In the days after the Referendum, Nicola Sturgeon assembled a team to advise the Scottish Government on all aspects of Brexit. Academics, financial, legal and constitutional experts will be making sure that Sturgeon and her team get well-informed advice.
Former Lib Dem Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore, now an adviser with PwC, welcomed this move and said that the UK Government should do the same. The Herald has the story:
He praised the expertise of those who will be advising the First Minister.
“Everybody on that panel, you can see how they have earned their place, and they are also quite independent-minded.
“(For instance) Charles Grant, who is probably one of the most pre-eminent European experts in the UK and Europe, is the kind of guy who can go in and talk to the top officials and ministers anywhere on the continent.
“The First Minister and others deserve credit for having a broad range of people, who won’t just go along with a particular view.
“They are there to offer expertise and presumably also to challenge.”
He also expressed concern that civil servants will now have to focus a lot of their time and energies on Brexit potentially to the cost of other important policies, such as the devolution of new powers to Scotland.
Whitehall’s “bandwidth” is remarkably narrow, he said.
In “normal times” officials would regard the new powers included in the Scotland Act as their “first priority… because (the transfer) is huge and difficult. And the bandwidth for that has been squeezed.”
The Scottish Government panel will be led Glasgow University Principal Professor Anton Muscatelli.
The line up also includes Professor Anne Glover, the former chief scientific advisor to the president of the European Commission, David Frost, the chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association, who is currently fighting Scottish minister’s plans to introduce minimum alcohol pricing, and two of Scotland’s MEPs, Labour’s David Martin and Alyn Smith from the SNP.
The First Minister has also announced that membership of the panel will be flexible “to ensure that we have access to appropriate advice as it is required”.
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5 Comments
Good to see a former Lib Dem MP who doesn’t slag off everything the SNP do just for the sake of it. I do not know enough about their dastardly electoral conduct if such there is. All I can say a,s a onetime Clydeside resident, that whenever I hear their representatives speak in Parliament I am usually more impressed than otherwise.
A sensible and significant statement by Michael Moore which seems to have much in common with this from Shirley Williams here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/09/labour-tory-mps-talk?CMP=twt_a-politics_b-gdnukpolitics
What seems apparent is that people are moving steadily through to the “acceptance” stage of the five stages of grief. Here is Barbara Ellen, part of whose journey into rational acceptance is the thought of joining the Liberal Democrats https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/post-brexit-meltdown?CMP=twt_gu
From the outset I thought Brexit would win and from the outset I thought the Lib Dems would be well advised to consider in advance the most liberal form of Brexit. As the acceptance stage is reached by more and more people are asking the question Shirley asks – what is the best way of influencing Brexit?
Surely, as I have been suggesting here for a couple of months, this is seeking that the UK joins the EEA as a non-EU member safeguarding the four freedoms of the single market. Where Michael and Shirley are asking for a national panel to examine options, surely what the Party needs in parallel is a Lib Dem body to do this job. As one of its advisers I recommend Alex Marsh who has made a start @ Alex’s Archives.
@Bill le Breton “From the outset I thought Brexit would win and from the outset I thought the Lib Dems would be well advised to consider in advance the most liberal form of Brexit.”
At the beginning of the campaign I expected (and hoped) that Bremain would win, but by the end I was so frustrated by the dismal Bremain campaign that I placed my first ever bet. I made £300 from Brexit, so ever cloud has a silver lining! If even I could see the writing on the wall, I am so disappointed that our politicians seemed unable to make their case before the referendum and so unprepared for the outcome afterwards.
Lib Dems seem to have ignored your counsel with a knee-jerk reaction to seek to stay or rejoin the EU. It may be difficult for the party to resile from that and back EEA membership as a positive alternative: it could look like a repeat of the confusing and half-hearted support for the “miserable little compromise” of AV.
Does anyone have a list of the ‘committee’ of the ‘Remain’ campain. While I can happily place blame on both Cameron and Corbyn for fighting this campaign in a manner which put their Party first and the notional campaign a long way second, I do also feel that the national campaign was very poor indeed. Did Lib Dems have any direct line to it to try to make it more sensible? Was its failure only or principally due to the failure of the Labour and Conservatives leaderships to co-operate effectively or was there something more fundamental? The whole thing does appear to me to have had so many echoes of the doomed AV-YES campaign.
In reply to Peter: the commitment to campaign to rejoin the EU is absolutely right. Not making that commitment would be precisely the sort of trimming that landed us with eight MPs. This country is best in the EU. Any country outside the EU can apply to join it. Simples.
However, either there will be a snap election, or none till 2020. If a snap election resulted in a pro-EU majority, as it might, the Brexit vote would be seriously undermined before the UK’s exit was complete and a likely result would be a new referendum. If there is no snap election, we all have to live with several years outside the EU before having the remotest chance of returning to it. Thus, it’s simply a matter of Plan A and Plan B. There is no contradiction whatsoever between standing firm for EU membership in the medium term, and trying with all our skill to get the most Liberal solution outside the EU possible in the short term.
And while on Plan A and Plan B – I trust the Scottish party will soon have a position on where it will stand if there’s a second Scottish independence referendum offering EU membership outside the UK. It does not seem to me the answer should be obvious.