UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

Debate between Stephen Kerr and Peter Grant

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

I do not accept the argument that says, “Because the vote was close,” or, “Because the legislation did not say it was binding.” I think we have to accept the results of the referendum in each of the four nations of the United Kingdom. That is why, although I sympathise with where my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) is coming from, I have some difficulty with his amendment, because I do not think we can permanently revoke article 50 unless we have a revised decision in another referendum.

When I say that we have to respect the result of the referendum, we have to respect the results in the four nations. It would be unacceptable for us to permanently revoke article 50 for England and Wales without asking the people of those nations what they thought. It is equally unacceptable and unconstitutional to ignore the express will of the people of Scotland or indeed Northern Ireland. We have the ridiculous situation where Northern Ireland cannot be made to stay in the United Kingdom against the will of its people and cannot be taken out of the United Kingdom against the will of its people, but can be taken out of the European Union against the will of its people. How does that work?

I cannot see any prospect of the Prime Minister’s deal being accepted by Parliament either before or after 29 March. I cannot see any prospect of the European Union agreeing any significant changes in the next month to a deal that it has spent two years with the Government agreeing to, so we are not going to leave with a deal on 29 March. As the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), the Father of the House, has said, there are barely 25 people in this place who would countenance leaving with no deal on 29 March, so surely the only credible, tenable and defensible solution is not to leave on 29 March, but to put back the leaving day until we can sort things out and at least engage in some kind of damage limitation.

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

rose—

[Peter Grant]

I could not give a speech without giving way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Stephen Kerr]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is quite right that the vast majority of people in this House want a deal that we can leave the European Union with in an orderly way. On that basis, and given the urgency of the situation, why did the First Minister of Scotland, our country, refuse to turn up for a high-level meeting involving the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Home Secretary and the First Minister of Wales to avoid a no-deal Brexit?

[Peter Grant]

It really is a bit cheeky to criticise the First Minister of Scotland for missing one meeting when she has been available to meet every day since the Brexit referendum. She and other Ministers of the devolved nations have attended meeting after meeting. They have been invited to express their views and then been told that their views counted for nothing.

Any Prime Minister who was putting the best interests of the people before the narrow, short-term interests of herself and her party would have asked for an extension by now. I want Parliament to say to the Prime Minister, bindingly or non-bindingly, “Ask for an extension.” I also want Parliament to be respected when it said, “Get no deal off the table.”

I do not know whether Members will recognise these words:

“We must reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right”.

Those words are from the Conservative party manifesto of 2017. Those were the promises on which every single Conservative Member of Parliament stood and was elected. If no-deal Brexit is not an ideological template provided by the libertarian right, I do not know what is. Those Members have been elected on a promise not to go with the disaster of no deal, so if the Government cannot prevent a no deal, they will have to go, because they will be in flagrant breach of one of the most fundamental promises of the Conservative manifesto.

Legislating for the Withdrawal Agreement

Debate between Stephen Kerr and Peter Grant

Monday 10th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

I come from a tradition where the people are sovereign, and if Parliament cannot decide what the people actually meant when they voted, Parliament should ask the people. I am not that bothered about going back to ask the people in my country what they wanted, because they made it perfectly clear by a majority of almost 24% that they wanted to stay.

[Stephen Kerr]

The hon. Gentleman comes from a political tradition where accepting referendum results is a philosophical problem.

[Peter Grant]

I love it when somebody who hardly knew I existed 18 months ago knows more about my political philosophy and political motivations than me. I suspect that I have lived in this body for longer than the hon. Gentleman has. I want to make this quite clear to him yet again, although I cannot say that I will only use words of one syllable, because “syllable” is too big a word to use. The Scottish National party is founded on the principle of the sovereignty of the people of Scotland. That principle has been unanimously endorsed by this House during this Parliament. If he did not agree with the sovereignty of the people, he could have spoken about it and voted at the time. He did not, and therefore, according to the rules of this most sovereign of palaces, he has endorsed the principle of the sovereignty of the people of Scotland. The people of Scotland said that they want to stay in the European Union. That creates a difficulty, but ignoring the will of the people when it does not suit is not a solution to the problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), who speaks with great passion and experience on these subjects, even if I cannot agree with much of what he says. I begin in the same vein as the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) by extending condolences to our fellow Scottish Member of Parliament, the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), who recently suffered a bereavement.

As we heard earlier, it was inevitable that this Session would be dominated by the method of our departure from the European Union. The conversation taking place both inside and outside the House has left the country with the distinct view that there is little consensus about the details. I have always been clear that I voted to leave the EU, and my constituents knew that. My political opponents in Stirling, where 67% of people voted to remain, often ask me on what basis I can speak up for Stirling in the House as a Member of Parliament who voted leave. My answer is simple: the people of Stirling sent me here on the basis of our manifesto commitment. All Conservative and Unionist candidates at the election stood on a manifesto commitment to deliver Brexit, and to leave the customs union, the single market and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

[Peter Grant]

I respect that fact that someone who gets elected is expected to implement the manifesto commitment on which they stood, but two years earlier the hon. Gentleman stood in the same constituency on a manifesto promise of keeping us in the single market. What caused his personal journey to Damascus from 2015, when he was determined to stay in the single market, to 2017, when he was determined to get out? Or did he just change his mind because he had to so that he was allowed to stand as a Conservative candidate?

[Stephen Kerr]

The hon. Gentleman is quite mistaken. In 2015 I stood on a manifesto commitment that the Conservative party, should it be elected with a majority and form the Government of this country, would hold a referendum on our membership of the European Union. The then Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that he would go to Brussels and negotiate a better arrangement with the European Union. In the event, sadly, he came back with much less than he had promised and, in my opinion, tried to oversell it to the British people. The British people will not be sold a pig in a poke, and the inevitable consequence was that they voted to leave the EU.

[Peter Grant]

I am a bit surprised to have to remind a Conservative MP of what was in his own manifesto in 2015. Admittedly it is no longer available on the official Conservative party website—I wonder what the party does not want us to see—but I can assure him that it said:

“We are clear about we want from Europe. We say: yes to the Single Market.”

I ask him again: what changed his view from wanting to stay in the single market when he stood in 2015 to wanting to get out when he stood in 2017?

[Stephen Kerr]

The simple answer is that we fulfilled our election commitment by holding a referendum in June 2016, when the people of this country voted to leave the European Union. That is clearly what changed. The hon. Gentleman was a little thin-skinned in his response when I intervened on him earlier but, unlike his party, the Conservative party honours and respects the outcomes of referendums. We did so in 2014 when the Scottish people voted to remain in the United Kingdom. We stand firmly on the side of the Scottish people in that judgment, as we stand on the side of the people of the United Kingdom who voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union. I have committed to the people of Stirling to come here and deliver on the outcome of that referendum, and I believe it is my responsibility to them to ensure that we in this House get the best possible Brexit for the United Kingdom. That remains my first and foremost consideration.

The electorate expect their politicians to negotiate, finalise and deliver a deal that will have their best interests at heart. I spent most of Saturday in Callander, which I recommend all right hon. and hon. Members pay a visit to—it is the most beautiful place. I was in Stirling Road, Campbell Court, Menteith Crescent and Willoughby Place, and when I knocked on doors, the people there were universally adamant about one thing, regardless of how they voted in June 2016: they want us to pull together and deliver Brexit. The people of our country have become incredibly fatigued by the squabbling and division, and they look to Members of all parties to unite and deliver the result of the referendum with a deal that is in the best interests of people in all parts of the United Kingdom.

Global Britain did some polling in my constituency last month—I am sure it will be covered in the Stirling Observer when it comes out on Wednesday—and the outcome was exactly as I have just described: people want to see us do the best we can for our country, and that we must do. That is why I continue to support the leadership of the Prime Minister. There was some scoffing earlier when my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) talked about how people see our Prime Minister, but I can tell Members that she is admired even by our political opponents, at least in my neck of the woods, because she has stuck to her job and shown a sense of duty and devotion to public service. Whether or not one agrees with her direction of travel, that is deeply admirable in her as a person. I honestly believe—in fact, I have no doubt whatsoever, and nor can any rationally-motivated person—that the Prime Minister is doing everything in her power to secure a Brexit arrangement that fulfils the instructions of the British people that were delivered through the referendum.

The Prime Minister is also dealing with the complexity of leaving the European Union. Despite the comments of Opposition Members, the British people fully embraced that complexity in a pretty full and protracted debate surrounding the EU referendum. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington said that the fact that people spoke in a public meeting about one particular issue but perhaps did not dwell on another logically proves—although this is actually illogical—that people did not give any consideration to whether we were leaving the single market, even though that fact was said repeatedly at the time by those on the remain side. In fact, the remain campaign even stopped calling the EU the European Union for a while and simply referred to it in those terms. The situation was well understood.

I admire my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister for what she is trying to do, and I wish to make it absolutely clear that my support for her includes my support for what she set out in her speeches about Brexit at Lancaster House and the Mansion House. The Conservative party was united in its response to her Mansion House speech because the principles that she set out in it were founded on pragmatism. At the end of the day, I am a Conservative because I am a pragmatist. The difference between the Conservative party and the ideologies of other parties is that we will do what will work. That is what the Conservative Government are being guided by.

Leaving the EU: Implications for Scotland

Debate between Stephen Kerr and Peter Grant

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am pleased to begin the summing up in this debate. It has certainly been interesting. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) on securing it and on the well-informed and comprehensive way in which she set out the social and economic impact that leaving the European Union threatens to have on our country. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) commented very knowledgeably on the potential legal and judicial impact and correctly pointed out that the UK Government have simply refused to acknowledge the issue.

We have had some interesting contributions from the Scottish Conservatives about Scottish independence; somebody forgot to tell them that we are actually talking about the European Union. I did not hear a single word from the Scottish Conservatives about why ending the free movement of people is a good idea for Scotland. We heard a lot of words about why the SNP is bad, why independence is bad, why the SNP is still bad, and why independence is even worse, but there was not a single word of justification for what the UK Government keep telling us was the single biggest reason for people voting to leave the European Union. I wonder why that might be. I wonder why they are scared to talk about the impact that ending the free movement of people will have on our nation.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) made an excellent contribution about the huge benefits that the free movement of people creates for all of us. Those benefits cannot be measured just by counting how much people pay in tax or generate for the economy. The free movement of people and the exchange of beliefs and ideas is probably more important than the movement of labour, workers or anything else. People coming here from other places and cultures enrich our place and our culture. It will always be a negative, backward and regressive step to try to prevent people from doing that by asking them to pay to exercise rights that they already have, or by putting in place some completely arbitrary, picked-out-of-the-sky number to limit who is and is not allowed to come here.

The single biggest impact of Brexit on Scotland is the one that my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran referred to her in her introduction. The Scottish Conservatives will try to hedge around it with the creative use of statistics, but it is an inalienable fact that 62% of people in Scotland voted to stay in the European Union. The hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) was muttering at one point, “Have you seen the opinion polls?” I have not seen an opinion poll since then that puts support for EU membership in Scotland at less than 62%. I have seen quite a few that put it significantly higher—75% in some places.

[Stephen Kerr]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham) said, we were elected last year on a manifesto commitment to take our country, the United Kingdom, out of the European Union, the single market and the customs union, and to do so in a way that protects jobs and our economy. That is why we are here. The hon. Gentleman can quote statistics about the cumulative referendum vote in Scotland until the cows come home, but we were elected on that manifesto and are here to see that the interests of our constituents in our part of Scotland are well represented and protected as we leave the European Union.

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point on a United Kingdom basis, but I gently remind him that we were elected with a substantial overall majority of Scottish seats in this place. As has been pointed out, the Scottish Government were elected on a manifesto commitment as well, which they will put into practice. Incidentally, his party was elected in 2015 on a manifesto that said it would keep us in the single market, so I do not know what its manifesto will be in next year’s general election.

As I said, 62% of the sovereign people of Scotland voted to remain in the European Union. We ignore that at our peril. If Scotland votes a different way from other parts of the United Kingdom, or if the Scottish Government and the UK Government, or their Parliaments, disagree, that does not create a constitutional crisis. It might create a political crisis, but a constitutional crisis happens only when those in power refuse to accept the will of the people. Clearly the UK Government intend to ride roughshod over the demand—not the desire, request or plea—of the people of the Scotland that our voice will be heard and that our links with our European partners will not be sacrificed on some altar of far-right ideology in a vain attempt to keep the Conservative party together.

[Peter Grant]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has noticed, but we are in the United Kingdom Parliament. That is a kind of acceptance that, for now, Scotland is part of the United Kingdom. However, there is a legal principle that subsequent legislation always trumps previous legislation if the two are incompatible. What about the mandate in 2016 for the Scottish Government to give the people of Scotland a choice if Scotland is threatened with being taken out of the European Union against our will? Nobody forces the Scottish people to do anything. The Conservative party want to deny the people of Scotland the right to set our own future. They want to deny the people of Scotland the right to remain in the European Union, which 62% of us have demanded. In percentage terms, the majority to stay in the European Union was almost 2.5 times bigger than the majority to stay in the United Kingdom.

The Conservatives do all this fancy footwork—I call it the Maradona trick. They take the vote on one side in one referendum, and to back up their argument they compare it with the vote in a different election on a different day on a different question. I call it the Maradona trick because it would mean that Argentina were still in the World cup—Argentina scored three goals and Brazil scored only two, so Argentina stay in the World cup and Brazil go out. Totally ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than the attempts of the Scottish Conservatives to set one part of the electorate against another based on an election or referendum held on a completely different day.

The fact that the Scottish Conservatives turn up to a debate about Scotland’s place in Europe and spend most of their time arguing for the lost cause of Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom says it all. They cannot argue the benefits to Scotland of leaving the European Union, because there are none. The damage done to Scotland by being forced to leave the European Union against our will is even greater than the damage that would be done if we left on our own terms and with the will of the people.

The people of Scotland are our masters; they are our sovereigns. There is no absolute parliamentary sovereignty in Scotland. There is no absolute sovereignty of the monarch, nor will there be of anyone who replaces the monarch in the future. The people are the absolute sovereigns, and our sovereigns have told us what to do. Brexit threatens to deny the people of Scotland the right to have the country that they have decided they want to have. Anyone who ignores the people in that context does so at their peril, because the people of Scotland will not be kept silent.

The hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) shakes his head, with that smug smirk that he is so fond of.

[Stephen Kerr]

We are so used to your threats.

[Peter Grant]

It is not a threat to say that the people have spoken and will ensure that their voice is heard. If the Scottish Conservatives are afraid of the voice of the people, what are they doing here?

Government’s EU Exit Analysis

Debate between Stephen Kerr and Peter Grant

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am grateful for the chance to speak in this debate and I commend the main Opposition party for securing it.

I am wondering why we are here because, yesterday, the Minister’s colleague beside him on the Front Bench, the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), spent over an hour valiantly, loyally and completely unsuccessfully trying to persuade the House that the sky would fall down if this information were shared with anybody. Now we are being told that it can be shared at the very least with 650 people.

Incidentally, part of the reason why relatively few MPs—certainly those in the Scottish National party—went along to the “Kremlin” reading room to look at the sectoral analysis is that, having seen part of the papers, I told a lot of my colleagues not to bother. It simply was not worth their time to go through the security checks to read stuff that they could get by looking online.

Again, we are seeing a symptom of the fact that, despite all the assurances we get that Brexit will restore “sovereignty” to Parliament, this is really about trying to restore the alleged sovereignty of a minority Government over the will of Parliament. Parliament is supposed to tell Government what to do, but every time it looks as if Parliament is going to tell the Government to do something they do not want to do, it causes absolute panic on the Government Front Bench. It also causes a headache for civil servants, as one of their main responsibilities is supposed to be to prevent Ministers from doing anything that causes political embarrassment to the Government—good luck to them. If they can achieve that, they must be quite remarkable people.

[Stephen Kerr]

May I ask the hon. Gentleman a very simple question? Does he condone or condemn the leaking of Government papers? It is an important question.

[Peter Grant]

At this point, the answer is no: I neither condone nor condemn because I do not know what the circumstances were.

I walked away from a potentially successful career in NHS financial management. I wrestled for six months with my own conscience, seeing things that I knew had to be brought to public attention but knowing there was no way I could do that, and knowing that the public were being deliberately misled about what was going on in the health board that I worked in. The only way I could bring it to public attention was to resign and walk away from the job. So I will never, ever condemn anyone who believes they are acting in the public interest by doing something that they are not supposed to do.

I would be very surprised if there is a single Member in the Chamber today who is not at this very moment considering an important constituency case that has been brought to them by someone who technically was breaking the rules by raising it with a Member of Parliament. There are times when the public interest has to outweigh all other considerations, and until I have seen the full circumstances of why this information was disclosed, I am not going to condone or condemn, and I do not think anyone else should prejudice the case by commenting on it now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant]

May I deal with the first intervention first, please?

What I said was that the reason I had told my colleagues that it was not really worth while for them to hand over their phones, make appointments and so on to go and see the documents, was that there was nothing in there that they could not have got quite easily on the internet. Is it really a good use of a Member’s time to go through a security check more severe than at an airport, in order to read in a classified document that Airbus and Boeing make aeroplanes? To read in a classified document that gambling legislation in Northern Ireland is devolved but not elsewhere? These are all things that were in the documents that the Government said they could not disclose. To read in the sectoral report on the electricity industry that lots of people in the United Kingdom rely on electricity for domestic and commercial purposes?

Come on, Madam Deputy Speaker: there may well be information in the latest batch of documents that there is good reason for wanting to keep classified and confidential, but the Government’s attitude is that they tell the people and Parliament as little as they can possibly get away with. We all know that the reason for the change of heart from yesterday to today is nothing to do with the Government’s having decided that, because part of the documents had been published, they might as well give Parliament everything. The Government are not opposing the motion today because they know they would go down badly if they forced it to a Division. They do not have the support of their own Back Benchers; I doubt if they even have the support of their own Front Benchers. Their culture of excessive secrecy no longer has the support of their own people. They are not forcing the matter to a vote today because they know they would not only lose, but lose so badly that it would call into question the continuation of the Government in its entirety.

[Stephen Kerr]

rose—

[Peter Grant]

I did say I would give way to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry).

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. I am aware of the time, and I do not want to impinge too much on other people’s—

[Stephen Kerr]

rose—

[Peter Grant]

I will give way once more, but I hope the intervention is a bit more relevant than the earlier one.

[Stephen Kerr]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his gracious approach to my intervention. It is just that he is contradicting himself. He says that the Government are not responsive to Parliament—that Parliament is some kind of constitutional eunuch—and in the next breath he says that the reason there will not be a vote today is that the Government cannot control their own side. He cannot have it both ways. This Parliament is very successfully holding the Government to account and is being very thorough in its scrutiny. In defence of the honour of this Parliament, I needed to intervene to say that.

[Peter Grant]

The reason why Conservative Back Benchers will abstain in this debate is that the Government Whips have told them to abstain. The reason why the earlier motion on the main Brexit sectoral analysis was not opposed was that the Government told their Back Benchers not to oppose it. Since then a number of Back Benchers, sitting in this Chamber, have said that they would have been quite happy to lead a move against that Humble Address before Christmas but the Government Whips told them not to. The fact of the matter is that all too often the Government hold Parliament to account, not the other way around.

We shall not fix that today, but if we appreciate that that is the background against which this fiasco has developed, it is easier to understand how it is that, as soon as there is a Government who do not command a substantial majority in the House, there are problems. The British electoral system has a phobia against minority Governments or coalition Governments, despite the fact that in numerous other places—some of them not too far north of here—there are examples of Governments operating very successfully indeed, either in coalition or as a minority Government.

The Minister, as part of his argument to try to discredit his own Government’s analysis, points out that it is based on average free trade agreements, as opposed to the all-singing, all-dancing with bells and whistles free trade agreement that the Government keep telling us they will achieve within the next year or two. What is that assurance based on? What grounds does this Parliament have to believe that the Government have a snowball in hell’s chance of finding anyone to give the United Kingdom on its own a better trade agreement than they are willing to give to the 500 million people of the European Union single market? Have the Government done an analysis to tell them that they are going to get better trade deals? I hope not, because if they have done such an analysis, that analysis is quite clearly rubbish as well.

Given that analyses that come out of Her Majesty’s Treasury are no longer to be trusted, may we now take it as the Government’s official position that we can no longer believe what was said in the 16 analyses that were done by Government Departments in 2013-14, showing what a disaster a yes result in the Scottish referendum would be? And can we just cut to the chase, and save everybody a lot of time, by getting the Government to admit now that the bucketsful of analysis that they are going to produce next time around are also worthless and incomplete and selective, so they can just not bother producing them and save us all a lot of time?

Madam Deputy Speaker, when you get a Government who have to defend their own excessive secrecy by telling the people of these islands that they cannot rely on information that comes out from the Government, whether it was meant to come out or not—when the Government tell us we cannot rely on information that the Government themselves are producing—that is what undermines Britain’s negotiating position with the European Union. It is not the fact that information might be published that the EU could have put together itself quite easily; it is that the Government’s action in attempting to conceal that information and then seeking to discredit it demonstrates to our EU partners what they probably knew—that they are negotiating with a disorganised, disunited, shambolic and incompetent Government. That weakens Britain’s negotiating position more than any release of Brexit analysis papers could ever do.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Stephen Kerr and Peter Grant

Thursday 7th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I commend the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and, in particular, the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), for their two outstanding contributions.

This Bill, and the whole Brexit process, not only gives us an opportunity but requires us to go right back and think fundamentally about what Parliament is for and what democracy is about. The Scottish National party supports as a fundamental principle the ancient and honoured tradition that sovereignty over the land of Scotland is inalienably vested in the people of Scotland. That principle is not for sale now, or at any time, to anybody.

This Bill seeks to usurp and undermine that sovereignty in a number of ways, which I will mention later. That fact alone compels me to vote against the Bill on Monday night, and it compels anybody who believes in the sovereignty of the people of Scotland, and anybody who purports to be here on their behalf, to oppose the Bill on Monday night, regardless of the party that is trying to get them to do something different.

As it is Labour’s reasoned amendment that has been selected, we will be supporting it on Monday night with some reservations. First, given that 62% of our citizens voted to remain in the European Union, I am certainly not ready to give up on that for the people I represent. I fully understand and respect the fact that two nations of the United Kingdom voted to leave, but I ask the Members of Parliament from those two nations to respect the fact that the other two nations voted to remain and that their votes cannot simply be cast aside.

Secondly, the reasoned amendment refers to parliamentary sovereignty. I respect that that is an important principle for some people, but it does not apply universally across the nations of these islands.

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

Is the hon. Gentleman not aware of the question that was on the ballot paper? It was a United Kingdom question and a United Kingdom vote, and we voted as a United Kingdom to leave the European Union. That is what we decided. Does he not understand that?

[Peter Grant]

I do not know which part of “the people of Scotland are sovereign” the hon. Gentleman does not understand. The people of Scotland are sovereign, and I will defend their sovereignty. I urge all Members of Parliament from Scotland to respect that sovereignty when the time comes.

My final concern with Labour’s reasoned amendment is on the transitional period.