Sewel Convention

Luke Graham Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I want to start on a consensual note by echoing the tributes that have been paid to the heroic work of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Police Scotland in responding to the tragedy at the Glasgow School of Art. I send my sympathies and condolences to Professor Tom Inns and the whole community. I had the privilege of seeing some of the restoration work last year. I share the sense of devastation and hope that some legacy and restoration can be achieved.

There are two aspects to the power grab. The first was explained by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford). Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act is very clear: if it ain’t reserved, it’s devolved. What is happening now is that powers that are not reserved to this Parliament are being stopped in their tracks from Brussels and reserved to the House of Commons, rather than being devolved to the Scottish Parliament. That is the first aspect of the grab of the 24 powers that have been spoken about so many times.

The second and more important aspect of the power grab is the contempt with which the refusal to grant a legislative consent motion is being treated. The decision of the House of Commons last Tuesday to vote through amendments to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill that the Scottish Parliament had expressly refused its consent to is a fundamental change to the nature of the devolution settlement. It fundamentally undermines 20 years of devolution. That is the real power grab: this Parliament expressing its sovereignty in the face of the sovereignty that the people of Scotland expressed in their legitimately elected Parliament.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He says that these powers being reserved is a fundamental challenge to devolution. Can he tell me how agricultural fertiliser regulations pose a fundamental challenge to devolution? How do powers relating to elements of reciprocal healthcare pose a fundamental challenge to devolution? Those are two of the 24 powers being reserved. This is not a challenge to devolution; it is just common sense.

[Patrick Grady]

The hon. Gentleman has a far more rural constituency than I do. Perhaps the farmers in his constituency are happy with the idea that this Parliament will simply legislate on those issues and ride roughshod, without the elected Members of the Scottish Parliament having a say, but I am not sure that the farmers in my constituency of Glasgow North would share that view.

The saddest thing is that it did not really have to come to any of this. This simply has not been on the Government’s radar. Whether that is because of a failure by the Secretary of State for Scotland to make Scotland’s voice heard in Cabinet or because Scotland is simply not important to the Tories does not really matter. The reality is that on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, we saw Government Whips running around the Benches negotiating with their rebels and Ministers at the Dispatch Box negotiating amendments to the withdrawal Bill in real time. Months of meetings in the Joint Ministerial Committee and of messages, statements, questions and debates led by Members from all the different parties in Scotland in this House seem to have had absolutely no effect on the UK Government. That is a demonstration of the contempt, of the power grab and of them riding roughshod over the views of Scotland expressed in the Scottish Parliament.

Ironically, and I have raised this before, there are still ways out for the Government, but they have so far refused to take them. On Thursday, I raised the issue of Royal Assent. It is up to the Government when the final version of the EU withdrawal Bill is put forward for Royal Assent. The Minister could stand up now and commit that they will not do so until agreement has been reached with the Scottish Government. Otherwise, presenting a Bill for Royal Assent while consent has been withheld is in blatant breach of the Sewel convention, which was put on a statutory basis in the Scotland Act after 2015—the greatest, most devolved Parliament in the entire history of the known universe snapped out and snuffed out just like that by this House of Commons after a paltry 19 minutes of debate, or one minute of debate for every year of devolution.

Let me say this on devolution and the Scottish National party—I say it with the greatest of respect to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). In 1997, when I was 17 years old, I was out on the streets of Inverness knocking on doors for the yes, yes campaign. I do not remember that many Liberal Democrat activists joining us, and that was a Liberal Democrat seat at the time. The reality is that the Scottish National party helped, on a cross-party basis, to deliver devolution and it has consistently delivered success in devolution, and the only people isolated throughout that period have been the Scottish Conservatives.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

This issue is relatively simple. The EU referendum was a UK-wide vote, and more than 1 million people in Scotland voted to leave the EU. In 2014, a referendum decided that Scotland should remain a part of the UK; the separatist argument lost by 10 percentage points—a significantly greater margin than in the EU referendum whose business currently preoccupies the House.

Respecting the will of the people of Scotland, which is constantly brought up by SNP Members, is exactly what the Government side of the House is doing. People in Scotland voted to remain Scottish and British—to have a devolved Parliament in Edinburgh, but also have their Parliament here in Westminster. It was a constitutional decision that reinforces our current structure of government and made sure that we still keep this Parliament of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland here in Westminster and sovereign, with directly elected representatives.

Section 2 of the Scotland Act 2016, which was shaped by the cross-party Smith commission, is unambiguous in asserting the UK Parliament’s power to make laws for Scotland and that devolution does not diminish that power. The Act also recognises the Sewel convention, which states:

“it is recognised that the Parliament of the United Kingdom will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament.”

But these are not devolved matters and these are clearly not “normal times”, as Mike Russell MSP recently acknowledged.

The convention also does not apply to reserved matters. Schedule 5, part 1 of the 2016 Act defines, among others, the constitution and foreign affairs as explicitly reserved powers for MPs in this House to discuss and decide. The European Union could not legitimately be defined as that

“which is normally dealt with by the Scottish Parliament”,

but very clearly comes under the powers reserved to this place. It is for those very reasons that the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament deemed the SNP Administration’s EU continuity Bill—rushed through, by the way, as emergency legislation, with just 25 hours of debate—to be outwith the competence of the Scottish Parliament. Indeed, far from protecting, or even respecting, the devolution settlement, the SNP is showing complete contempt for it and for our constituents.

The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and this whole debate is concerned with where powers that previously sat in Brussels will now sit in the UK. It is ironic that the SNP is fine with having unelected Brussels bureaucrats set laws for Scotland, but finds it an outrage when this Parliament, which is also Scotland’s Parliament and has its own directly elected MPs, makes laws. It cannot be a power grab if Holyrood never had those powers to begin with. Finally, even today, Lord Sewel, who I imagine has some insight into these matters, stated clearly that Westminster needs the power to move ahead and that there is no constitutional crisis.

To recap, that is the Scotland Act 2016, the Smith commission, the SNP MSP responsible for the constitution, the former SNP deputy leader and Lord Sewel himself all clearly acknowledging the validity of the Sewel convention and reinforcing the sovereignty of this House. We should take a moment to remember what devolution was truly meant to be about—not erecting a wall between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, but bringing power closer to communities throughout the UK.

Furthermore, the Smith commission went one further by saying that powers should come from Holyrood to individual local authorities. Has that happened in Scotland? No—there has been a clear centralisation of power in Edinburgh. Powers are being taken from Westminster and centralised in Edinburgh with no respect. This is not good devolution or bad devolution—it is deliberately dysfunctional devolution, stoked by an SNP that is so obsessed by separation from the United Kingdom that it cannot countenance even making an agreement with it.

As I outlined earlier, it is really clear that this is not about the 24 powers in relation to the UK common framework; this is about fertiliser, food labelling and standards. When I was looking, there was no one in my constituency saying, “We want them to be so drastically different from the rest of the UK, it is an assault on devolution.” That is what the 24 powers are about. If we want to get into the detail, we should engage with it.

We have been threatened tonight with disruption, with another referendum, with “paying a price” as the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) said. Well, you carry on with the threats. We will focus on delivering for our constituencies. What we have seen in the last week is very, very simple: the mask has slipped and the façade has fallen. What is revealed is naked nationalism. While SNP Members fight to separate the United Kingdom, we will be fighting to unite it.