An SNP MSP has slammed David Mundell's handling of the Brexit impact papers as "shambolic".
Mairi Gougeon MSP told The National that sometimes it seems like even he doesn't believe in what he is talking about.
Mundell told a Holyrood committee of MSPs that the UK Government hadn't carried out any Scotland-specific analysis on the impact of Brexit –only for that analysis to later leak to the press.
The Scottish Secretary has since been involved in a number of car crash interviews in which he's tried to justify saying something that clearly did exist didn't exist.
Gougeon said: “David Mundell’s handling of the Brexit impact assessment situation is nothing short of shambolic. At times, I don’t even know if even he believes in what he is talking about.
“One minute he tells us there are substantial sectorial analysis assessments for Scotland over Brexit, the next there are none. Then we find out through a leaked document on Buzzfeed that there ARE impact assessments for Scotland.
“But even still the very people Brexit will impact hardest on – the general public – aren’t entitled to view these documents.
“It’s hard to work out whether he is continually – and quite deliberately – misleading or if he is so far out of the loop at UK Government level that he has no idea what the impact of Brexit will be on more than five million he represents in Scotland.
“I don’t know what is worse, failing to be honest with the people you represent or failing to do your homework on something that will heavily effect people’s jobs, finance, businesses and day-to-day lives in Scotland.
“As I said during my exchange with Mr Mundell at the Europe Committee, people have a right to explicitly know how Brexit will impact on them.
“They shouldn’t have play a guessing game every time David Mundell speaks. The cold, hard facts should be out in the public domain for each and every person in our country to see for themselves.
“Giving MPs and MSPs extremely limited and heavily controlled access to this information in secret is not the way a honest and responsible Government should operate.
“Mr Mundell and the Tory UK Government should be utterly ashamed of themselves over how they are mishandling this whole process.”
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