How Boris Johnson has once again shut down MP scrutiny of his government

Our last piece of work will be a report on why we think the future relationship agreement continues to require detailed parliamentary scrutiny. The deal reached is only a starting position and there is a lot of work to be done to fill in the gaps and to address the problems it has created.

The committee’s unanimous plea to be allowed to continue its work fell on deaf ears and Jacob Rees-Mogg has insisted that it ceases to exist. I suspect many readers of this column will wonder why they should shed a tear for any Westminster committee. So, let me try to explain.

For so long as there are still Scottish MPs at Westminster, scrutinising the UK Government is a big part of our job. It is what our constituents expect, and often what we uncover can advance the cause of independence by highlighting the British Government’s incompetence and chicanery. Select committees, before which hapless ministers can be brought and cross examined, are one of the best ways of doing this.

Highlights of the committee’s evidence sessions have included some memorable grillings of David Davis, Steve Barclay and Michael Gove; a magisterial performance by Mike Russell which put backbench Brexiteers in their place at a time when they were still dreaming of taking control on the bridge of the Titanic; and the revelation that granting a ferry contract to Seaborne Freight, the company with no ferries, broke the law on competitive tendering.

The committee has produced numerous forensic reports analysing some of the most important issues thrown up by Brexit, including the implications for peace in Ireland and the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU after Brexit.

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Membership of the committee over the last four years has afforded SNP MPs including myself, Peter Grant and Philippa Whitford top-level access to politicians and diplomats from across the EU and a chance to put Scotland’s case internationally. Our contacts books will come in handy over the next few years as an independent Scotland negotiates our future relationship with the EU.

The committee has been scrapped just as we were about to take evidence from Gove and Frost, the very people who negotiated the agreement which is throwing up such horrendous problems for Scotland’s seafood industry and causing chaos on the UK’s border with the EU and the new sea border between Northern Ireland and Britain.

Jacob Rees-Mogg wants to stop the committee from continuing its scrutiny of the agreement because he knows the more we look at it, the more problems we will uncover. For example, last week an expert legal witness confirmed that, contrary to claims by Priti Patel, the UK will not be a safer place under the law enforcement and judicial co-operation parts of the agreement. Instead, as senior police officers and security experts have warned for years, our access to vital databases in the fight against crime has been lost or significantly restricted.

I think we can all agree that hamstringing or disbanding committees which might uncover a government’s misdemeanours is not a good look.

But this is just another example of parliamentary scrutiny being stymied by Boris Johnson. Why should we be surprised that someone who was prepared to suspend Parliament is prepared to scrap a troublesome committee?

It is vital that SNP MPs find other ways to get to grips with the detail in the future relationship agreement because understanding and monitoring the development of the new relationship between the UK and the EU will be important from the point of view of developing SNP policy on Scotland’s future relationship with the EU.

WHEN the next independence campaign proper starts, there will be a close focus on both how Scotland might rejoin the EU and how we will manage our trade relationship with England and Wales thereafter.

Earlier this week, I attended a seminar organised by the European Movement in Scotland, the Scottish Centre for European Relations and the Faculty of Advocates on the subject of the issues and challenges for an independent Scotland in the EU. The speakers were all experts on EU enlargement and accession, or EU constitutional law. The event can be viewed at youtu.be/uxz-yCh1zws

There were several very important takeaways from this meeting for SNP policy-making. In order to be eligible to rejoin the EU Scotland will need to fulfil legal, political and economic criteria. These are known as the Copenhagen Criteria. As has been widely reported this week, Dr Barbara Lippert, the director of research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin took the view that, judged against these criteria, Scotland would go to the top of the list in terms of eligibility.

However, it is important to understand that by that she did not mean there is a queue for membership as such. Professor James Ker-Lindsay of the London School of Economics explained that’s not how EU enlargement works – if a state is ready and there is the political will then the state joins.

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Accession for Scotland could be fast and there is no question of Westminster having any say in that because the EU is very clear that third countries don’t get to choose so they will ignore any threatening voices from London.

We were told that Brexit has been a real game-changer because inside the EU it is now much better understood why Scotland wants to be independent. However, we still need to establish a strong narrative about what we can offer to the EU project when we rejoin.

Dr Kirsty Hughes emphasised that Scotland needs to move quickly because the longer we are out of the EU ,and the more the UK diverges from EU law, the more areas will require to be revisited during Scotland’s accession negotiations. This view was echoed by others. So was the view of Tobias Lock, professor of law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, that a key consideration will be what will happen to the Anglo-Scottish border in terms of trade and persons crossing.

The knowledge gleaned by SNP MPs on the Brexit Select Committee about borders and how they operate to facilitate trade across Europe between EU and Non-EU countries and between EU and EEA countries will be invaluable here.

Finally, while the clear consensus was that for Scotland to be welcomed back into the EU we will need to secure our independence by a legal and constitutional process, significantly, it was also said that while any discussion of a Plan B should bear this in mind, it does not necessarily mean that we must replicate the way in which things were done in 2014. I look forward to expanding on this aspect of the discussion at the SNP National Assembly on January 24.

I also look forward to taking forward detailed work on SNP policy on Scotland’s future relationship with the EU, having already had some fruitful discussion about how this should be done with our new SNP policy convenor, Chris Hanlon.