WITH just over five months to go until the end of the Brexit transition period, many of our fears of leaving the EU are beginning to come true.

Just this week we saw the institutionally racist Home Office use the cover of Brexit to ramp up its brutal hostile environment policy. A few short weeks after clapping for carers, the Home Secretary Priti Patel has proposed a new immigration system that would bar carers from moving here.

Workers who were recognised for the essential nature of the work they do every day of every year are to be valued by what they get in their pay packet and not the huge contribution they make to our society.

Donald Macaskill of Scottish Care was quite right to brand the move as a slap in the face for the care sector.

It’s clear that there is much work to do to improve pay and conditions in the sector, but it’s also obvious to anyone who is paying attention that with an ageing population, it will become even more important in future that we welcome people to Scotland to support our public services.

While pushing the EU away with both hands, even to the baffling extent of opting out of a common programme to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, the UK Government is simultaneously trying to embrace Trump’s America and tighten its grip on the devolved nations.

The very purpose of devolution within the UK is to allow the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to have more say in the everyday matters that concern them most. Powers over the environment, agriculture, food and animal welfare, for example, are devolved and therefore the preserve of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government.

Now the UK Government is threatening to grab those powers back. Its proposals for an “internal market” in the UK would hand Boris Johnson, not MSPs at Holyrood, the powers to determine how those powers would be used.

What that means in practice is that when England decides to reduce its food quality and animal welfare standards in order to secure that Trump trade deal with the US, it will allow chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-treated beef and foods grown with pesticides that are illegal in the EU to be sold here.

The Scottish Parliament will be stripped of any power to diverge. Instead Johnson’s Government will grant unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Whitehall a veto on every single piece of Scottish Parliament legislation.

At a time when we should be supporting the proud producers of Scotland’s food and agricultural products to improve standards, they will be forced to reduce the current high standards and high quality in order to compete with a flood of low-quality, cheap, cruelly produced food.

The Tories have never liked the idea of devolution in Scotland, as they know they’ll never be in government here, instead favouring centralised rule from London. And while the blatant disregard for democracy in Scotland is not a surprise, it is a disgrace.

Jackson Carlaw, the Tory leader in Scotland, himself campaigned against devolution and is now supporting his Westminster colleagues in orchestrating a power grab that undermines our devolved powers as well as Scotland’s farmers and our food and drink producers.

There is no good outcome down this path for Scotland. Less democratic accountability, less say in those things that matter to us, and a wedge driven in separating us from our friends in the EU.

It’s quite telling that the UK Government wants to leave the EU with its high food, environmental and welfare standards and has now even given up pretending that we won’t be forced to accept chlorinated chicken.

And just as we’re being dragged from the EU it will be implementing a European Green New Deal to support the recovery from this crisis and begin to respond to the climate emergency, giving young people of Europe hope that they can build a better future.

At the same time young people in Scotland are stripped of their right to move, live, work and study in 27 other EU countries. And instead of a Green New Deal, our recovery is to be built on a discount at Nando’s.

The fact that the UK Government is incompetent, corrupt and unaccountable isn’t really a surprise. Scotland can do so much better with independence.

Polls show that more people than ever recognise the urgent need for Scotland to take its own direction and that we are on course to elect the biggest ever group of Scottish Greens MSPs.

Scottish Greens have had MSPs in the Scottish Parliament since it first opened its doors in 1999. We have played a constructive, challenging and effective role in pushing government beyond its comfort zone to tackle the biggest issues, and we’ll be working hard all the way to polling day in May to ensure we play an even bigger role as Scotland continues on its path to independence.