Chamber and committees

Carol Mochan talks about some of the pressures on Scotland’s budget. Does she anticipate that an incoming UK Labour Government would continue to hold to its plans to stick to Tory spending priorities for the first two years?

To ask the Scottish Government whether, as part of its work to further the case for Scottish independence, any of its future publications on independence will cover any constitutional lessons that can be learned from structures used in Parliaments elsewhere that include unelected members. (S6O-02928)

Does the minister agree that, following Baroness Mone’s disastrous television interview last month, the lesson that no Parliament, if it wishes to be accountable in any way whatsoever to the electorate, should have an unelected house has once more clearly—if rather painfully—been made?

Will the member take an intervention?

I am grateful to Alex Cole-Hamilton for giving way, and I hear what he says, but I am curious as to whether he will at any point give up on the moral equivalence that he seems to be drawing between the two Governments concerned. One Government appears to be restricting our powers, and the other Government—or rather, the other Parliament—seems to have to pick up the pieces from that.

Will the member give way?

Happy new year, Presiding Officer.

I recognise the considerable work of the CEEAC Committee, which reported in October on the changing constitutional relationships in the UK. In its report, the committee concludes diplomatically that

“whereas constitutional change prior to EU-exit was implemented across the UK on a largely consensual basis this has not been the case after EU-exit.”

That goes to the heart of the matter. The kinds of changes that we have seen to the way that devolution works are not the product, as previous changes were, of some kind of conversation between the UK Government and its counterparts in Edinburgh and Cardiff, but are the work of a UK Government to which the previous political consensus about devolution does not now wholly extend.

It is as well to note that in the view of Professor Jim Gallagher, the former director general for devolution at the UK Cabinet Office, the UK constitution—in so far as there actually is one—has now been “stretched beyond breaking point” by Brexit.

One concrete example of all that, which other members have discussed, is the Sewel convention. From the re-establishment of this Parliament in 1999, right up until the Brexit referendum, the convention was engaged more than 140 times. Only once in that period did the UK Parliament even attempt to legislate in a devolved area without Scotland’s consent. The Sewel convention is now, however, clearly history: Westminster now regularly seeks to make law in devolved areas, regardless of what Scotland’s elected Parliament might think.

When that is taken together with other developments, we see that there is now a clear trend: we now see the UK Government spending, in devolved areas, public money that would, in the past, have unquestioningly been left to this Parliament to allocate. The United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 and the Subsidy Control Act 2020 place effective restrictions on Holyrood’s agency to do things differently—a restriction that has, apparently, been endorsed today by Alexander Stewart—and we have seen a section 35 order made to prevent royal assent being given to a Scottish act.

Then, we have the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023, which—to be fair—eventually had its so-called automatic sunset clause abandoned when the UK Government finally realised that it was about to unpick so much of the UK and Scots statute books that it would threaten a legislative meltdown.

It is not easy to avoid the impression that, even after 25 years, elements of the Westminster machine continue not to fully understand devolution. Interestingly, the CEEAC Committee report points out that the lack of clear structures for governance of England contributes somewhat to that on-going confusion.

Members should have seen the warning signs some time ago, when it became clear that Westminster was regularly unclear about whether it was speaking as the English Parliament or the UK Parliament. An early example was when the then Speaker of the House of Commons, John Smith, said, on receipt from us of the “Articles of Union” in 1707, that

“we have catch’d Scotland and will bind her fast”.

I quote that remark because it betrays a view that in some quarters has not been entirely consigned to history, and which certainly has an impact on the way in which the rules of devolution shift mid-game in our own day. Indeed, Professor Rawlings told the committee:

“there was profound ambivalence on the part of the UK Government as to the extent to which the other Administrations had a legitimate part to play in the governance of the UK. Without that shared understanding of what the roles of the various Administrations could be, productive intergovernmental relations were not likely.”—[Official Report, Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee, 9 March 2023; c 20.]

Anyone might have hoped that there would be—as there was in the committee, on the report—political consensus in the chamber that the pressures on this Parliament from Westminster since Brexit do not represent good government, regardless of what our individual differing constitutional politics might be. Indeed, there was a time when even the Tory party promoted people who, although they were politically unionist, would stand up for Scotland’s distinctive institutions and her right to pursue policy differently. Sir Walter Scott and John Buchan are conspicuous examples of that tradition, although I concede that they are by no means the most recent.

These days, however, the refrain from the Tories in here, with a number of honourable exceptions, is to ask why Scotland should ever do anything differently from England—a question that is, tellingly, never posed the other way around. Meanwhile, in the UK Government, we have a Secretary of State for Scotland whose view of this Parliament is, I am afraid, perhaps more dismissive than that of any of his predecessors in that office since the first Earl of Seafield.

Constitutional reform is supposed to be about first principles, but that is not how constitutional change works in the UK. Layer upon layer of new and byzantine qualifications to devolution have been laid on one another in an effort to square the Brexit circle.

This Parliament and the Senedd in Wales are not even considerations in the UK Government’s mind in any of this. It is as well that we all just say that.

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the roll-out of its new carer support payment in the Western Isles and other pilot areas. (S6O-02913)

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I seek your guidance on whether Mr Kerr has crossed the line between criticising an individual and casting doubt on the efficacy and propriety of the processes of this Parliament.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I voted no, but I am unclear whether that was registered.