By Mairi Gougeon MSP

THE role of the Secretary of State for Scotland is, according to the official UK Government website: “To promote and protect the devolution settlement. Other responsibilities include promoting partnership between the UK Government and the Scottish Government and relations between the two Parliaments.”

Can our current Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell, honestly say he is meeting this job description? In the past week he has shirked all these key responsibilities in spectacular fashion.

On Tuesday night, Mundell blatantly undermined his role as he merrily trooped through the voting chambers along with his Scottish Tory colleagues at Westminster to demolish the devolution settlement.

It took 353 days to implement a Scottish Parliament following the historic 1997 referendum, but just 15 minutes at Westminster to destroy devolution.

Then, after my SNP colleagues in London rightly walked out of Parliament in protest the next day, Mundell shirked the rest of his responsibilities as he pulled out of a key meeting at the Scottish Parliament.

He was due to travel to Edinburgh to appear in front of the Justice Committee to address the Scottish Parliament’s many concerns over the justice system in relation to Brexit.

This appointment was cancelled with less than 24 hours’ notice. It’s almost as if Mundell and his colleagues don’t want to “promote partnership between the UK Government and the Scottish Government”. It doesn’t fit the Tory Government’s agenda which – with every passing day – has become ever clearer. It is aiming to dismantle the Scottish Parliament brick by brick.

The failure to return devolved powers is just the start. It won’t settle until it completely erodes the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

Sadly, at Holyrood we have become all too familiar with the continual lack of respect and complete disregard of the will of our Parliament throughout the shambolic Brexit process.

The Joint Ministerial Committee, which was supposed to meet with all the devolved nations on a regular basis to ensure they had a clear voice in the Brexit negotiations, failed to meet for nine months in 2017.

The Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government were given no say or opportunity to influence key position papers, some of which related to entirely devolved areas, that were put forward by the UK Government as its basis for negotiations with the EU.

And Brexit Minister David Davis ignored repeated invitations to appear in front of the Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Relations Committee on which I sit at the Scottish Parliament.

This lack of respect shown to Scotland has now reached a critical point.

Mundell has the dubious honour of being the only Secretary of State for Scotland since devolution to ignore the expressed will of the Scottish Parliament.

No respect, no attempt to listen and no concern for the people of Scotland.