Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:53 pm on 4 April 2017.
Anyone who believes otherwise—[Interruption.] Anyone who believes otherwise has no understanding of international trade. Governments don’t sell goods to other nations; businesses sell goods to other nations. It is merely the function and duty of every Government to remove as many impediments to that trade as possible, and that, at the end of the day, is what the Governments of Europe, and hence the European Commission, will be forced to do. If we are to debate the European Union, let’s not look at this institution through rose-coloured spectacles, pretending that it is an institution without huge drawbacks. Its policies have had catastrophic consequences for a large part of the population of Europe. The true pragmatists among us recognise that a divorce—any divorce—from Europe is preferable to being manacled to a union destined to slip further and further down the tables of economic trade.