UK’s Withdrawal from the EU — House of Commons, 2019-02-27
Topic: International Affairs
Peter Grant (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): It is easy to ask what has changed since the last debate, and the one before that, and the one before that. I was tempted to talk only about what has changed, because I could quite easily fit "nothing" into four minutes. However, something important has changed. The clock has changed. Cliff-edge day is getting nearer and nearer. The Prime Minister insists that this is not a deliberate, cynical and criminally reckless ploy to run down the clock and blackmail us into voting for a rotten deal as the only alternative to no deal at all. I do not believe that, and I doubt that many other Members in the Chamber do either I have been accused tonight of not understanding democratic deficits. I have visited the Dutch Parliament, and I know that Dutch Members of Parliament are able to vote every time a Minister goes to the European Council to tell the Minister how to vote. We are not able to do that. I serve in a Parliament nearly three quarters of whose Members are appointed by patronage and favour, not by democratic mandate. I know about democratic deficits. I have never been alive at a time when my country has voted for a Conservative Government, but Conservative Governments have ruled over me, and misruled over me, for more than half my life. No one in this place is going to tell me, or five and a half million of my fellow Scots, that we do not understand what a democratic deficit means I must point out to the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham)—although I do not know whether he is still in the Chamber—that our amendment is not redundant. The Prime Minister has not promised to give us a chance to take no deal off the table. She has offered to give us a chance to take it off the table on 29 March. I want it off the table on 30 March, 31 March, and every day from then till kingdom come. It is not acceptable that the Prime Minister has refused to confirm that that will happen if the House rejects no deal for a second time. We have already rejected it, and it is still on the table. How is that for a democratic deficit We have seen so many principles of good government thrown out of the window by a Government who now seem almost to be playing the game that winning a vote is all that matters. It does not matter what is in the vote. It does not matter if they win a vote to take us over a cliff edge, as long as they win it. My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford)—who I do not think is in the Chamber now—brilliantly described the choice that we are being offered: she said that the Prime Minister’s deal takes us over the cliff edge, but with luck we might have time to knit ourselves a parachute on the way down, before we hit the ground This is not a good enough choice. Those who want to force Parliament into such a non-choice are not being democratic. They are seeking to frustrate the clearly expressed will of the House. The House does not want to be forced to choose between a rotten deal and no deal. Some of us have another choice before us. Scotland will never accept the xenophobic, isolationist and divisive future that the Government are trying to force us into. Scotland has an alternative future, and that future will be claimed by the people of Scotland before very long.