I could not quote the legal detail, but I would think that if a company based in the UK did things like that, it could be taken to the Court of Session in Scotland or the High Court in England and found not to be complying with the law.
As a Scot and as an economist, I read Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”. It talks about comparative advantage, but before that, he wrote a document about the morals of competition. The good thing about the Bill is that it says, “We believe in competition.” We are not talking about pricing people out of the market entirely. We are saying that it must be morally justifiable as well as economically justifiable.
I want to finish with a response to one of my constituents, who, when it was reported that we were discussing the Bill, wrote in an e-mail blog: “What’s that got to do with creating employment in Scotland and your constituency?” The reality is that, if we can stop people using cheap labour, and particularly slave labour at the worst end, we give British companies the chance to compete better. That is why the BRC is behind the Bill. If there is a
voluntary code, the bad companies just will not comply, whereas if there is a mandatory code and if we can take people to law to enforce it, everyone must do the right thing or be held to account.