Pete Wishart
SNP MP FOR PERTH & PERTHSHIRE NORTH More big issues under discussion in Westminster
Hard Brexit. Trump’s inauguration. America First. Trident failure.
Just a small taste of what has been going on in Westminster and beyond in the past couple of weeks.
Theresa May confirmed what many of us have feared, that the UK is headed firmly for a hard Brexit.
Not just out of the institutions of the European Union but out of the single market as well.
During Prime Minister’s Questions, my colleague Angus Robertson challenged Theresa May on whether the prospect of Scotland losing around 80,000 jobs on leaving the EU would be“a price worth paying to deliver her Little Britain Brexit”.
This figure comes from Scotland’s leading economic forecaster who also predicts that real wages will fall by £2,000 per year for someone on average full-time earnings.
Another of my SNP colleagues led an opposition day debate on the particular impact that Brexit would have on Scotland’s rural economy.
UK government ministers are already breaking promises made during the Brexit campaign and adding unsettling confusion with their contradictory comments about the long term future for farm support.
Indeed, there is mounting evidence that this is already having an adverse impact on the rural economy.
Shortly after the Prime Minister announced that she wants to take the UK out of the single European market, the Scottish Parliament voted by a large cross-party majority to remain in it, just as a large majority of people in a Scotland voted to remain in the European Union.
If the UK really is a‘family of nations’as we are so often glibly told, then she will have to start respecting Scotland’s view on this.
If we do leave the single market, we will need to set up new individual deals with all our trading partners and that will not be quick, easy or beneficial.
Trump may have said that the UK will be at the head of the queue in terms of making a deal but the message from his brash and blustery inauguration speech was clear - America is entering an intensely protectionist phase and a good deal for him will not necessarily be a good one for us.
Nevertheless, I don’t think we should be firing nuclear weapons at Florida!
It is extremely worrying that the UK government appears to have withheld information about a serious malfunction in a Trident test launch last year – just weeks ahead of a parliamentary vote on Trident renewal.
Theresa May failed to share this information about the incident with MPs despite it raising fundamental questions over the safety of the technology.
The SNP has called for a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding this failed test.
Details on what happened, who knew what and when, and why the House of Commons was kept in the dark, should be published.
The lack of transparency on an issue of such importance has set a worrying precedent for the future.