Can I thank the leader of the Welsh Conservatives for his comments? Can I say to him: I listened to what he said about looking to come to a common position, but it would certainly help me if I were to understand what his position is on some of the more fundamental aspects? I know he was somebody who advocated that the UK should leave the EU. That is there for all to see. But does he believe that we should retain full and unfettered access to the single market? Does he reject any idea of tariff or non-tariff barriers? Does he accept that there is a need perhaps to modify freedom of movement, but not to end it completely? What is his view in terms of the border between north and south in Ireland? What is his view then in terms of the maritime border between Wales and Ireland and how that would operate? What is his view on the UK being inside of the customs union or not? If it’s outside of the customs union, then that border with the UK and Ireland cannot operate as a seamless border. Does he believe that the transitional arrangements, and they will be needed, should be such that we should consider European Economic Area membership, or European free trade area membership in the short term? All these questions I’ve not heard him express a view on. I invite him to do so, but what I do know is that he wants to leave the EU and that’s clear. What I don’t know is what, at the moment, he expects to see in its place.

In terms of the White Paper, the White Paper remains the joint paper between ourselves and Plaid Cymru. He asked in particular, ‘Where are the points of disagreement?’ First of all, tone. What we saw from the Prime Minister before the election was a nationalist tone. I can’t describe it in any other way. The kind of tone that we saw from people who said to us that the EU would fall at our feet in order to get a deal. That was false and we see that now. The voters rejected that tone, and now it’s time to reset. Firstly, I don’t believe that no deal is better than a bad deal. I think that is nonsensical. No deal is the worst deal. Nor do I believe that if there is no transition that is something we should not be afraid of. I cannot understand why there’s this desperate need to fall off the edge of a cliff when there is a bridge that can be walked over and that bridge is EEA membership or EFTA membership.

I don’t agree with her idea that freedom of movement must end completely. Again, you cannot control your borders unless you shut the border with the Republic of Ireland. There’s no other way of doing it. And that is something that people have not yet understood. I do not agree then with the position that she’s taken on that. I don’t agree with her that, somehow, the UK would not be subject to any kind of court outside the UK. Of course it would. Even where the UK was in a position to sign a free trade agreement with another country or trading block, there would still be the need for a court to adjudicate disputes that arise from the free trade agreement; it’s bound to happen. And that would mean having a court, at the very least, if there were a free trade agreement at some point with the EU—a court made up possibly of ECJ judges and UK judges, which would constitute the trade court. There is no escaping that. If you want to have a free trade agreement, then you have to accept that other people will also have a view on the way that free trade agreement actually operates.

I don’t know what the UK’s position is any more, if I’m blunt. There has been no engagement with the devolved administrations. We know it can’t be the same as it was before the election. We know that the UK’s position was that it wished for the issue of the UK’s leaving the EU, and the UK’s future relationship with the EU, to be dealt with in parallel. The EU’s position was that it should be sequential. We hear now that the EU’s position has won out—that it will be a sequential negotiation. So, that ground has already been given. What was apparently going to lead to the row of the summer, to quote David Davis, that’s not going to happen.

I welcome what he said about the JMC, and the fact that it’s no longer fit for purpose. But there is another fundamental issue here that I believe the great repeal Bill will try to address, and in a way that is negative. And that is that, where powers in devolved areas return from Brussels, they never arrive in Whitehall, they come straight here. The great repeal Bill, we believe—well, certainly, before the election—was going to try to alter the devolution settlement, without reference to the people of Wales, to stop that happening. That is a fundamental constitutional principle. And we could not accept any situation that would override the clearly expressed view of the people of Wales in 2011. It would be much more sensible if we simply say, ‘Okay, those powers are going to the devolved administrations, but let’s agree to do nothing with them, until such time as we can implement a common framework.’ The alternative is to have that common framework imposed, and that’s something we could not agree to, because that would actually overturn a part of the devolution settlement that is absolutely fundamental. We wait to see what the great repeal Bill actually says, but there clearly is an issue here for Wales.

The other issue, of course, which I touched on in the statement, though it is fundamental to us, is that, if we look at trade, trade is not devolved. There’s no dispute about that. But, if, for example, the UK were to sign a free trade agreement with New Zealand, then there’s a massive Welsh interest, because of the New Zealand lamb that would arrive in far greater quantities on the UK market. Clearly, we have a strong view on that—it’s not something that we would welcome. So, there has to be a mechanism as well to make sure that the views of the devolved administrations are, at the very least, taken into account when the UK looks to negotiate free trade agreements, where such an agreement would represent a negative disbenefit to countries such as Wales. There will be other examples that affect different parts of different countries in the UK in different ways, but these are fundamental questions that need to be addressed. We have sought to do that, and I’d invite him to express a view on those issues that I’ve already outlined, in order for us to understand more fully where his thinking has gone since the result of the referendum last year.