EU Exit Preparations: Ferry Contracts — House of Commons, 2019-03-05
Topic: International Affairs
Peter Grant (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Absolutely. The single biggest example of incompetence coupled with complacency—it must be said that a lot of the official Opposition were guilty of this—was triggering article 50 and setting a two-year deadline that we cannot unilaterally get out of, after which we will leave without a deal, before the Government had any idea what no deal meant. It is notable that, although the Prime Minister’s mantra was, "No deal is better than a bad deal," we just heard the Secretary of State announce that, two years after the referendum, they suddenly discovered that no deal would be a lot more disruptive than they realised. I will just mention in passing that when the Government discovered that a no-deal Brexit would be much worse than they realised, they were allowed to change their minds, have another think about it and do something that they had not done before, but 60 million citizens of these nations have not been allowed to have another think and perhaps another go at a decision now that they have been told what they could not have been expected to know in June 2016 about the disastrous consequences of no deal, because Her Majesty’s Government were blithely unaware of it until August or September last year We are told that the reason why the Government brought in this new company was the desire to support a new start-up business. Well, bravo. I would always support that, but it completely annihilates the claim that the reason for urgency was that this was a potential life-or-death medical supplies requirement. If there is a service that cannot be allowed to fail because people’s lives would be at risk, who in their right mind would give the opportunity to undertake that work to somebody who had never done the job before? I am sure that health services and health authorities all over the United Kingdom do what they can to give work experience and job opportunities to young people who have not had too great a time at school, but they would not under any circumstances put them behind the wheel of an ambulance with a blue light and ask them to go and save lives, but that is, in effect, what the Secretary of State is telling us the Government did with this contract. Either the contract was innocuous enough that we could afford to give it to a business that did not exist, because nothing would go wrong if the whole thing collapsed, or it was a life-or-death contract that, for reasons of urgency, had to be signed very quickly. If that was the case, it was an act of utter folly to award it to anyone who did not already have an impeccable record in the running of ferry services I commend the efforts of the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) and the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) to protect the Secretary of State by saying, "It wasn’t the Secretary of State who was incompetent; it was everyone else in the Government." My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West has given us the way out of that What does the fact that this Parliament does not have the authority to table a vote of no confidence in the Secretary of State for Transport tell us about this model of parliamentary democracy? We do not have the authority to instruct a Prime Minister to remove a Minister from office, and we do not have a say over who the Prime Minister appoints or does not appoint to any post in the Government. We must be one of the very few allegedly democratic Parliaments in Europe that does not get a say before Ministers are appointed. Ministers in the Scottish Government have the same Crown appointment as Ministers in the UK Government, but the First Minister of Scotland will not put them forward until they have been agreed by a motion of the Scottish Parliament. The First Minister herself did not accept the commission from Her Majesty until her appointment had been recommended and agreed by a vote of the Scottish Parliament. Maybe that is one of the 1,001 improvements to democracy we need in this place, so that in future Ministers are appointed and unappointed not at the whim of the Prime Minister but by a vote of their peers in this Parliament and can removed from office when this Parliament loses confidence in them, rather than only when the Prime Minister decides they have become too much of an embarrassment Throughout this Brexit shambles, any number of serious issues have been raised—life-or-death issues, issues with the potential to devastate our economy, issues such as citizens’ rights that have the potential to ruin the lives of millions of our fellow citizens, issues with the potential to wipe out entire sectors of industry and put tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people on the dole—and each and every time the knee-jerk, first-choice response from Her Majesty’s Government has been to throw it back at the person raising the concern. If it comes from Labour Members, they are told, "Well, if you lot had been in power, it would have been an even worse disaster." What kind of a way is that to run a Government? I can understand why a lot of people would have concerns if the current Leader of the Opposition became Prime Minister—I would have my concerns as well—but if the only thing the Government can say to defend themselves is that the Government-in-waiting would be even worse, they are a Government well past their sell-by date My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West has repeatedly and rightly raised valid concerns—I hope she will continue to raise them because she has right on her side—and the response from numerous Ministers has been ridicule: she did not know what she was talking about, she was trying to make trouble, she was just an SNP Member, the SNP did not want to leave the EU anyway so how could they possibly have any good ideas for making Brexit less damaging? That would be unacceptable for a Government with a majority of 150. For a Government who threw away their majority and do not command majority support in the House or the nations, it is a despicable way to behave. If that is the best they can do, not only the Secretary of State but the whole Government have to go.