Hi everyone and welcome to this next episode on our Brexit and Beyond podcast, brought to you by the UK in a changing Europe.

And I'm delighted this week to have as a guest, Professor Nicola McEwen from the University of Edinburgh.

Hi, Nicola.

Hi.

Now, Nicola is one of a number of authors who've produced a briefing on the internal market bill, which you'll be able to find

online next week. And this seemed like a good moment to talk through, not only the bill,

but also devolution more generally. So just to start at the very, very beginning, Nicola,

if I may, as far as the government's concerned, what's what's the internal market bill

for when it comes to the devolved governments?

That's a very good question. On one sense, this administration and the Theresa Mays

administration have been concerned that when the UK left the EU and at the end of the transition

period when we leave the internal market, that that might lead to new

barriers to trade entering within the UK between the devolved territories and England, essentially.

So the internal market bill is one attempt to try to ensure that even if there are different regulations in the

different parts of the UK, that they won't produce extra costs or extra barriers for businesses

because they'll still be able to trade freely. The problem is that there are different ways to

address that problem, if indeed it's a real problem at all, and we just don't know yet. We have a really integrated market in the UK, and the governments have been working together for a number of years now to try to identify where they might need to do things together, where they might need to cooperate more,

and that's in a process called common frameworks. But the government's thinking, I think,

around this bill is that they might miss something by that approach. And so they think of the

internal market bill as a backstock, can use that term, to sort of mop up anything that might fall through

the cracks. Problem is, it is in effect quite a centralising measure and it is being done very

much against the wishes of the devolved government, certainly the devolved governments in Wales

...