Regarding its impact on devolved administrations, I think it's important to note here that the Bill risks making the exercise of devolved powers much more difficult, and it's in their exercise that powers are significant. They can exist notionally, and many people have referred to the supposedly 70 more powers that come to us as a result of them being moved from Brussels, but if these things cannot be exercised just because of the general framework of a particular policy area, or existing policies are more difficult to exercise—for instance, how we regulate the housing market and the provision of services by landlords, for instance, or agents of landlords—that really brings home how it can have an impact in domestic policy making.

I do believe the UK Government would have been better advised to have treated this Bill as the first of a number of constitutional Bills that may be necessary to strengthen the integrity of the UK. I do regret that this has not been its focus. Of course, to be successful, a constitutional Bill needs to be the product of joint working in its drafting between the devolved administrations, or at least giving them every opportunity to join in that effort. Now, I'm not so naive as to suppose that support from the Scottish Government was ever likely to be forthcoming, and there are well understood reasons for that, but they still may have contributed to a process they didn't entirely agree with or in the end would be happy to support. But opposition from a unionist Labour Welsh Government should not be dismissed lightly. It sends an alarming signal.

Presiding Officer, in many ways, Brexit was about the reaction to the single market and its regulation, and the accusation that those regulations often hampered the exercise of domestic sovereignty. Yet what we have proposed today is an internal market that is much more centralised than the European single market and without those principles of subsidiarity and proportionality that do give genuine local decision making full scope within a single market—or as full a scope as is possible. We are not going to have that, and I think it's ironic that senior members of my party that pursued Brexit with such verve and success are now applying and multiplying the principles they so condemned in terms of the European single market.

Can I just finish by saying that in preparing the ground to break international law, this Bill is clearly repugnant? Now, I do understand that despite the decision of the Commons to reinsert the clauses that allow for the breaking of international law—the Commons say that they had to be reinstated after the Lords withdrew them—I understand now that the Government has indicated that it will not object to the Lords removing those same clauses again, and therefore at least that stain in this Bill will then be expunged. But the fact that that threat was ever made I think must cause great unease to the devolved administrations, and the ability of a British Government to negotiate in a way that is trusting and full and not capable of these underlying menaces. I think, in this regard alone, this Bill stood remarkably outside the traditions of the Conservative Party, when you look at Churchill and Maxwell Fyfe, who did so much to establish the norms of international law after the second world war. It's with great reluctance, Presiding Officer, that I must tell the Chamber and my own party that I will be voting against giving this Bill our legislative consent.