Oral Answers to Questions
Joanna Cherry Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Greg Hands
The Prime Minister’s first bilateral trade visit in November 2016 was to India, accompanied by the Secretary of State and myself. We have recently completed a trade audit with India that looks at all the barriers. India is at times a difficult market for British exporters to crack. We have a lot of advantages in doing business there, and the trade audit and the joint economic trade committee talks led by the Secretary of State last month are taking us in the right direction.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade (Dr Liam Fox)
By leaving the customs union and establishing a new ambitious arrangement with the EU, we will be seeking to maintain as frictionless as possible trade in goods between the UK and the EU, and the freedom to forge trade relations with partners around the world.
Joanna Cherry
The Norwegians have a saying: “Nothing is in as much of a hurry as a dead fish on the back of a lorry.” Like Norway, Scotland exports most of the fish it catches to the EU, which is why Norway has chosen to be a member of the single market, in particular to avoid non-tariff barriers so the fish can cross borders quickly. What assessment has the Secretary of State made of the impact of leaving the single market on the Scottish fishing industry?
Dr Fox
Of course, the majority of Scotland’s exports go to the rest of the UK, not the EU. The hon. and learned Lady talks about the value of the single market; it is just worth pointing out that, despite our membership of the single market, we have had a growing trade deficit with the EU at a time when we have had a growing trade surplus with the rest of the world. We want to establish the conditions for all our exports from all parts of the UK to be able to access the growing markets of the world, and, as the International Monetary Fund has pointed out, 90% of global growth in the next 10 to 15 years will be outside Europe.
Amber Rudd
That is such a good question from my hon. Friend. It is so important that we also encourage women to participate more in local councils. Only 33% of local councillors are women, and I would like to see that number rise. I echo his thanks to his local councillors. I pay particular tribute to Councillor Gwen Blackett, who is soon to retire from Havant Borough Council following 45 years of service. I congratulate her on that, and congratulate the other women who have served as well.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The first woman to be elected to this Parliament was, of course, Countess Markievicz, an Irish nationalist. Is the Home Secretary, like me, looking forward to the presentation of a portrait of the countess next week by the Irish Speaker in the Irish Parliament to Mr Speaker in this Parliament?
Trade Bill
Joanna Cherry Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner
I will give way a little later to both the right hon. Lady and the hon. and learned Lady, but in the meantime I propose to make a little progress.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about any of the strictures that we laid down in our manifesto. Many other countries around the world have such procedures to exercise oversight over their Executives. New Zealand requires its Government to present national interest analyses before its Parliament. Australia has a separate joint scrutiny committee on treaties. Even in the EU, Germany requires all trade treaties to undergo a process of scrutiny by parliamentary committee before ratification can take place.
Currently, the Council of Ministers sets a negotiating mandate and the Commission is charged with implementing it. Our representatives in the European Parliament debate it and scrutinise it in the trade committee. The resulting treaty is then put under the powerful microscope of the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who chairs the European Scrutiny Committee in this House. Once we leave the EU, all those institutional levels of accountability are stripped away and we will fall back on the 1924 Ponsonby rule. It was interesting to hear the Secretary of State say, “No, no, it’s all about the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.” Does he not realise that CRAGA actually gives legislative effect to the Ponsonby rule, an arcane procedure from the last century that allows our Government to ratify a trade agreement—an international trade treaty—by simply laying the text before the House for 21 sitting days, with no need for a debate or vote? That is simply not good enough in a modern democracy. Hon. Members hold this House’s dignity very cheap indeed if they vote tonight to govern ourselves after the fashion of a tinpot dictatorship.
The Government have a woeful record on transparency and democratic oversight when it comes to international trade agreements, so it pains me to remind the House of the exchange of letters, which were revealed just before Christmas, between the Department and the Office of the United States Trade Representative, in which the Secretary of State gave assurances to President Trump’s Administration that he will deny Members of this House access to information on the substance of talks held in the UK-US trade working group. The letter says that the following approach will be taken:
“Proposals, accompanying explanatory material, emails related to the substance of the working group, and other information, exchanged in the context of the working group, are provided and will be held in confidence unless otherwise jointly decided.”
Yet when the Secretary of State responded to my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), who asked a trenchant question about the need for transparency, he said that of course he believed there should be full transparency. In fact, this obsession with secrecy should not be taken for a prudent desire to conceal our negotiating hand from the Americans. The provisions agreed by the Secretary of State are expressly designed to deny British MPs and the wider public any knowledge of what has already been discussed with the United States’ representatives. He will not tell us what he has already told them.
Barry Gardiner
Look, the hon. Lady is of course right that the European Union held a lot of those discussions in private, particularly over TTIP. However, she may be unaware though that although European Members of Parliament were able to access the text of the TTIP agreement, this Secretary of State refused for nine months to set up a reading room so that Members of this House could access the very same information that was available to her colleagues in the European Union.
Joanna Cherry
The hon. Gentleman has made a very powerful case for more scrutiny of future trade agreements by this Parliament, but it is not the only Parliament in the United Kingdom—there is a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Parliament, and, I hope that, eventually, the Northern Ireland Assembly will be up and running again. With the CETA process, we saw the powerful influence of not only national and regional Parliaments in the European Union, but provincial Parliaments in Canada. Will the Labour party support such influence for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly?
Barry Gardiner
I will deal with issues around devolution later in my speech. Indeed, that is something that my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) will be addressing in his winding-up speech.
Having set the context, let us look at the detail. The Bill’s opening clause sets the tone for the power grab that is to come. It gives Ministers the power to implement regulatory changes as a consequence of any country acceding to or seceding from the WTO’s government procurement agreement. This is not a temporary power. It is not simply to facilitate our transition from a member under the wing of the EU to a member in our own right, as the explanatory notes to the Bill claim, but a power in perpetuity without the requirement for any scrutiny by Parliament.
The Government will use the sweeping powers of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 to push through the UK’s independent membership of the GPA without a vote in Parliament. The Bill confirms that any future changes to the terms of the GPA will go the same way. We can talk about the merits of the GPA—I am sure that we will find much common cause across the Dispatch Boxes—but the Secretary of State said that we would be acceding on the “existing terms of participation”, if I wrote that down correctly. That is something that Members should be free to scrutinise and debate. The United States, Canada, South Korea and Japan have all put annexes to their schedules for the GPA that allow them to set aside and disapply regulations on behalf of small businesses and other organisations. That is something that we might wish to consider. It would be quite proper for us to do so, to boost trade for our small businesses, but the Bill, as currently formulated, would not allow that.
I have to confess that when I first looked at the GPA, I wondered what material difference this might make to British business. I was quite impressed to find that the Government’s explanatory notes showed that the GPA opened up £1.3 trillion of contracts to UK business—we should all rejoice in that—but when I checked the Bill’s impact assessment, I learned that the total cross-border earnings of our businesses from GPA contracts outside the UK is just £1.2 billion, which is less than 1% of that amount. I also learned that the total earnings by foreign companies from the £68 billion of GPA contracts inside the UK was £16.7 billion, which is about 24.5%. Will the Minister explain what the saving to the public purse was from this procurement agreement that merited £16.7 billion going to foreign companies while just £1.2 billion came back to the UK? There might well be a very good answer, but is this not precisely the sort of issue on which Parliament should have a proper role of scrutiny and holding the Executive to account? Of course, the Bill denies us the capacity to do so.
Clause 2 gives the Secretary of State the most far-reaching powers to implement new international trade agreements without the need for even a debate in Parliament. As his Department has confirmed, the clause includes the Henry VIII power to modify primary legislation without a vote. On that point, we were treated to the extraordinary spectacle of the Secretary of State resorting to the letters page of a national newspaper to deny what is printed in black and white—actually in black and green—in his own legislation. He must have been piqued by a number of articles in response to the Bill’s publication in November that accused him of appropriating powers that should, by rights, lie with Parliament. He responded on The Guardian website on the evening of 20 November, saying:
“In an editorial (13 November) you claim that the trade bill is ‘effectively granting ministers the power to write law behind parliament’s back’ with ‘Henry VIII powers’. This claim is repeated in a column by George Monbiot (18 November). This is untrue. The powers in the bill will only allow for amendment of secondary legislation covering existing trade agreements, and secondary legislation is still subject to parliamentary oversight.”
Yet it was not The Guardian that was wrong; the Secretary of State was wrong. He knew that he was wrong, although he did not correct his remarks, because clause 2 of the Trade Bill, which he had published just two weeks earlier, states quite clearly that the powers in the Bill make provision not only for the amendment of secondary legislation, but for “modifying primary legislation”. Lest there should be any doubt about this, the delegated powers memorandum published by the Secretary of State’s Department to accompany the Bill, which was quoted by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) with such devastating effect earlier, states on its very first page:
“The Bill contains 6 individual provisions containing delegated powers. Two of these, clauses 2(1) and 7(3), include a Henry VIII power.”
This was not the case of a Cabinet Minister misspeaking or being ambushed in a broadcast interview; this was a written communication that the Secretary of State placed in a national newspaper in the cold light of day that contradicted plain fact and the considered explanation of his own officials. I will happily give way to the Secretary of State if he would care to come to the Dispatch Box and explain himself by putting on the public record why he chose to suggest that there are no Henry VIII powers in this Bill when his own Department had already confirmed the opposite to be the case. I cannot claim to have served with Henry VIII. I cannot claim that Henry VIII was a friend of mine. But, to misquote Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s remark to Dan Quayle, I can say, “Secretary of State, you are no Henry VIII. This Bill is an affront to the dignity of your office and to the authority of this House.”
Clause 2 provides the Secretary of State with unprecedented powers to implement international trade agreements without a vote in Parliament. It is perhaps the most egregiously anti-democratic provision of the Bill, in that it allows the Secretary of State to engage in secret negotiations with a trading partner of the EU, to lay the results of those negotiations before Parliament without the need for a debate or a vote, and to proceed to incorporate the resulting treaty into UK law without the need for a vote either.
The Government have tried to justify this power grab with the sham argument that these are simply roll-over agreements—existing agreements that are just being grandfathered. They claim that the corresponding agreements between 60-plus countries and the EU have already been through the process of scrutiny, meaning that the UK’s new agreements can go through on the nod. Yet the Government have been forced to admit that the UK’s new trade agreements are legally distinct from those previously negotiated by the EU. They are new agreements in international law. If we allow the Bill to go through as it stands, the Secretary of State, as the Government have acknowledged, will be given carte blanche to agree substantively new obligations with third countries and to implement them without a vote in Parliament.
The Government are aware of the magnitude of what they are attempting. The delegated powers memorandum could scarcely disguise its shame with regard to this part of the Bill. It says:
“It is recognised that Parliament will want considerable assurances from the Government that this power will not be used beyond what is necessary to ensure a seamless transition of the agreements in scope.”
The Government have given that assurance, but they cannot deny that the power is there. In the next breath, the memorandum claims, apparently without irony:
“The Department considers that this power is appropriate for the negative procedure.”
The negative procedure is the least rigorous procedure available to this House, as it allows the Government to bypass the need for a debate or a vote, or the possibility of amendment—there is nothing.
I ask the Minister to come clean and confirm to the House that the delegated powers memorandum is correct. Will he assure us that the Government will bring forward their own amendment in Committee to ensure that these new internationally binding agreements must go through a due process of proper scrutiny by Parliament, rather than being signed off by Ministers without a vote?
Joanna Cherry
My hon. Friend quoted the Law Society of Scotland. Does she agree that it is important for the Tory Government to understand that it is not just members of the SNP who are concerned about the Bill, but that a wide section of Scottish civic society is completely behind the devolved settlement for which it voted so overwhelmingly in 1997? The Law Society’s trenchant comments should give the Government pause for thought about what they are doing. They should bear in mind that it is not just a political party that says they are undermining the devolved settlement, but an apolitical, professional association with great expertise behind it.
Hannah Bardell
I absolutely, and not surprisingly, agree with my hon. and learned Friend. It is true that Scotland voted by 62% to remain in the EU. My colleagues and I are here today to stand up for Scotland and what it voted for in that referendum and to defend and protect the powers of our Parliament in Scotland and the rights, protections and equalities that we enjoy by virtue of our membership of the EU. I for one am not going to let this chaotic and reckless Tory Government diminish or damage the powers of the Parliament, country and economy of Scotland without a very real and determined fight.
We should not have to fight for our voice to be heard here or in trade negotiations and any trade deals that are done. Scotland and the devolved nations should be treated as equal partners, and if we are not, we reserve the right to make a decision about our constitutional future.
Hannah Bardell
I am not sure that I have referred to that at all; what I am referring to—[Interruption.] The point I am making is that the powers that will be given to this Government and the deals in place and the powers that intersect with the devolved nations will not be protected, so any future trade deals might well be imposed or impinged on, and our powers will be diminished.
Joanna Cherry
The point my hon. Friend is forcefully making—[Interruption.] Conservative Members laugh, but this is very important for the Scottish and British economy, because the biggest export from Scotland and indeed of the whole UK is Scotch whisky; that is what is keeping the economy afloat. It is very important to Scotland that trade deals such as that with South Korea are perpetuated on the same terms and that Scotch whisky’s geographical indication is protected. These are not just my concerns. I am holding an email from the Scottish Whisky Association, with which I am in regular contact. It wants these matters to be raised; it is used to hearing assurances from the Government, as am I, but we do not hear much else. Does my hon. Friend agree that the point is this: she is talking about the importance of—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. First, the hon. and learned Lady, whose eloquence is far above average in this House—that is meant to be a compliment—knows that she should not make such a long intervention. Secondly, she cannot have a private conversation with her colleague the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) and be looking away from the Chamber towards her; she must look this way. I call Hannah Bardell.
Exiting the European Union and Global Trade
Joanna Cherry Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I associate myself and other SNP Members with the Secretary of State’s comments about PC Keith Palmer—this debate was due to take place on the day of the attack on Parliament—and our thoughts continue to be with him, his family and his friends.
I welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is nice to see that we have gender balance among the Speaker and Deputy Speakers.
I rise to speak for the first time in a substantive debate since my re-election as the MP for Livingston—I am grateful to the people of Livingston for re-electing me—and since my appointment as SNP spokesperson on international trade and investment.
I pay tribute to my former colleague and Member for Ochil and South Perthshire, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, our previous spokesperson on international trade and investment. She was one of the hardest working MPs this Parliament has ever seen, and she was a doughty champion for the people of Ochil and South Perthshire. She pursued many matters—from international trade to the plight of the people of war-torn Syria and the UK Government’s involvement in the Yemen conflict—and her dogged work ensured that, time and again, UK Ministers were dragged to the Dispatch Box to answer the questions of SNP Members. We will continue to pursue such issues with vigour and passion.
My former colleague was a far cry from some of the Conservative Members who, sadly, have replaced her and other SNP colleagues. I do not mean to be entirely unkind—they are not in their places today—but they have been here for only a few weeks, and they have already rolled over on a distasteful deal with the DUP, failing to stand up for Scotland and their constituents. This Tory Government have found £1.5 billion to do a deal so that they can vote down pay increases for emergency service workers and public servants. In recent weeks and months, we have come to rely very heavily on those emergency workers and public servants, and the Scottish Conservatives should hang their heads in shame.
The Scottish Conservatives now have a choice: they can choose to do what is in the best interests of Scotland and of the constituents who voted them in, or they can fall into line with the rest of their party in support of a hard Brexit. I challenge them to use the opportunities that lie ahead to make sure that the Prime Minister reconsiders her position and joins us, and other Members in other parties, in defending Scotland’s place in the single market and the customs union.
The trade and customs Bills will seek to put in place a legislative framework to allow the UK to operate its own trade policy and provide new domestic legislation to replace EU customs legislation. The problem is that, despite all the bluff and bluster from the Tories, the UK had to cave in on the first day of Brexit talks and agree that the divorce deal will have to be established before any trade deals are agreed, leaving business, the economy and workers across our country in limbo. Michel Barnier said earlier today that frictionless trade in goods and services “is not possible” outside the single market and the customs union. We need to know from the Secretary of State and colleagues whether there will be transitional arrangements for our economy in relation to goods and services.
We know the track record of this Government on scrutiny and process: they avoid it at all costs. They had to be dragged through the courts even to give Parliament a say on the triggering of article 50, so what hope can we have that we will get to scrutinise properly the many laws and regulations that will be coming back from the EU? The Government’s plans for the great repeal Bill include so-called Henry VIII powers to avoid any scrutiny, as well as antiquated and back-door measures through the use of delegated legislation. What guarantees are the Government offering to ensure they will not abuse such powers? What guarantees are they offering to ensure they will not use antiquated and back-door measures to avoid scrutiny by and the need to obtain the consent of the devolved Administrations?
The public rejected the Prime Minister’s call at the last election to strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations, and she cannot carry on as if the election result has not happened. It would serve her and this Government’s flailing credibility better to build a much more consensual approach, because leaving the single market would be an unprecedented act of self-harm.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that that would in particular be an act of self-harm for Scotland? At present, EU trade deals with the likes of South Korea mean that the tariff on our major export of Scotch whisky has been reduced to nil, whereas a 20% tariff has to be paid on other whisky entering South Korea. Are we not much more likely to get such favourable deals for Scotch whisky if we have the whole weight of the EU behind us, rather than if we are negotiating just as the UK?
Hannah Bardell
I absolutely agree with everything my hon. and learned Friend says.
The Secretary of State alluded in his opening comments to trade deals with countries such as India, particularly on whisky. Are he and his colleagues not concerned that when the Foreign Secretary visited India recently he was advised that:
“Mobility issues are of importance to us; we cannot separate free movement of people from the free flow of goods, services and investments”
Trade agreements are about give and take. The Government, the Ministers on the Front Bench and others who have spoken do not seem to understand that concept.
The plans for a hard Tory Brexit have already immersed the UK economy in uncertainty, with inflation escalating and companies preparing to move their operations outside the UK. [Interruption.] Conservative Members chunter from a sedentary position, but they only need to open the papers every day to see examples of that. Figures from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research suggest that Scotland’s exports could be cut by more than £5 billion if we fail to retain full membership of the single market. The research also shows that trade in goods could decline by 35% to 44%. If exports of Scottish goods were to fall by a similar amount, the additional cost would be about £3 billion. According to the UK Government’s own analysis, leaving the single market could reduce Scotland’s GDP by more than £10 billion.
At the end of this process, when we have clarity on whether there is a deal or no deal, if the Government have not taken on board Scotland’s position, which I will come on to later, we must have an insurance policy. We must have a say over our own future and be able to decide whether we want to be an independent nation within Europe. That is why Scotland’s main business organisations issued a joint statement on 8 July last year, confirming that Scotland’s businesses need continued access to the single market and free movement of labour.
Since then, those organisations have all repeatedly raised concerns about the impact of Brexit on business, including on access to labour, both skilled and non-skilled. For example, the loss of EU nationals will seriously harm our rural economy. About 8,000 EU nationals come to live in Scotland and work in the food and drink industry, and 15,000 seasonal migrant workers harvest our world-class fruit and vegetables. We cannot put their futures or the future of our vital sectors at risk. EU nationals also make a huge contribution to our NHS. One in 20 NHS doctors in Scotland comes from the EU. More than 1,000 companies owned in the EU employ over 127,000 people in Scotland and about 181,000 EU citizens live in Scotland, bringing vital skills and expertise. We heard only last week that the rate of applicants for nursing posts from the EU has dropped by 96%. That will be devastating across the UK.
Scotland is an open and modern economy. Our exports of goods and services account for about 50% of our GDP. That is why our membership of the single market is so crucial to our economy. Through the EU, Scotland trades with the world. The EU has signed free trade agreements with nearly 90 non-EU countries. Free trade agreements are already in place with 62 countries and the agreements with 28 countries are still to be applied. The Secretary of State said in his comments that he hoped they would be ratified soon. Those agreements are driving growth in Scotland’s trade with the rest of the world, which increased by 55% between 2007 and 2015.
If we are not able to continue with those trade agreements—we know how long many of them may take—then cumulatively it could be decades before we even reach the position we now have with full access to the single market. Scotland’s businesses are well placed to take advantage of the opportunities to sell their products across Europe and the world. If we leave the single market, we gamble with a market of 500 million people and free trade deals with 90 countries around the world.
The Tory manifesto contained a pledge to leave the single market and the customs union. Given that the Tories failed to gain a clear majority, they must think again, put those options back on the table and make them central to their negotiating position. It just went to show the contempt the UK Government have for Scotland when we heard the Brexit Secretary admitting to the Exiting the European Union Committee and, indeed, the rest of the UK in March 2017 that no economic analysis—none—had been done to address the impact of Brexit on the UK economy. How can we have been in a position whereby not only was an impact study not done before we went into the referendum, but in all of the time between then and coming to that Committee no work had been done? This was compounded by comments on “The Andrew Marr Show” recently, where the right hon. Gentleman, who is opening negotiations for the UK, was unable to confirm that the UK would get a free trade agreement with the EU; it was very much a case of, “Mebbe’s aye, mebbe’s no.” The Secretary of State’s comments show just how disorganised he and the Tory party are on Brexit and our future trading relationship with the EU.
Just this week, the Financial Times reported that the City of London was sending a delegation to Brussels to present a secret blueprint for a post-Brexit free trade deal on financial services. The City is left to do the work of the Government for itself.
Concern mounts over the damage facing employers if they are forced to move operations to the continent. Not every sector is able to do that, or should do that. We should have a Government who are listening to the devolved nations and all those sectors. This is just the latest indication that businesses do not trust the Tory Government.
The SNP Scottish Government put forward a very sensible compromise agreement on Scotland’s place in Europe, respecting the results in 2014 and of the EU referendum. It laid out a sensible and pragmatic approach to the situation we now find ourselves in: that Scotland could retain its membership of the single market and remain within the UK.
In Scotland, we are working hard to support SMEs and corporates with initiatives like the Borders enterprise agency, which was just launched, with a focus on meeting the region’s distinctive economic needs. We have also launched the Scottish-European Growth Co-investment Programme, the first part of the Scottish growth scheme, with £50 million from Scottish Enterprise and £50 million from the European Investment Fund, which will leverage at least £100 million from private sector fund managers. Evidence of the fruits of the Scottish Government’s labours were borne out by yesterday’s GDP data, which showed the Scottish economy defying recession concerns and growing at 0.8%, compared with the UK average of 0.2%.
But this is set against a backdrop of Brexit uncertainty giving businesses much pause for thought in investment decisions. The Chancellor has conceded that a “large amount” of UK business investment is being postponed, and urged early agreement with the EU on transitional arrangements. Our growth is under threat, and we need to hear more than warm words from the Government Benches. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, spoke of “anaemic wage growth” and said he would like in coming months to see
“whether wages begin to firm, and more generally, how the economy reacts to the prospect of tighter financial conditions and the reality of Brexit negotiations.”
Scotland’s voice is being ignored. That is not democratic, and it is not acceptable. Scotland is the top destination in Europe for exports from the rest of the UK, so it is in everybody’s interests to have a close trading relationship, because the European single market is Scotland’s real growth market, and is eight times bigger than the UK market alone.
The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union said on a recent visit to Ireland:
“Ireland will not have to choose between having a strong commitment to the EU or to the UK—it can and should have both.”
Why, then, can that not apply to Scotland?
In a press conference in Dublin on 30 January 2017, the Prime Minister said that the UK would maintain
“the common travel area and excellent economic links with Ireland.”
Again, I ask why that cannot apply to Scotland?
There must be a meeting of the UK and devolved Governments to decide objectives before the next cycle of negotiations with the EU this month, and there must be a commitment to take seriously, and act upon, the interests of Scottish businesses, universities and a range of other groups becoming increasingly alarmed at the way Brexit is being handled.
Scotland’s voice must be heard during the Brexit negotiations. Only recently we heard from a surprise supporter of that long-held SNP view. The Labour party leader, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), took time out from partying at Glastonbury to write for the Sunday Herald saying that Scotland needs a clear input into the Brexit negotiating process. He said:
“The Scottish Government must have regular and systematic access to the British negotiating team so that the Scottish perspective, especially in those areas for which the Scottish Parliament is responsible, is fully taken into account.”
That is very welcome; it is just a shame that his party cannot be united on access to the single market and the customs union. Will this Government finally acknowledge the overwhelming support for a Scottish seat at the Brexit table and extend the hand of friendship to all the devolved nations to enable them to take part in these negotiations, which will affect their people, their economies and their future?
This Conservative Government are cowed and reduced; they failed resolutely to start negotiating a trade deal with the EU at the same time as the exit deal. We in the SNP believe that it is important to maintain our international development goals and ensure an ethical trade policy. To ensure that our international development goals are maintained, the Scottish Parliament must have a real say on any trade deal that is negotiated. ActionAid has ranked the UK joint worst in the world for having the largest number of treaties with developing countries that most restrict the rights of poor countries to tax UK companies operating there. That is not acceptable and it does the UK’s reputation no good on the world stage. The SNP will continue to defend Scotland’s interests and prioritise maintaining Scotland’s membership of the single market and the customs union in the Brexit negotiations.