Yesterday, the First Minister described his White Paper as balancing the message that the Welsh people gave us with the economic reality. It implies that the Welsh people don’t understand their economic interests or reality, that they somehow suffer from some false consciousness and must defer to the First Minister for their better economic interests. He says that, together with Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Government will speak for Wales, but on this issue, they don’t speak for Wales. Do they not understand—[Interruption.] Yes, we do. Fifty-three per cent of Wales voted to leave the European Union and are ignored by the First Minister, who prefers to team up with Plaid Cymru in a coalition of losers who told the Welsh people to vote ‘remain’ but were ignored by 53 per cent of those people who better understand their interests than he does.

Now, one thing we do learn from this paper is quite why the First Minister’s position has been so incoherent. From going from immediate demands for maintaining free movement to reversing that, what we see is that he’s been trying to nail down a common position with Plaid Cymru, but that joint position has the consistency of blancmange. He refers to full unfettered access to the single market and then goes on to say that that is referred to in the document as ‘single market participation’. But ‘single market participation’ is a weasel phrase: it is meaningless. It should be taken no more seriously than ‘The Beano’.

In her comments, Leanne Wood, initially refers to continued participation in the single market. Yet, she then goes on to extol the paper because it upholds the principle of freedom of movement and, therefore, full single market participation. We saw this in the motion that Plaid Cymru had last year calling for us to remain in the single market, on which the First Minister whipped his troops to, with us, vote down as inconsistent with the message of the Welsh people that freedom of movement had to end. He then, more recently, signed up to their amendment supporting membership of the EEA and/or EFTA—frankly a pathetic formulation that is utterly meaningless. It’s carried on in this document—and he wants us to refer to the document. In this paragraph, he says there are various options that

‘might involve UK membership of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), of which the UK was a member prior to joining the EU, and through this continuing to form part of the European Economic Area (EEA)’.

It is not through EFTA that Norway and Iceland are members of the EEA. They are members of the EEA because they joined it. Switzerland is in EFTA but it is not in the EEA. That is because the EEA is a very, very different thing from EFTA. EFTA is a free trade agreement. The EEA implies accepting an entire body of law and the ECJ’s determination of that law and it also implies going to our domestic economy. He talks about EU regulation, and yet when we export to the EU we must obey their regulation. But should we also obey all that regulation over our entire domestic economy of people who don’t export and should the ECJ have the final word over our laws? Those are the key questions, and a reference to ‘participation in the single market’ or ‘joining the EEA and/or EFTA’ is, frankly, a joke.

The opposition leader referred to ‘The Beano’. It was actually Keith Vaz, as a Labour Minister for Europe, who first referred to ‘The Beano’ in the context of the Charter of Fundamental Rights—it would have all the potency of ‘The Beano’—until actually it was interpreted to apply directly to all our laws. He cannot decide either what a common position is with Plaid Cymru, and has this pathetic phrase ‘participation in the single market’ to cover up those gaps—or is it to cover up his own lack of understanding? He’s unaware that Britain is a member of the WTO. He refers to the EU having a free trade agreement with China. Where on earth has he got this idea from? Does he not understand that TTIP is not a free trade agreement? It is agreement behind closed doors with corporate interests for a single regulatory space in which it’s illegal to sell anything unless it follows that single regulation set transatlantically without reference to our democratic Assemblies and Parliaments. He needs to determine what his own position is, rather than seek simply to cover up the position through a desperate desire to hug Plaid Cymru as close as he can on this issue. Actually, the only people left out of that are those who used to vote for his party—the 53 per cent of Wales who voted to leave—and many, many of those, instead of voting for his party when their opportunity comes, will vote for ours.