Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:57 pm on 7 February 2017.
Yes, well, I will come on to this in a moment in this speech. How on earth could moving to WTO rules from single market rules, where there would be an average tariff of less than 3.5 per cent, possibly produce a fall in the size of our national income by 10 per cent, given that our total exports to the EU are only 12 per cent of gross domestic product? This is absolutely economically illiterate, and the vacuity of this document is really beyond description. The idea that this is a plan, as the honourable lady says, is just absurd. Might I remind her that the Government has set out its broad negotiating position, and as the great German military strategist Helmut von Moltke once pointed out,
‘Kein Plan überlebt die erste Feindberührung’.
That shows my European credentials: ‘no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy’. So, there is no point in trying to have a meticulously thought-out plan for these negotiations. The Government’s broad position is the sensible one, which apparently there is agreement throughout this Assembly for—that what we want to achieve, in the words that the First Minister quoted, was frictionless trade between the EU: things much as they are now in terms of trade between us. It’s very much in the EU’s interest for that to happen. We had a £61 billion trade deficit with the EU in 2015. It’s massively more in their interests that in ours to preserve free trade between Britain and the rest of Europe. [Interruption.] I give way.