Business of the House

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. Pharmacies have shown themselves a bedrock of local communities this year. Their doors have remained open and the pharmacists within welcoming and wise. They have been a model of public service, and I commend community pharmacies for the essential work that they have done throughout the pandemic. The drive to vaccinate the nation will require a great national effort, and my hon. Friend makes an important point about the role of pharmacists in distributing and administering the vaccine. He is right to raise it, and I will pass his suggestion on to the Secretary of State.

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP) [V]]

The Leader of the House confuses matters with references to MPs as key workers. Of course our democracy cannot be compromised by covid. Members must represent their constituents and hold the Government to account, but we do not need to be in this place to do that. His continual references to “coming to work” show that he does not understand the distinction between work and place of work. It seems that he is unable to grasp that many Members are working remotely. We should help them to do that. Indeed, that is precisely what we are exhorting every other employer in the land to do. A majority of Members want to participate in debates without putting themselves and the public at risk, and they should not have to divulge confidential medical information to do so. When will he listen to his own Back Benchers, the Procedure Committee and the Liaison Committee and switch the virtual technology back on?

Let me turn to another matter. Does the Leader of the House agree with the Prime Minister that devolution north of the border has been a disaster, and that it was Tony Blair’s biggest mistake? Does he understand the insult that this is to the Scottish public? The Prime Minister may claim that he is referring to the SNP Government, but that Government only exist because the people of Scotland have voted for them—not once, not twice, but three times. The truth is that the Prime Minister is attacking the democratic decision of the people. Donald Trump would indeed be proud. The exposure of this level of disrespect from a British Prime Minister presents us with a grave constitutional problem. We need to have an urgent debate on devolution, not just, as I have argued for the past six months, to review its efficacy in the light of covid, but to clarify whether the British Government respect their own constitution. In May, the Scottish electorate will vote again. Now that the Prime Minister’s contempt for devolution is clear, a great many people will realise that the only way to protect the limited powers we have is to grasp the political power and capacity that comes with independence.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

As I have set out before, I and the whole House have the greatest sympathy for people who are extremely clinically vulnerable and are advised not to come into work and for making provisions for them to participate. I have sympathy with people who are in difficult circumstances that do not fall into that category, even if the guidelines do not actually provide them with the security that they may be asking for. I have much less sympathy for members of the Scottish National party who do not actually like coming to Parliament in the first place.

As regards what the Prime Minister said about devolution, let us look at the SNP Government’s record, because it is a tragic record of failure. Schools were once the pride of Scotland, but schooling in Scotland has gone down under the SNP’s reign. Scotland has fallen to 15th in reading, from sixth in 2000. For maths, it is 31st—nine places lower than England—and down from 17th in 2006 and fifth in 2000. They have therefore failed in terms of schools. They have also failed in terms of the economy; before the pandemic, Scotland’s economy was forecast to trail the UK for the foreseeable future. They have failed in terms of policing; crime is on the rise, and most areas of Scotland have fewer police officers on the frontline since the SNP forced the police merger through.

Before the crisis, the SNP was causing the NHS to suffer. The £850 million waiting times improvement plan was a failure; Scotland’s public sector watchdog said that the NHS was under increasing pressure in 2019; and the SNP has failed to tackle Scotland’s chronic shortage of GPs. After years and years of SNP grandstanding on welfare, the party is failing to deliver on its own welfare promises, and SNP Ministers even had to hand back responsibility for one benefit to the Department for Work and Pensions.

The failure of devolution is the failure of the Scottish National party, and—just to add to the fun of it—its members are also mired in some discussion about who can remember who sent texts to whom, but it might be ungracious of me to delve into the inner workings of the relationship between very fishy Scottish figures.