Mr. Michael Russell:

Thank you very much for the wide range of questions. I will do my best to try to address most of them. They fall into natural groupings. I will say something about UK Government and its function. I will say something about the processes, including intra-UK and legislative consent processes. I realise the detail will not be completely familiar to committee members. I will try to address some of the other issues, especially those relating to the Single Market and the customs union.

I will start with a quotation from the French Ambassador to the USA. We are swapping quotations this afternoon which is no great harm. He pointed out rather pithily that he could not understand how the cause of free trade was being furthered by the UK Government if it was abandoning the biggest free trade bloc in the work and 53 free trade agreements. There is no sense to this. Anyone who tries to struggle with it on the basis of reason will have to give up. There is no sense to this.

There has been a long-term campaign, by a small number of people to start with, to leave the EU. They hanker after a past that never existed. That campaign has continued to grow. It has been fed, often by the tabloid newspapers, and in certain parts of the UK it has been successful, although not in all the parts. In Scotland, 62% voted to remain compared to 38% who voted to leave. I think the remain percentage would be certainly in the high 60s now. I have no wish to play it down, but in some areas and sectors there were genuine complaints about the EU.

For example, I represent many fishing communities. There was a very strong feeling that the Common Fisheries Policy had failed those communities and I agree with them. It had failed those communities and it is not a policy that we could accept with equanimity. It would have to change very substantially in the future. However, there are many other policies that work particularly well and the general purpose of the EU has succeeded. It is important to remember when the UK joined the EU in the 1970s, it had two failed applications. When it joined at the third attempt, it did so out of economic necessity because it was almost an economic basket case. If we look at the figures, we can see that productivity and GDP grew. This was overwhelmingly a good thing for the UK economy. By extension, one would have to say that leaving must overwhelmingly be a bad thing.

In respect of the first question addressed by Deputy Durkan in terms of what the benefits of this are, they are entirely illusory. There are people who will go around telling us that there will be all these wonderful free trade agreements that will be possible and that this is not true in the EU. If this was true, why would Germany be one of the most successful trading nations in the world? There is no such restraint nor are all these countries queuing up to do these trade deals. India is a very good example. The argument has always been that India does not have a trade agreement with the EU and has, therefore, been held back in some way by the EU and the UK will do one. The holding back has been the UK's problem, not the EU's problem. It is the UK that has been the difficulty in securing that.

When the Prime Minister went to India last year, she went on the basis that she would find some pot of gold. She came away empty handed because the Indian deal will be dependent on an increase in migration. Migration is the ideé fixeof the Tory Party. It cannot accept migration so that deal cannot be done. We find again and again that this is the situation. This is why one of the more worrying aspects of this is the attempt to take powers to Westminster that should rightly be in Scotland and Wales because they will require things to trade away. They will require agriculture to trade away. The issues relating to access by Brazilian beef are issues that they will attempt to trade away in order to get advantage so this is a really serious set of circumstances. So on the issue of advantages, I must say there are no great advantages. This will not be a beneficial process. Senator Richmond was right. There is no such thing as a good Brexit. The Prime Minister uses the term all the time. It does not exist.

When one starts with that position, one must begin to go into some detail about what the alternatives are. I think we are all agreed that the only acceptable next step, which is not as good, would be Single Market and customs union membership. I do not believe rationality will kick in any time soon. Senator Coghlan is hopeful but I do not see that happening because this is an ideological battle. This is a battle for the soul of the Conservative Party, the most successful governing party in the world. No other party has held government longer. It is about the survival of the Conservative Party and in those circumstances, it cannot survive if it splits completely on this so there will be a fudge - a continuing fudge. This fudge will go on. I do not expect there to be much clarity about the final deal from the UK Government. I know it is very frustrating for the governments of the 27 member states to negotiate with people who will not say what they want because if they say what they want, they will automatically alienate half of their own people.

We suffer the same problem. We are negotiating. I come to intra-UK negotiations. We are negotiating with a UK Government that does not know what it wants. It knows what it does not want. I was very intrigued to see that this was apparently the summation of Michel Barnier's conversations with my opposite number in the UK Government, David Davis, this week, which was that when he sat down, he heard a great deal about what it did not want but when he got up, he still did not know what it did want. That is what we are facing so we have a serious set of difficulties.

Deputy Haughey asked about the relationship in negotiation. It is very poor. We endeavour to build it. We have been endeavouring to build it for the past 18 months. We have not really got very far and the reason is because the main vehicle is the Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations). I will not go into the full detail of the joint ministerial structure. Suffice to say that it was established at the time of devolution in 1999 to make sure devolved administrations had some sort of formal contact and context with the UK Government. By and large, it has been a complete failure. Lots of parliamentary committees and academics have examined it. It has no great strengths. It has no dispute resolution procedure, or none worth having. The UK Government decides the dispute resolution procedures but as the dispute is usually with the UK Government, it is scarcely fair. I think any of its committees have only met twice since 1999 outside London. It is always chaired by a Minister from the UK Government. I have been a member on and off of various parts of it. I attended one meeting of the Joint Ministerial Committee on Europe in London which was attended by 23 Ministers from the UK Government, the Welsh First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, and I. This was hardly fair or an equity of arms.

The structure does not work but there is nothing else. We established a new part of it called the Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations), which had a very clear written remit. The two most important parts of it were to seek to agree the terms of the Article 50 letter. We never saw the Article 50 letter. I am a member of it. It never happened. We were meant to meet every month. We met four times and then it stopped meeting because if it had continued to meet, my Welsh counterpart, Mark Drakeford, and I would have had to see the letter and we were never shown it.

The committee was weakened by Northern Ireland not being present. At the first two meetings, the Northern Irish representatives were Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness. They were very important members and saw it as very important. When Mr. McGuinness became ill, a number of other representatives came for two meetings and then they stopped coming. That does weaken the committee. I agree entirely with Senator Leyden that something has to happen. There must be an Administration because it is weakening the possibility of moving forward. That committee did not meet from February 2017 until the second week in October 2017 so it went without a meeting during that period. It met again on 12 December last year and we are still waiting for another meeting. I pay tribute to Damien Green who, as chair of that committee with responsibility for devolution, was making progress. He was streamlining it and trying to get it to work but we now have another Minister to replace him, David Lidington, and we do not know how this will work.

The second objective of this committee was to have oversight of the negotiations in so far as they addressed the devolved competencies. That committee is now vital because it should be meeting on a regular basis - monthly or more regularly - and discussing the negotiating process but it is not doing so. This reflects upon the basic core weakness of the situation, which is that the UK Government is paralysed by the ideological dispute and is, therefore, unable to move forward in a rational or constructive way. Therefore, everything suffers from that.

We recognise what we hear of the problems of negotiation with the EU 27 from our own experience. We do not want this to happen. We would much rather we were not here but if it is going to happen, it must happen in an intelligent and rational way. Scotland is the nation of the Enlightenment. We try to bring a rational and evidence-based view of policy and it is not happening. If the analysis carried out by the UK Government is the same as our own, it shows that this is pretty disastrous and, therefore, the only sensible thing would be to go for the Single Market and the customs union. The Irish Government knows that. We know that. The UK analysis knows that. The other 26 members apart from Ireland know this. Why then would the UK Government not accept that this is the case and find a way to do so because it also squares the circle in terms of negotiation? It makes the context of negotiation actually work.

I will address very briefly some of the other points that have been raised. I think I have covered some of them. I will not go into the minutiae of people who marry dukes or duchesses - I have never aspired to either. I will come to tourism because I think it is important. There are three areas where Brexit will touch almost everybody to a greater or lesser extent. One of them is people, usually labour shortages. There will be a massive shortage in hospitality. We already have a shortage. We know that there is a Europe-wide shortage of agricultural labour. This is why Ukrainian workers are working in Germany. That will continue to be the case. There will be shortages in a variety of other sectors. EU nationals in the labour market in Scotland are a bit like a horseshoe. There is a predominance in lower-skilled jobs and highly skilled jobs and something in between.

We have five of the world's top 200 universities, which is unique for a country of our size, but 25% of staff are EU nationals so we are very heavily dependent on EU labour. In the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, the area I represent, one fifth of the workforce will retire in the next five to ten years, amounting to just over 80,000 people. We are not producing people to replace them so we either have migration or we lose services, businesses and other things.

People are the first issue and the second is regulation. One cannot be part of something for almost half a century and not have an entwined regulatory system. Over 90% of our food standards regulation is European. How do we disentangle that? The third issue is money. There is a series of fiscal flows, one way or the other, and it will be difficult to unravel those to give guarantees for the future. In the area of agricultural payments, we believe Pillar 1 payments are guaranteed but there is no guarantee at all for Pillar 2 payments so rural development moneys will disappear for a period, which will be disastrous, leaving aside a range of economic and social policy. There are big issues in all three areas.

Senator Richmond asked a number of very important questions. As for timescale, March 2019 is a date for leaving but the Prime Minister, who started off saying there would be no transition and no implementation period, now says the Government wants a transition period and is trying to negotiate it. If it gets one, the EU has suggested the end of 2020, which fits with the financial framework. I do not think anybody realistically believes the work can be finished by then so there is an indeterminate period in which something may or may not happen. There is no point avoiding a cliff edge if one is going to fall off it in 2020 so we need to find a way through. So far the Government is refusing to talk about it and that is a problem because at some stage it will have to say we are leaving formally in 2019. After that we will go into limbo, for example, in respect of the fishing negotiations where we will not be part of the annual quota discussions. That is a much worse situation. There will be a period in which things will change but we do not know what that period is. The driver of this, as ever, will be internal UK politics and the UK Government will have to go to the people before May 2022, if not sooner, so it will have to have something it believes it can talk about before then.

Some of the work Mr. John Webster and his team are doing to build businesses and investment is a good foundation for the Celtic arc. I have seen many proposals for fixed links and in the 19th century there was a proposal for a railway tunnel between the North of Ireland and Campbeltown. I believe it is a great idea as it would open up my constituency. A lot of talking needs to be done on that and recent coverage indicates it should happen. As a local MSP, I would support it.

We need to be honest about consent. We cannot veto the withdrawal formally, though the UK Government could decide that if we do not give legislative consent at the last amending stage, namely, Report Stage in the House of Lords, it could put the Bill through anyway. Legislative consent motions apply to parts of Bills so the UK Government could come to the devolved administration and identify the parts for which it required legislative consent, on the basis of legislating for our competence. If we refused to do so, convention demands that those parts of the Bill be dropped. What would probably happen is that the UK Government would impose those parts of the Bill, but the House of Lords seems to be increasingly of the view that a refusal of a legislative consent motion would be so serious that it would not pass the Bill. If that were to happen, it would be very problematic for the UK Government. We do not want a cliff edge and would rather agree a legislative consent motion but the Government knows what it requires to allow us to do that. There are no ifs and buts and we have spelt it out in words of one syllable. We put amendments forward which the Government voted down so now it has to tell us what amendments are acceptable. If it cannot do that, we could pass our own Bill and the Welsh and Scottish governments are considering doing just that. The Bills have been drafted and they are with our presiding officers for legislative scrutiny. That is not the best solution and is probably a more complicated solution but may ultimately be necessary. The UK Government would then have to veto the Bills and pass its own so it is a constitutional crisis. Having said that, I contend that we have been in a constitutional crisis for the past year and it is only getting worse.

As Senator Richmond said, it is a disaster but the rational response is to find a way forward. Membership of the Single Market and customs union is the way forward and we need to keep saying it, even as the Prime Minister, in order to appease one wing of her party, says it should not happen while others in her party say it might happen. It is the only possible compromise that is left. We have been offering it for well over a year and far from being hardline, we have been trying to negotiate. It may well be, as Deputy Haughey said, that at the end of the process there will have to be a vote across the UK and there are a number of proposals for a second referendum, which is not unknown in this country. It could not ask people the same question but it could ask them if they agreed with a negotiated deal. In those circumstances we would have to have an arrangement which recognised that, if Scotland voted to reject a settlement and the rest of the UK accepted it, we would have to find a mechanism to take us forward. We could not repeat the crisis we are in now, with Scotland having voted to stay in the EU while England voted to leave. As Senator Coghlan heard me say in Killarney, in the end it is the people who will decide and that is how it has to be, whether it is through the ballot box or a referendum. It will probably be the most serious decision they will have to make in a long time. For our part, we regard the whole thing as one that must produce a result other than the one the UK Government wants.