European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Pete Wishart Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I begin by trying to find a bit of consensus and agreement across the House. We are all basically agreed that we need to improve the Bill in Committee. Everyone seems to suggest that lots of amendments are required to improve this legislation.

I may have inadvertently misled the House last Thursday when I broke the crushing news that only eight days will be available in Committee, because actually only seven days will be available. That is because we are going to lose four hours out of the eight in days five and eight. So we will have seven days to rewrite the whole of the law system of the United Kingdom, whereas 41 days were given to the Maastricht treaty, 29 were given to the Lisbon treaty and 21 were given to entering the Common Market. We will have only seven days for this great repeal Bill—what an absolute embarrassment for this Government. They had better come back with a proper programme motion to give this House sufficient time—

[Mr Francois]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

I have not got time for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, so he should sit down. On this side of the House, we have been trying to outdo each other in describing this Bill. I would describe it as a “Hammer House of Horror” Bill: it gifts unprecedented power to this Executive, drives a coach and horses through the devolution settlement and presents a profound threat to our human rights. It is hard, if not impossible, to conceive of a Bill that more undermines this “taking back control” mantra of all those who parroted it ad nauseam when they were talking about leaving the European Union.

I would not vote for this Bill in a month of Sundays. The UK is engaged in an almost unprecedented exercise of national self-harm with this whole Brexit project. We are indulging in a grotesque episode of economic, political and cultural self-flagellation and, by God, we are determined to give ourselves a damn good thrashing! We are opting for the hardest of hard Brexits, reaching for the most painful implement in the box, and the scars and pain will be there for decades to come.

Turning to the negotiations, I will put my cards on the table when it comes to these tricky conversations. I will try to lay them down as delicately and sensitively as I can. Never before has an enterprise of such political significance been prosecuted with such delusional cluelessness, which is approaching a national embarrassment. It is hard to think of any major international negotiations being handled so ineptly and chaotically; it is almost as if we have put the clowns in charge of the Brexit circus and their huge clown footprints are all over all of this. We are becoming a national embarrassment with our negotiations, and this Government have to start to get real and drop their delusions. This repeal Bill is only throwing salt on the wounds.

What interests me more than anything else about this is what the Bill tells us about how Scotland is now perceived in this union of nations. Today, we celebrate 20 years of the vote that delivered the Scottish Parliament: 20 years of really taking back control—Members may wish to see it like that. This Bill presents the biggest challenge that our Parliament has ever had to confront, as it undermines the very foundation and ethos of the development of our national Parliament: if something is not listed in the reserved powers, it is devolved. That approach was designed elegantly by Donald Dewar as a means to determine and shape our national Parliament, and it has served us so well since then. This Bill drives a coach and horses through that. Indeed, it is worse than that, as the Law Society of Scotland tells us:

“The effect of the Bill would be to remove the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament in relation to any matter in retained EU law. This would be the case even if it related to areas of law not reserved to the UK under the Scotland Act, such as agriculture or fisheries.”

Then we must consider the Henry VIII power, an innovation so spectacular in its political audaciousness that one of Henry’s executioners would baulk at the whole experience. We have our own powers, which I refer to as the Robert the Bruce powers. We are actually compelled to exercise them as part of this Bill, even though we might have fundamental concerns in respect of democratic oversight. We are sailing towards the big Brexit iceberg, but Scotland has an opportunity. We can get down below decks, get on that lifeboat labelled “Scotland”, get out on to the ocean and row as quickly as we can to the shores of sanity.

[Several hon. Members rose—]