Covid laws: SNP/Green attempt to make emergency powers permanent should make democrats shudder – Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP

“Laws are like sausages,” Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck is thought to have said, “it’s better not to see them being made.”

Nicola Sturgeon must abandon plans to make some emergency Covid powers given to ministers permanent (Picture: Fraser Bremner/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

I’ve always wondered about that phrase. I suppose he was talking about the compromise that’s involved, the horse-trading and the time that’s usually taken up in their transit of Parliament (it usually takes about a year for a bill to go from first draft to law).

This may be true, but the effective scrutiny of laws as they are created is one of the most important jobs entrusted to parliamentarians. Unlike sausages, however, we need to pay close attention while they’re made.

As Covid began to sweep through the population in 2020, we moved into lockdown and in just three days the Scottish Parliament passed the Coronavirus (Scotland) Act.

The measures it contained were wide-ranging and conferred huge, unprecedented new powers on Scottish ministers. All in all, there were emergency powers to close schools, limit movement, empty prisons and enforce isolation.

As a liberal, I found it horrifying that we should hand such power to the government, but the threat of the emergency was itself huge and unprecedented.

Even back then, I was worried about over-reach by the SNP and make no bones about it, we opposition MSPs had to pay close attention.

Had we not done so, a government attempt to suspend trial by jury would have made it through. The SNP argued there would be no means of ensuring social distancing for jurors, but this step had not been taken by any other democratic nation on the planet. It would have ended 800 years of unbroken legal tradition, a tradition and a human right that had endured both war and pandemic before.

I personally worked through the night with other parties and the legal profession to ensure that clause was abandoned by the SNP. Juries were moved to cinemas, the bill was passed with many sweeping powers left in but Nicola Sturgeon repeatedly said she would not retain them for a moment longer than needed. Last week, the SNP/Green coalition signalled their intent to make many of those powers permanent. This development should make any democrat shudder.

I understand the justification for retaining some changes that modernise how we work. They allow electronic signatures on legal documents and protect certain rights to housing.

However, there is no justification for granting to ministers forever powers that could see them closing schools or releasing hundreds from prisons with the stroke of a pen.

In 2020, we dispensed with the months of debate and scrutiny that such legislation would normally command because we were in a state of crisis. The very presence of a lethal virus spreading uncontrollably through the country was such that ministers needed the power to shut down educational establishments or relieve overcrowding in our prisons as a means of stopping the spread. But the immediacy of that threat has now fallen away.

What that urgent legislative response also demonstrated was that, at a push, the Scottish Parliament can move law through the chamber at one heck of a clip. If ever such a threat presented itself in the future, we could do so again. For that reason, the government must abandon their plans now.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP for Edinburgh Western

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