Diolch yn fawr iawn, Lywydd. As we approach the end of another hard day at the ‘wordface’, Members may be forgiven for thinking, as we have another debate on Brexit, that the subject may be inexhaustible but we are not. But, I rise to propose our motion that the National Assembly for Wales believes that Brexit gives Wales a great opportunity to boost trade, industry and employment; welcomes the freedom Brexit provides to create a tailor-made policy for Welsh agriculture and fishing; and calls on the Welsh Government to work closely in a positive frame of mind to capitalise on these opportunities and to involve all parties in the Assembly in its negotiations with the UK Government to maximise the potential benefits for Wales.

The debate on Brexit, for many, many months, has perhaps shed more heat than light. Amongst those who opposed Britain leaving the EU, a world has been conjured up— somewhat akin to a Hieronymus Bosch painting—of devils and demons and a world of fear. I hope that we’ve now moved beyond that. I was certainly encouraged by the words of the First Minister yesterday, in response to the leader of the opposition, where it was clear that he’s now beginning to think very positively about the future for Wales, and I applauded and approved what he said about a free trade agreement being the way forward.

I also was very taken by the speech that we heard this afternoon from Adam Price, who I think is a very open-minded and positive person, and I think he came forward with a number of very useful ideas—in stark contradistinction to the leader of his party, sadly, who is still trying to rerun the referendum on the debate on immigration, despite the fact that her own constituency, the Rhondda, voted even more overwhelmingly for Brexit than the rest of Wales.

The future is bright for Wales, in my opinion, as a result of the opportunities that Brexit gives us. It’s not the case that if we remained within the EU, somehow or other everything would be stable and we would have no problems. Of course, change is constant in the business world. Anybody who’s ever run a business, particularly a trading business, knows that the world is full of uncertainties: it’s the way you capitalise upon them that is the difference between success and failure. It is important to us, of course, that we should obtain tariff-free access to the single market, but it’s not something that we should be prepared to pay any price to obtain. There are other important public policy issues that have to be taken into consideration too.

It is true that we export to the EU maybe 5 per cent of Britain’s GDP. Clearly, that’s important, but, we have to recall, the flipside of that argument is that 95 per cent of our economy is not involved in exporting to the EU. So, we should keep these questions in perspective. And even that part of our trade that is exports to the EU, 65 per cent of it would be subject to a tariff of less than 4 per cent if we came to no agreement at all as a result of Brexit with our partners across the channel. So, it is only 35 per cent of our exports that are really in issue in these trade negotiations.

Most important, of course, is the automotive industry. But, there again, we have opportunities rather than challenges, in my view: we export £8.5 billion in value in cars to the EU, but they export to us—i.e. we import from them—£23 billion-worth of cars. So, they’re selling to us three times what we sell to them. Of that £23 billion that we buy from European car manufactures, £20 billion comes from Germany alone. So, Germany is going to play a massive part in the decisions that fall to be made on the future trading relationship between Britain and the European Union. It seems utterly fanciful to me to imagine that German car manufacturers are for a moment going to countenance tariffs on trade between us because Germany would be massively the loser. Even in terms of pounds per head or euros per head, the situation is that Germany is the winner, relative to Britain.