In June 2017, the citizens, by a small but sufficient majority, said two things, I think, to us. They did not want to remain part of European governance. I know we hear often about we’re still European—of course we are, and we’re part of that great cultural inheritance, but we did vote to remove ourselves from European governance and we will face consequences for that.

Secondly, I think they said that we need to take care much more of those left behind. It was a huge message, shared in many western societies, it has to be said, but it seems to me that message is that our society’s not cohesive enough, and many people feel they don’t get a fair deal. This has been a particular crisis, really, to have hit since the financial difficulties of 2008, which sparked the great recession, and it’s this bit we really need to concentrate on as we, in the National Assembly, get to grips with Brexit, because it’s our whole governance at the moment that many people feel is not producing at the level it needs to produce, so we must remember those that are left behind.

So, a small majority voted to leave the European Union, but I think for all of us unionists in this Chamber—and I respect those that are not—we must realise that it will require a large majority to rejuvenate the UK’s union. This is not about preserving Britain, it is about rebuilding Britain, and that work will require great vision, generosity, and an awareness that we now need a new relationship between the UK’s nations. We are in a very different position to the one we were in in 1973, and that is certainly the case, and, indeed, this is why, broadly speaking, I’m prepared to back the idea of a council of Ministers to take forward now the JMC process and make it more predictable, formal, and much more at the heart of our governance arrangements. I have to say I’m an optimist in terms of—I think a lot of the language is fairly austere at the moment in terms of ‘we must protect our patch’, and in this time of great change and uncertainty we don’t fully trust our other partners, be they in Scotland, London, wherever, and I think we need to get over this. We need to think of what functions we need. We need to ask ourselves what is required for the UK market to operate, not just over the economy, which, broadly, is not contested, but over areas like agriculture and the environment.

We need to be very, very cautious about what we wish for, because I think any argument that is basically saying that current competences, which were examined a few years ago in that foreign office study, and basically decided that what was at the EU level was appropriately at the EU level—. To argue that those current competences that underwrite the European frameworks that we are now leaving, that those competences go from the supra-state level straight down to the sub-state level without stopping in-between—really, I think we need to be cautious about these very purist arguments that remind me of the medieval church’s debates on the nature of the hypostatic union; I mean, you missed the big picture. We need the UK to work as an integrated—