WE now have very little time to respond to the four-week consultation on the UK Internal Market white paper. This speedily cobbled together bill fundamentally breeches the devolution settlement. There are no barriers to trade within the UK at present, so the haste with which this bill is being pushed through can only suggest one thing: it gives Westminster the power it needs to lower standards and open up the whole of the UK to a trade deal with the current, hopefully outgoing, US administration.

Through the mechanisms of “mutual recognition” and “non-discrimination” it removes any potential for divergence in standards between the four nations of the UK. It allows business to contest that any differences, like branding products as Scottish, will cause undue barriers to free trade and prohibit them. Procuring Scottish milk or meat would be construed as protectionism and deemed illegal. Rather than being a power surge, this is a disingenuous power cut, directly overruling devolved competencies.

And let us never forget how hard-won devolution was. Tory prime minister Edward Heath first mooted a Scottish Assembly in his Declaration of Perth back in 1968, retracting the proposal just two years later. In 1979 referendum was derailed by the 40% rule, depriving us of the mandate we won then.

The campaign for a Scottish Assembly continued through the bleak 80s and on into the 90s; through the relentless de-industrialisation of Scotland, mass unemployment and the Poll Tax. After Thatcher’s Sermon on the Mound in 1988, Cannon Kenyon Wright wrote “All this made us see with a clarity we never had before, that we could never again rely on the British state. We realised that our real enemy was not a particular government, whatever its colour, but a constitutional system. We came to understand that our central need, if we were to be governed justly and democratically, was just not to change the government, but to change the rules.”

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The “settled will of the Scottish people”, as so profoundly put by John Smith, was finally realised in 1997 and open our Parliament was reconvened in 1999. For those too young to imagine this, devolution was not an SNP policy. It was a cross party, civic movement. No less than 74.3% of the Scottish people said Yes to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and 63% of them said yes to granting it tax raising powers.

Last year we celebrated our reconvened Parliament’s 20th birthday, with many leading Labour Party politicians sharing their pride in the achievement. Given that story and the clear and present danger, the silence of the current Scottish Labour Party is deafening. We of course know that the Scottish Branch Office pledged their allegiance to the Union in 2014, but none the less, their failure to defend devolution is still tragic. Their support now, however late, is still welcome. One week to go.

You can respond the UK Government consultation here.

Heather Anderson is an SNP councillor in the Scottish Borders and a former MEP