BREXIT has disrupted devolution in the UK and seen a reduction in the extent of devolved powers, a political expert has said.
Professor Dan Wincott, the Blackwell Law and Society Chair at Cardiff University, further said that the idea of obtaining consent from devolved admins had “gradually been degraded” by the Tory government.
Wincott’s statements may give the lie to claims from Tory figures such as Scottish Secretary Alister Jack, who said that post-Brexit laws represented a “power surge” for devolved administrations.
Jack insisted previously that the UK Internal Market Act, introduced in the wake of Brexit, was not a power grab, with then business secretary Alok Sharma claiming it represented “the biggest transfer of powers in the history of devolution”.
However, Wincott told an audience in Glasgow that it was “very hard” to describe what the UK Government had done as providing a “power surge”.
Speaking at A UK in a Changing Europe event on Scotland’s constitutional future, the Cardiff professor said: “The UK’s EU membership served as a kind of scaffold for devolution, supporting devolution, allowing some divergence but within the constraints of the EU system …
“Any kind of Brexit was going to disrupt devolution, but it’s not so much Brexit per se as the way that Brexit has been implemented from [Westminster] that I think has been particularly disruptive and served as a kind of pivot in the trends around devolution, trends away from gradual growth to a kind of retrenchment of devolved powers.”
Wincott said that the UK Internal Market Act in practice created a “hyperactive” version of the EU’s internal market against which Brexiteer Tories in Westminster had raged.
He said: “This quote-unquote hard form of Brexit has had particularly disruptive consequences for devolution. Particularly important here I think has been the UK Internal Market Act, described by devolved politicians as a power grab.
“Members of the European Reform Group, enthusiastic Brexiteers at Westminster, thought of the EU’s internal market as a kind of device driving integration of the European market and perhaps helping to build EU-level political institutions. The UK Internal Market Act looks like a kind of imagined version of that system rendered especially powerful.
“The UK Internal Market Act, as well as providing for at the UK level economic regulation, gives the UK authorities powers to spend money and make policy in a range of areas that are traditionally understood to be devolved, and to make those interventions directly. So it’s almost like it’s a kind of hyperactive version of the EU system.
“But it’s not just the UK Internal Market Act. There is a whole series of bits of UK-level legislation which are generally speaking giving more power to executives and particularly giving more power to the UK executive to make policy and to make interventions in policy areas that are traditionally seen as devolved.”
The Internal Market Act contains controversial laws that mean that anything which passes regulatory hurdles in one part of the UK can be sold in any other part.
This means that if England legalises some forms of genetically modified food, as it plans to, those foods will appear unlabelled on Scotland's shop shelves.
