mention outstanding questions—which I will not go into in detail, although I could—about what appear to be politically motivated choices made on those funds.

The people of Scotland trust the Scottish Parliament to make these decisions. The Prime Minister and his wrecking crew of Brexiters seem to think that devolution was enacted merely at the whim of a previous Administration and that it can simply be reversed with a wave of their aristocratic hands. They have clearly forgotten, so I will remind them, that in the 1997 devolution referendum almost three quarters of voters backed the re-establishment of a Scottish Parliament. It was, as David Cameron acknowledged, the settled will of the people. In the years since, that support has mushroomed, with polling from 2019 showing that 93% of the Scottish public were in favour of the Parliament’s existence. That demonstrates clearly the continuing support from communities in Scotland for power being returned to them, after more than 300 years of it being locked away from them down here.

Policies such as free prescriptions for everything from HRT to medicines for those with long-term conditions, and tuition-free university education, have broken from Conservative ideology at Westminster and meant real benefits for the people of Scotland. While Tory Government free-marketeers stubbornly refuse to meaningfully support people amid the cost of living crisis, the Scottish Government have used their limited powers to take measures such as increasing Scottish social security payments by 6% and doubling the Scottish child payment to £20 per child per week, with plans to increase it further by the end of the year. We have mitigated the impact of hated UK Government policies such as the bedroom tax and the benefits cap, at a cost to our Government of hundreds of millions of pounds per year.

Every day the UK Government fail to use their reserved powers to tackle the cost of living crisis, they show again, starkly, why independence is the only way for Scotland to build that fairer society we all want to see. It is no wonder that in last week’s council election the fortunes of the SNP and the Conservatives were so contrasting. The Tories suffered their worst result since 1990, whereas the SNP won its 11th election in a row. Following consecutive emphatic election wins, as well as a clear majority in the Scottish Parliament for another independence referendum, the mandate for that second vote should be beyond dispute. Furthermore, a new report on last year’s Holyrood election by the Scottish Election Study, carried out by six academics across the UK, concluded that it was “Independence Wot Won It” for the SNP Government. The study shows not only that the SNP holds broad support across a number of demographics, but it won more than half of the constituency ballot among voters born outside the UK, as well as a plurality of those born in England. Surely that is a testament to our outward-looking and progressive vision for Scotland’s future.

Finally, it would be remiss to talk about empowering our communities without making some remarks on the Online Safety Bill, which, if amended, could play an important role in protecting and enhancing democracy at a national and local level. There is much in the Bill that the SNP can support, but it disappoints in its lack of a credible plan to tackle online misinformation and disinformation, which is doing so much to weaken our democracy. We think the Bill should include robust measures on misinformation and disinformation, and the UK Government should follow the example of countries such as Sweden, Finland and Latvia in building up national information resilience programmes.

The Government might point to self-regulation by online platforms via the ads transparency centre, but we have learned that tens of thousands of ads went missing from Facebook’s ad archive in the final days of the 2019 general election. There are requirements for businesses, charities and public sector organisations to communicate honestly with the public about their online activities and products, but no such provision exists for political parties or campaign groups.

Neither the Advertising Standards Authority nor the Electoral Commission has the powers to enforce basic standards of honesty in electoral online advertising. Currently, a bad actor can run a huge volume of misleading online adverts and invest large amounts of money in breach of electoral law, and if that bad actor does not report it, or its activities are not uncovered and reported, there is no record of that advertising having been placed.

The various campaign groups that were established as unincorporated associations and sprang up like weeds just before the most recent Scottish elections used Facebook ads in particular to push political links, and in most cases it was not possible to establish who paid for the ads or the groups’ political links. The Government must look into and close the loophole that allows donations under the spending limit or directly to political candidates.

In closing, I urge the Government to take the issues I have outlined much more seriously than they have been taking them. They should examine closely the dark side of political advertising and take some real action. Democracy is under threat like never before, and without democracy there is no real power for our communities.