United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Tim Farron Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 15th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

I have to start by expressing my deepest sympathies to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell), who has had to come to the House to try to defend the completely and utterly indefensible. [Interruption.] She says that she does not need my sympathy—well, she is getting it anyway. The reality is that the Labour party has once again turned its back on voters in Scotland. Last night Labour had the opportunity to stand up for the Scottish Parliament, to stand up for devolution and to block direct spending by this UK Government on devolved matters, and it sat on its hands. That is why there is a not a single Labour Back Bencher here in the Chamber this afternoon.

But my sympathies do not stop there: they also extend to the Minister himself. He talks about business certainty—business certainty! Four and a half years after the Brexit vote, after three Prime Ministers and two general elections, it is 17 days to the end of the transition period and the Minister could not name, in any way, shape or form, what the trade status of the United Kingdom is going to be. I pity them all. This is why the people of Scotland will choose a different path in the very near future.

Let us look at the Bill as it stands in a little more detail. It remains—it utterly remains—a blatant attack on devolution. For me, that is extremely frustrating, because, like my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), I am young enough to have lived almost entirely under the Scottish Parliament. I do not remember a time when there was not a Scottish Parliament. It has been a positive, progressive force for Scotland that we are proud of. I am not going to come to this Chamber and let a party that has not won an election in Scotland since the 1950s dictate to the Scottish Parliament as to what will happen. It is a complete and utter shambles, and the Government should be utterly ashamed of that.

To finish, something that has been asked a lot in this Chamber—I have heard the shadow Scotland Office Minister say it as well—is, “Name a single power that is being grabbed. Name a single one”, but this is much bigger than that; this is a blatant, all-out attack on devolution itself. It seeks to undermine the very premise of devolution. To prove that very fact, The Press and Journal just four days ago said:

“The Secretary of State has been very clear he wants to deal direct with local authorities”—

not just going beyond the Scottish Parliament or the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, but going straight to the local authorities themselves. That is absurd and a blatant attack on devolution, and we will not stand for it.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I am overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu, with the Labour Front Bench getting more grief than the Treasury Front Bench, as back in the day. I am also overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu because I feel a great sense of this Government being in the same place—in my heart, in my mind—as the European Commission once was. Back in the days when we were not little Britain, I remember feeling enormous frustration and anger with the European Commission when it would do stupid things, in particular with agriculture, playing into the hands of separatists who only wanted the end of our relationship with the European Union.

I feel exactly the same about this Government now playing into the hands of my friends and colleagues around me on the SNP Benches—to whom this is music to their ears—by undermining the Union and being cloth-eared in the process. The Minister has had every chance to accept Lords amendments and to do what he can to stand behind the integrity of the Union and of the devolution settlement.

I have another great concern. I mentioned agriculture a minute ago, and what is critical in the race to the bottom that is built into the Bill when it comes to standards of farming, animal welfare and the environment is something that is not restricted to the Bill alone; it is something that the Government are repeating in other areas of their approach. We have seen the failure of the Government to accept proposals from my party and others that the high standards of British animal welfare and our environmental standards should be written into all new trade deals, but those were refused at every turn—clearly preparing the way to sell out farmers in all corners of the United Kingdom at the first chance the Government get in any trade deal.

At the same time, although most of us in this House agree with the Government’s direction in terms of the English changes to farm payments—from basic payments to the environmental land management scheme—the plan has been to underfund the scheme and to bodge it, getting rid of the basic payments before the new payments are in place, therefore killing off English family farms, which are the unit that allows us to have high-quality animal welfare and environmental standards. All those things together paint a picture of a Government who have lost touch with the countryside and with agriculture, and are prepared to set out a range of policies—almost a manifesto, a catalogue, of attacks on British farming—that undermine our standards, animal welfare and the quality of our produce, and to sell our farmers down the river.

I am proud of the quality of British farming, throughout these islands, and I want the standards that are the highest in any nation to be the highest across all four. I would love the Government to learn from the mistakes of the European Commission—not to play into the hands of separatists, but to make sure that they defend our Union and the devolution settlement.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

We are clear on the SNP Benches that Scotland does not want this Bill and that it overrides powers within the Scotland Act 1998. The explanatory notes state:

“The Bill’s provisions replace the existing limits on the effect of legislation made in exercise of devolved legislative or executive competence”.

The Bill is clear about taking new powers.

We know that divergence will not be tolerated, because it is not tolerated currently. In immigration policy, Scotland has been refused any degree of control. On the control and sale of fireworks, we have been ignored in our request to regulate fireworks. In the treatment of drug law, an area close to my heart and that of my constituents, despite crying out for years in the face of a drugs-death crisis—a crisis which last year saw 1,264 souls lost—the UK Government say that Scotland will not be permitted, not allowed, not trusted to take further action to prevent the deaths of our citizens. Scotland accepts responsibility in the areas where we can act, and we know we must do more, but we do it with our hands tied behind our back. I do not trust this Government to behave any differently when they grasp with grubby hands Scotland’s powers over economic development and infrastructure, such as our water supply, our transport, our health or our education. The only way to protect the powers of our own Parliament is for Scotland to vote for independence.