15:29

There has been a response of studied fury to Boris Johnson’s response to SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford during FMQs today that the Scottish parliament “has no role” in approving his current withdrawal deal.

While it was immediately pointed out that the bill’s own explanatory notes list more than a dozen instances where consent of the devolved administrations is required, the first ministers of Scotland and Wales, Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford, this afternoon accused the prime minister of trying to rush through the EU withdrawal agreement without scrutiny.

They both added that said the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly were likely to refuse to give consent for the withdrawal agreement bill, and called for the devolved nations to be given a greater say.

SNP MP and Brexit legal challenger Joanna Cherry said that the prime minister was “wholly wrong” and “a stranger to the truth”, while Scotland’s Brexit secretary, Michael Russell, described Johnson’s dismissal as “completely wrong”, adding that the Scottish government had already identified a number of additional parts of the bill that required legislative consent too.

Point of info: since 1999, the Sewel convention has held that Westminster will not legislate on devolved matters without the consent of the devolved parliaments, but in 2017 the supreme court appeared to undermine this convention by ruling that because it is political in nature, enforcing it was not a matter for the courts.

