Cost of Living and Brexit

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Ian Murray

Wednesday 14th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

I am not sure I understand that point, given that this is about a UK parliamentary cost of living crisis Committee. It would not be a Committee dedicated just to Scotland; it would be dedicated to the cost of living, I would have thought, and we cannot determine not to have other Committee members serving on it, on the basis that something is an England-only Department. Education is critical across the whole United Kingdom and in terms of the cost of living crisis. Perhaps we can have an explanation for why the Education Committee is not listed—it was not my question; it was a question from the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone).

[Dr Whitford]

The hon. Gentleman made a point about the failure of Scottish education, but the attainment gap in Scotland has closed by two thirds at higher level, and by two thirds at positive destinations. That is in contrast with what has happened south of the border, where figures in November showed that the gap had widened.

[Ian Murray]

It always surprises me when SNP Members think that just slightly beating England is an achievement. The attainment gap in Scotland is an unmitigated shame for us all, and the way they have treated education in Scotland should also be a shame.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Murray]

I do not agree with the hon. Member—he is justifying his abstention on the basis that other people abstained as well. I did not agree with them at the time, and I still do not. No deal would have been an unmitigated disaster for the country.

Again, I go back to the point—SNP Members might want to reflect on this—that if, as is the case, Brexit with the deal that we have got is a contributor to the cost of living crisis, surely having no deal with the European Union would have magnified the cost of living crisis even more. They cannot say one without the other, and, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) just confirmed, they backed no deal when the deal came to the House.

[Dr Whitford]

rose—

[Ian Murray]

I am happy to give way, given that the hon. Member opened the debate.

[Dr Whitford]

The shadow Secretary of State is going back to 2019 with the customs union and single market votes. Why is that not Labour policy now?

[Ian Murray]

Unlike the SNP, the Labour Party is trying to be honest with the public on what is in front of us. SNP Members’ proposition to the public at the moment is to have their cake and eat it. They want a separate currency while using someone else’s currency, they have a deficit well in excess of what the legal treaties of the European Union would allow them, and their own First Minister is saying that there will not be an independence referendum anytime soon because the Scottish people do not want it, yet they are promising the public, against the very treaty rules in place—they are there in black and white—that they can have everything they want and still get easy access to the European Union. That is fundamentally dishonest. Labour will not be dishonest with the British people.

On day one of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) being Prime Minister, he will have to deal with the principles in front of him, and we will ensure that the Brexit proposition is done on the basis that we can have better trade and better agreements. In the 2025-26 trade and co-operation agreement renegotiation, we can build on that agreement and ensure that we repair our damaged and tattered relationship with the European Union. As I said, we see that agreement as the floor and not, as the current Government suggest, as the ceiling.

The SNP is clear that its solution to Brexit—in its words, as well as mine and those of many others, it was a bad idea—is to have Scexit, which would be many magnitudes worse than Brexit. It wants to repeat the same mistakes and do the same thing while being dishonest with the British people. Labour will not be dishonest with the British people about the position we are in as a country. Regretfully, we have to deal with what is in front of us, not how we would wish to dream it up. The SNP does not have to deal with that, so it can take any position it likes.

The key point is that while SNP Members keep blaming Brexit—they are right that Brexit has contributed to the cost of living crisis—by saying it is all Brexit’s fault, they are letting the Government off the hook. It is not all Brexit’s fault; it is the Government’s fault, given the decisions they have made on Brexit, on energy, on the economy, on wages, on growth and on tax, and the impact of every single thing they have done in the last 13 years. Let us not let the Government off of the hook by blaming their botched Brexit. Let us keep them on the hook for Brexit and for everything else that they have subsequently done.

The motion talks about setting up a cost of living Committee. That may seem like a sensible idea, but when we look at the small print, the flaws of the proposal become clear. I am left wondering whether the real reason for proposing it is to try to get one of the SNP group’s many disgruntled Members an additional salary payment for being the Committee Chair, as stated in the motion. Perhaps the SNP is trying to campaign to get the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) a Committee Chair position after campaigning so heavily against him for the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee position in the House a few weeks ago.

I am also left wondering why, if the SNP thinks this is such a great idea, it does not use its coalition majority in Holyrood to create a similar Committee in the Scottish Parliament. Perhaps it does not wish to do that, but it does want to spend upwards of half a million pounds here on a Committee with 45 members that would not include members of the Education Committee. The Committee would include three members of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, even though the cost of living crisis is no doubt driven mostly by the energy crisis. Is the SNP aware that the biggest spark of the cost of living crisis is spiralling energy bills for families and businesses?

The Committee would have five members from the Scottish Affairs Committee, five from the Welsh Affairs Committee, yet none from the Education Committee. The justification is that the English Education Committee does not have anything to do with Scotland, but neither does the Welsh Affairs Committee, yet it will provide five Members while the Education Committee will provide none. I do not think that the SNP has thought this through. There will also be no representation from the Defence Committee, which is a UK-wide Committee. Perhaps SNP Members are not aware of the many stories of soldiers having to rely on food banks because of the cost of living crisis.

The SNP’s motion fails to mention that the SNP has already been in charge of the Scottish economy for 16 years. The Scottish economy is now indisputably the creation of the SNP Government. A Scot who was finishing school when the SNP came to power 16 years ago will now be in their mid-30s—they will probably have one of those fixed-term mortgages, and perhaps even a family of their own—and they will have seen that, much like for the UK Government, economic growth has been an afterthought for the Scottish Government.

The Scottish Government are responsible for a huge number of issues and policy areas in Scotland, including the creation of jobs in the renewable sector. I have said this many times in the House and will continue to do so: we should congratulate the SNP Government, because they have created tens of thousands of jobs in the renewable sector—but unfortunately they are in Denmark, Indonesia and elsewhere. When they had the opportunity to sell what they called ScotWind licences for offshore wind in Scotland, they told us that they could not demand that bidders had their supply chains in Scotland due to EU state aid rules, even though we had left the European Union. They are right to talk about the damage of the Tory Brexit, but they cannot say that and, at the same time, hide behind state aid rules when we know that was not the case. They could have conditioned all those licences for Scottish jobs, but they decided that it would be better for those Scottish jobs to be overseas.

Labour has a fully costed alternative to the Conservative crisis. We would first introduce a proper windfall tax on the oil and gas giants—the SNP and its new leader opposed that until they realised it was popular—by backdating that to January 2022, as we have always called for, closing the loopholes and taxing it at the same rate as Norway. That would raise an extra £10 billion that would go towards people’s energy bills and put an end to the injustice of the oil and gas companies raking in billions on the back of people’s energy bills. The money raised would help families directly and pay for a plan to help the energy-intensive industries such as food manufacturers and processors with the cost of energy and, therefore, potentially reduce prices in shops for ordinary people.

Labour would reverse the Government’s decision to hand the top 1% of savers a tax break in their pensions while introducing specific measures to help doctors and the NHS. We would close the non-dom tax loophole, much to the frustration of the Prime Minister himself. We would cut business rates for small businesses, paid for by taxing the online giants such as Amazon, which are not held to the same rules as our high street businesses.

The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire said that there is no difference between the Conservatives and the Labour party. However, we have already announced that we would fund the Scottish Acorn project, and we would set up a publicly owned GB Energy, which the SNP used to believe in until it dropped that. So it does matter what colour of party is sitting on the Government side of the Chamber.

The new First Minister claims that absolutely none of it matters. Incidentally, he is the first SNP First Minister not to be arrested—but, when he is, I am sure we will send him flowers and thank him for his service. He would threaten to bring down a Labour Government over his obsession with the constitution. The consequences of what he said at the weekend are clear: vote for an SNP MP and they will block the transformative change that a Labour Government would seek to deliver. Vote SNP and see SNP MPs walking side by side through the No Lobby, with the very hard Brexiteers they have been slagging off this afternoon, to block a Labour Budget. That is what he said.

The conclusion that we can all come to is that SNP candidates at the election will be a barrier to change in this country. Why is the new SNP leader taking such a destructive stance? It is because Labour opposes rerunning the 2014 referendum. He could not have been clearer. He said:

“at the moment, for example, it’s pretty obvious that independence is not the consistent settled will of the Scottish people”.

Previous SNP leaders have always avoided speaking that truth for a reason. It begets the question: if the SNP’s preferred change is not what the people want, what is the alternative? After the SNP leader’s interview, we know that he will block the change that Scots want by undermining a Labour Government, in his words,

“at every corner and every turn”,

to demand something that he has admitted Scots do not actually want. I think that the people of Scotland can see through that position, and I am sure they will do so at the election.

Scotland wants a Labour Government, and a Labour Government will deliver for Scotland. When the mood shifts in politics, it shifts fast, but as ordinary working people sit around their dinner tables discussing how they will meet the weekly shopping bill, praying for mild weather, worrying about their families, neighbours, colleagues and friends or dreading the next email from ScottishPower or a bill dropping on their door mats from British Gas, the Tory Government and the SNP are devouring themselves with their own psychodramas. The cost of living crisis is a misery for millions in Scotland, but both of their Governments are responsible for making it worse and sit back to do little to help. Voters agree: 60% say that the Government are not taking the right measures on the cost of living crisis. The public deserve so much better and, at the election, they will get it.

Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill: Section 35 Power

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Ian Murray

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

That is where we get to the crux of this process. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) made a similar point earlier about wanting to make sure that trans rights and women’s rights were protected in this country, and about doing it properly. This is certainly not the way to do it. We will now have a process whereby the First Minister and the Scottish Government will take the UK Government to court on the basis of these reasons and the unseen legal advice, and the courts will have to decide whether the reasons that the UK Government have put forward are legitimate and reasonable in terms of the bar they have to reach—namely, that there would be adverse consequences for reserved legislation. I think that at the end of that process the courts will have to resolve these arguments because both Governments are unwilling to do so together.

[Dr Whitford]

Is the shadow Minister concerned, as I am, that although gender recognition is devolved, half of the blather in here is that it conflicts with the Gender Recognition Act 2004? The whole point of devolution is that we can change legislation in Scotland in a devolved policy area.

[Ian Murray]

That is a very helpful intervention, because paragraph 14, on the first category of adverse effects, talks about different regimes across the United Kingdom. That, to me, suggests that the Government do not want this to be devolved. There are other devolved issues, such as abortion, that would have cross-border implications. But I would also gently say in response to the hon. Lady that Donald Dewar designed section 35 for the very question that she has just asked—[Interruption.] I hope she will not mind me repeating that he did not envisage all the issues that would come through. Devolution was always a journey for the Labour party and it will continue to be so. The key point was that section 35 was put there to enable the Scottish Parliament to legislate in devolved areas that might have an impact on the rest of the UK, but that it was to be used only as a last resort when there might be a conflict. If the first adverse effect is that the Government do not want different circumstances for gender recognition certificates between Scotland and the rest of the UK, surely they are saying that this should not be devolved.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Ian Murray

Committee: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Monday 4th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

I agree that all parts of the UK should be treated similarly, which is why I have always championed the UK’s staying in the single market and the customs union. That would allow us to leave the EU while keeping the regulatory harmonisation required—the very regulatory harmonisation that the hon. Gentleman railed against just a few moments ago—and keeping the UK single market operating within the EU single market.

[Dr Whitford]

On the question of where power actually lies, we know that many farmers voted leave, yet I know, having attended a National Farmers Union meeting on Friday, that the idea of farming and hill farming in Scotland being controlled from here is something they consider anathema. Given the failure to pass on the convergence uplift in 2013-14, they are frightened about farming powers being here.

[Ian Murray]

These are complex discussions and issues, but the key principle is that any power devolved under schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998 should be devolved. No one is saying that everything should be devolved at one minute past midnight—or whenever we leave the European Union—but these discussions must take place by means of intergovernmental processes, and the principle should be that there should be devolution at the point at which powers come back from the EU, when it is possible for that to be done.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Philippa Whitford and Ian Murray

Monday 6th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

Well, devolution in a lot of instances is not logical, because—[Interruption.] I am answering the intervention of the hon. Member for Gainsborough. If the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) wants to intervene, I am more than happy to allow him to do so, but he must let me answer the intervention first. A lot of devolution is illogical, because that is how devolution works.

I hope that the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar will allow me to get to the second and third reasons for our opposition to the devolution of abortion at this stage. As I have said, our first reason for opposing it is that we are being asked to do so by women’s organisations in Scotland. Secondly, the Smith commission clearly stated that

“a process should be established immediately to consider the matter further.”

That has not happened. On 21 July, a Scottish Government spokesperson told the BBC that talks with UK Government Ministers on the devolution of abortion law had begun prior to the election. I would welcome an intervention from the Secretary of State or, indeed, anyone on the SNP Front Bench to inform the House about the discussions that have taken place so far, but the Smith agreement is clear and the promised process has not emerged.

This is not the proper process for which Smith asked. I understand that the issue was put on the table rather late in the day at the Smith commission and that it was agreed that there would be a proper process of discussion, debate and dialogue before any particular change is made to the constitution or the law.

[Dr Philippa Whitford]

Does not the hon. Gentleman think that this could be the start of that process? If there is an agreement in principle that the powers will be devolved, that discussion can begin. If we throw the amendment out, it will disappear.