Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:01 pm on 14 June 2016.
Well, it depends what you mean by ‘competitive’. If it’s going to plummet, that, as he knows full well, will drive inflation, because we import so much. More than anything else, what the steel industry needs is a market, and, if it cannot enter the European market or any other world market without a tariff being imposed, then the steel industry doesn’t have a future. The UK is not big enough to drive demand for the UK steel industry. And, to my mind, what concerns me more than anything else is that I do not believe that there is a plan for what happens if we leave. Nigel Farage himself has said it doesn’t matter if there’s a trade deal or not. That is absolutely disastrous for the UK’s economy. We export—[Interruption.] Well, we export half of what we produce. We export half of it to the EU: half of our exports go there. Coming the other way, it’s 7 per cent; that’s the difference. It may be a higher figure financially, but percentage-wise we export far more than comes back in. And what worries me is that our export market will be jeopardised, Welsh lamb will be hit by a double whammy where it would cost more to sell Welsh lamb on the continent, and yet I hear your party say you want a trade deal with New Zealand—that means floods of New Zealand lamb coming in cheaply into Wales. So, there are some consequences here that have not been thought through. Better, I say, that we don’t have the barriers to export that leaving the UK would put in place. Better not to have that, and better to have a situation where, yes, we’re able to export freely and we’re able to get access to those funds. We will not get those funds and not get that guaranteed access if we leave.