I would have to see the details of what my hon. Friend the Chair of PACAC said. I would have to study it before responding, but I must stress that creating more powers is not ripping up the devolution settlement. That is not the case. The founding father of devolution, Donald Dewar, a Scottish Labour Member—there are not many left in this place these days—stated that devolution was a journey, not a one-way street. We need to have a discussion about where powers are best held, and that is what we are doing here today.
What is most remarkable about these arguments and the amendments that have been tabled by the SNP today is that they are drafted by parties that want to take Scotland and Wales back into the European Union. The SNP made much yesterday, and has again today, of the Competition and Markets Authority and the Office for the Internal Market, while the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) spoke about autocratic Ministers of the Crown spending in Scotland. The hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) yesterday decried the need for the Office for the Internal Market, claiming it was unnecessary, undemocratic and appointed, and complaining that it would
“decide whether a Bill met the test of the internal market, putting permanent constraints on the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and the Northern Irish Assembly.”—[Official Report, 15 September 2020; Vol. 680, c. 248.]
That is quite remarkable from a party determined to take Scotland back into the European Union, but then maybe I missed the complaints from SNP Members when, in August 2015, the unelected and unaccountable European Commission suspended the payment of more than £45 million to the Scottish Government, under the European social fund, due to accounting “irregularities” and because it had not been given specific assurances from the Scottish Government as to how the money was being spent.
I must also, then, have missed hon. Members’ complaints to the—again—unelected and unaccountable European Commission when it threatened to fine the Scottish Government £125 million for botching up the farm payments system in 2015-16. I hate to break it to the SNP, but the restrictions placed on member states in order to preserve the internal market of the European Union are much—inordinately—more prohibitive than anything we are proposing here today.
After Brexit—indeed, because of Brexit—the Scottish Government will be free to spend, and indeed mis-spend, and free to exercise their expanded and increasing powers as they see fit. Nothing in the Bill threatens that in any way whatsoever—no powers to curb spending or cut revenue, no powers to fine for messing up payment systems, more money, more power, protecting jobs. What on earth is it in the Bill that the SNP could be
objecting to so much? Why on earth is the SNP so happy to accept EU cash, with all the rules and regulations around spending and how it is spent, but will not allow the British Government to spend directly on specific projects that will benefit the lives of individual Scots?