Covid-19: Future UK-EU Relationship

Debate between Tom Hunt and Gavin Newlands

Wednesday 15th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

It is, for a change, a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), and I am glad to see him doing better. His more measured approach to this debate has been noted on the SNP Benches, and I wish him well—although, as usual, he was talking guff.

We are in the middle of a health crisis that stretches not just across borders—whether or not the Prime Minister recognises them—but across continents. At least 600,000 people around the world are dead from coronavirus, and many millions more will contract the virus in the future. That situation requires an international response, yet sadly, and predictably, the UK has gone further into its Brexit bunker, and decided to try and opt out of the world.

We have heard repeatedly about how Ministers want the UK to remain close friends with our EU allies, but what sort of friend insists on diverting the resources of the EU and its member states away from dealing with the most serious health emergency in modern history, and to negotiating with an obstinate and childish ex-member that seems to use a “Dad’s Army” script as its terms of reference? The EU has made clear time after time that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) said, it would be more than amenable to an extension to the negotiations, to allow it and the UK the space and time that is needed to deal with the public health emergency consuming us all. The response from the UK? “No thanks. I’m all right Jack.” What sort of relationship does it think will emerge on the other side?

Scotland is being dragged into a bombastic mix of exceptionalism, isolationism, and outright self-destruction. Ministers and Conservative Members have said that we voted as a Union, but people in Scotland have heard that before. People in Scotland also know that our democratic wish to work alongside our longstanding partners and allies has been torn up and chucked in the Brexit bin. Again, we are seeing that the British state is fundamentally incapable of good governance for Scotland or the rest of the UK. A clique of self-congratulatory Oxbridge graduates would steer their own country on to the rocks in the name of Brexit if they even knew where the steering wheel was. Instead, they have allowed their country to drift over the decades, taking the rest of us with them.

Scotland has never endorsed this self-immolation. For all that Ruth Davidson was lauded to the heavens by her high-profile supporters in the press, her crowning triumph was 28% of the vote in 2017—a figure that dropped two years later. The Tory record at election after election has been an unbroken streak of dismal failure for decades, yet our entire society and economy has been reshaped and allowed to wither on the vine, because that same Tory party has governed the UK for nearly 28 out of my 40 years. Now they expect us to keep silent and meekly go along with their back-of-a-fag-packet Brexit.

As I have said a few times in this place in the past few weeks, my constituency is facing the biggest challenge to our economy for decades. Rolls-Royce, Glasgow airport, easyJet, British Airways, Menzies Aviation and Swissport—I could go on to list company after company, and sector after sector—are in the process of collectively laying off thousands of my constituents. I have asked time after time what the UK Government plan to do to support constituencies such as mine, which are staring economic disaster in the face, but there has been no answer and no sign of a plan. But EU countries do have plans and they are implementing them now. They want to save jobs and key industries, and they have their levers and powers to do that. The Danish Government do not have to send missives to the Germans asking permission to have an industrial or macroeconomic policy. The French Government are implementing their plan for aviation now, yet there is no plan in the UK—none. Aerospace and aviation are left to rot; there is no sectoral support and no sign of any.

Businesses face a double whammy of coronavirus and Brexit, both accentuated by UK Government incompetence, ideology and arrogance. The exporters in my constituency still do not know what and where they will be able to export to the EU in the new year. Our manufacturers still do not know whether they will be massively disadvantaged by trade barriers that their EU competitors regard as fit only for the history books. The service industries still do not know what access, if any, they will have to the single market after 1 January, all while every business and individual in the country grapples with the impact of coronavirus, and the massive dislocation it is causing and will continue to cause.

This is history repeating itself. Our country lived through decades of de-industrialisation as asset-strippers and spivs were allowed to run riot and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs in the name of ideology—the UK Government sat back and let it happen. Emigration from Scotland ran into the hundreds of thousands as families moved anywhere and everywhere they could to find a skilled job—the UK Government sat back and let it happen. Our towns and cities became victims of the post-industrial economy—the UK Government sat back and let it happen.

[Tom Hunt]

The hon. Gentleman talks about the uncertainty that many businesses in his constituency face, but surely that uncertainty would drag on if we were to extend the transition deadline today. Surely it would be far better to focus on getting a deal and providing greater certainty through a clear framework of where we are going to be in the years ahead, rather than extending and pushing it down the road.

[Gavin Newlands]

I am very grateful for that intervention, but I have just listed all the things where businesses do not know what is going to happen after 1 January, so what certainty is the hon. Gentleman talking about? I have no idea and neither do businesses in my constituency. If he has some certainty to give us, I would be happy to give way again so that he can tell us what that is.

The UK has shown itself unfit and unwilling to govern Scotland properly, with, more often than not, zero democratic mandate to do so. I know that an independent Scotland, with its governance, capability and capacity, could plot a better course than the one we are locked into. I know that we could take our place back in the EU alongside the other small independent countries that make up the majority of its members. Do the Government want to carry on telling the people of Scotland that somehow we, on our own, are an economic basket case propped up by the largesse of the Treasury, as has been indicated? That is their concern, but I urge them not to be hypocritical; they should deliver that message to the people of Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg, Slovenia and all the other nations, self-governing, sovereign and independent, that make up the EU. The UK Government should pop up in the national news programmes of those countries telling the electorate that they are doing it wrong. They should be firing out press releases and extending the Prime Minister’s role as Minister for the Union to cover all these countries, Britsplaining their way across the continent. But they will not find a receptive audience and they do not find one in Scotland. More and more the rot at the heart of the UK is laid bare for all to see and people are saying enough is enough—enough of jingoism, isolationism and palling up with Trump; enough of watching the poorest in society being punished by a welfare state that is meant to help them; enough of rhetoric towards our friends in the EU that, until very recently, was the sole preserve of the Daily Mail letters page.

We want a Scotland that protects our citizens and works to protect others. We want a Scotland that values Europe and the benefits we bring each other when working in partnership. The Minister for the Union and his colleagues should realise now that to block the democratic will of the people to achieve these goals would be another nail in the coffin for the UK and another example for the Scottish people of how the UK works against our interests, not for them.

Scotland belongs in Europe and the people of Scotland will make that happen sooner rather than later. The Government, despite what they may think, cannot stop democracy, and they cannot and will not stop the people of Scotland choosing their own future.