Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:59 pm on 14 September 2016.
Well, I spoke too soon earlier on—we’ve heard the same chorus of Jeremiahs as we’ve heard over the years; the First Minister’s even refighting the 1981 budget. The Labour Party is stuck in a mindset of the past. The reason we had to have the 1981 budget was because of the 1979 winter of discontent when Labour last ruined the country in a big way. But we’re not here to refight the battles of the 1980s—we’re here to win the battles of the 2010s. And with the kind of mindset that we’ve heard on the other benches today, we’re never going to win that battle because, as Mark Isherwood rightly said in following me in the debate at the start, if you’re going to sell something, if you’re going to sell a property, you’ve got to believe in it and you’ve got to go out there and be as positive as possible. That’s never going to happen with the kind of mindset that we hear, sadly, from the First Minister.
As far as German car manufacturers are concerned and whether they have any fear of a trade deal not being negotiated with Britain, they say this is the highest priority for the German Government in their view, and the idea that the people who run Mercedes, Audi or BMW have no influence on the German Government and that the German Government has no influence upon the European Commission is absolute moonshine and a world away from the world of reality.
We’ve heard many contributions today, some on our side who have been optimistic and positive, and others who are still stuck in this mindset of negativity. Jenny Rathbone said that we’re offering simplistic solutions. Nobody is offering a simplistic solution. Anybody who’s ever run a business knows the world isn’t simple; it changes from day to day. All I’m saying is that the challenges and the risks of being out of the European Union are far less than the challenges and risks of staying in it, because the EU is a failing project and the eurozone is a complete catastrophe. Europe is now half the size it was relatively in terms of trade compared to the rest of the world in 1980—30 per cent of world trade was accounted for then by the EU, and only 15 per cent now. The future of Wales is to be decided outside the EU in international trade terms, and this freedom, which is given to us as a result of the referendum, now puts into our own hands the tools and levers that we need to kick-start the Welsh economy of the future. How can a nationalist party not want to have the power in its own hands here in Wales or in the UK, not in Brussels—