DAVID Mundell has dismissed yesterday’s Holyrood vote on the Brexit power grab, saying MSPs didn’t understand what they were doing.
The Secretary of State for Scotland said the vote, which saw his party isolated, as Labour, the Lib Dems, and the Greens, backed the SNP government in refusing to give Theresa May's EU Withdrawal Bill consent, was too “technical” for anyone other than the Tories to understand.
Mundell told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland: “There did seem to be a fundamental misunderstanding among many of the MSPs [about] what this bill is about. It’s about a technical process of agreeing things that we’ve already agreed, and that’s why I find it almost incomprehensible that we’ve got into this debate around what’s really a very, very technical issue.”
The minister said he was disappointed by “all the constitutional hoo-ha, all the bickering and politicking”.
“I think people across Scotland, that’s what they want: they don’t want the bickering, they don’t want the hyperbole they saw in yesterday’s Scottish parliament debate,” he added.
Though Tuesday’s vote is not binding, it does put Theresa May into uncharted territory.
The vote forces Prime Minister to choose between respecting the will of the Scottish Parliament or ignoring MSPs and getting her EU Withdrawal Bill through Westminster.
The row centres over powers being repatriated from the EU to Britain after Brexit. All the governments have agreed there needs to be UK-wide frameworks for some of these powers, but there is disagreement over who has final say.
The Scottish Government insists that Holyrood must explicitly agree any changes to these UK wide frameworks, but the government in Whitehall believes this gives Edinburgh an effective veto.
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