UK Constituent Parts (EU)

Debate between Emma Reynolds and Ann McKechin

Wednesday 21st November 2012 Westminster Hall

[Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Ann McKechin) on securing this debate.

It is the passionate belief of the Labour party that the United Kingdom is stronger together and that the United Kingdom is stronger in the world as a member of the European Union. The referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 is an incredibly serious matter that will affect all of us in the United Kingdom and, as has been stressed by several of my hon. Friends, when the Scottish people vote in that referendum they deserve to have at their disposal the full facts about the implications of a separate Scotland.

Unfortunately, far from providing clarity about the facts, the Scottish Government have created a great deal of confusion about the potential consequences of Scottish separation for Scotland’s relationship with the European Union. It is pretty extraordinary—indeed, it beggars belief—that, as has already been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North, in response to a freedom of information request from one of our colleagues in the European Parliament, the Labour MEP Catherine Stihler, the Scottish First Minister initially said that he would not disclose legal advice, only for him to be contradicted by the deputy First Minister of Scotland who said that such legal advice had not even been sought, let alone received.

[Ann McKechin]

Just in the last hour, it has been announced in the Court of Session papers regarding that FOI request that the Scottish Government stated that to reveal whether or not they had received legal advice would cause mischief. That is an extraordinary statement, given the Scottish National Party’s supposed links with the people of Scotland and given their ability to know what the facts of that case are. Does my hon. Friend agree that that lack of transparency, which included taunting people for the number of FOI requests that they had put in to the Scottish Government, is indicative of a Government who are actually scared of telling the truth?

[Emma Reynolds]

That lack of transparency is of concern to all of us, and it has blown a hole in the credibility of what the First Minister has said on this issue.

The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) has made a speech today, which I have had the fortune—or misfortune—to have read before the debate, in which he made some strange references to giant pandas and “The X Factor”, but remarkably he made no reference to the European treaties and perhaps more tellingly he also did not refer to any other European Union member state. If he had cared to take a look at them, he would have seen that those treaties make it very clear that new member states must apply for membership of the European Union. Article 52 of the treaty on European Union lists the members of the European Union, including the UK, and article 49 of that treaty states that new member states must apply for membership of the European Union. Moreover, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Gordon Banks) has made clear, the European Commission President has also stated the clear facts. He has said recently:

“A new state, if it wants to join the EU, has to apply to become a member of the EU, like any state.”