I welcome the statement today. In particular, I welcome the tone that the First Minister has adopted, which I think is both realistic and reasonable and all the more persuasive for that. I’m glad that he’s moved on from the referendum in the last 12 months, in marked contradistinction to the tone that we heard from the leader of Plaid Cymru earlier on today. That’s the way, I think, to advance Wales’s interests with the Government of the United Kingdom and, indeed, more widely as well.

Although I do endorse what the leader of the Welsh Conservatives said, that we need to establish as wide a consensus as possible in support of the Welsh Government’s position vis-à-vis the United Kingdom Government, and, in UKIP, the First Minister will find that perhaps we are nearer to his position than the Welsh Conservatives are. In particular, as I’ve said all along, we should get every penny that Brussels currently spends of British taxpayers’ money in Wales back here in Cardiff, and also we are against any land grab of any kind of the powers that have been devolved. And I fully support the statements that the First Minister has said today in relation to all of that.

I also support his view that the UK Government needs to treat us with respect and the union will survive and prosper only if each participant in it exhibits those characteristics. It is a shame, I think, that the UK Government has not been more inclusive and sought to move forward with the Welsh Government in this respect. I certainly deprecate Michael Gove’s cancelling of his meeting that was planned with devolved Ministers.

The First Minister asked the leader of the Welsh Conservatives what his policy is on a range of issues, and, of course, we want free access, as far as possible, to European markets, and we’re against non-tariff barriers. The problem with the single market as it developed was not the conception that the Government had when I was a member of it, which was based upon the European Court of Justice case of Cassis de Dijon, which didn’t require minute regulation of every product that was produced in the European Communities, as they then were, so that everybody was put within a single straitjacket of regulation, but that you could sell any product that was legal in one country in any other country, and that would’ve been, I think, a much better way for the European Union to proceed. But they took the opposite direction and the result has been the vote, I think, on 23 June last year.

But we have to accept that free movement is a non-negotiable item for the British Government, because that was one of the principal ingredients behind the decision of the British people last June. There are problems with the borders of Northern Ireland—I fully accept that and those are practical problems that need to be resolved. As regards the customs union, I can’t see how we could conceivably remain inside the customs union, because that would mean one of the principal benefits of Brexit would be denied to us, which is the ability to enter into free trade agreements with the 85 per cent of the global economy that is not part of the EU.

Whilst I fully accept what the First Minister says, that there are bound to be winners and losers in any free trade agreement, and the losers have to be protected as far as we possibly can, the British Government should, therefore, enter into meaningful discussions with the devolved administrations to try to come up with a composite proposal that means that any particular grouping—let’s take sheep farmers, for example, as one of the best examples of this—that could be disadvantaged by a free trade agreement, as the First Minister said, with New Zealand, that we have some means of protecting their interests. I, unfortunately, don’t see any mechanism at the moment that has been set up by the UK Government to address that constitutional difficulty.

So, I welcome the proposals that the First Minister has put forward in relation to the creation of a kind of council of Ministers for the UK, although those of us who’ve been members of the Council of Ministers in the EU have, no doubt, many criticisms of the way that secretive organisation works. It’s certainly an interesting idea that a kind of qualified majority vote system should be introduced in the UK—of the UK Government plus one devolved administration—although that I wouldn’t want to endorse without further thought.

I don’t agree with the First Minister where he said that the country is deeply divided. The divisions that exist are deep, but the overwhelming majority of people in this country have either welcomed enthusiastically the decision of the referendum last June, or have adjusted to it. It’s only perhaps 20 per cent of the population who take a different view, and 83 per cent of the people who voted in the general election just a few days ago voted for parties that are committed formally to leaving the European Union. I’m not sure that a convention on the future of the UK is useful at the moment. In fact, the general election result, as the First Minister referred to, in Scotland shows that maybe the direction of travel north of the border there is rather different from what we thought it to be just a few weeks ago, and perhaps it would be better to see how things go for a little while yet before we try to come up with formalised institutions that are designed to be permanent.

There’s only one other point that I wish to make, in view of the time, that has not been referred to hitherto, and that’s the statement on page 12 of this document, which refers to the corpus of regulation that we will inherit from the EU when we leave. I don’t think it is right just to make a blanket statement that we should preserve for the long term the social and environmental protections that we’ve accrued through the EU. I think we should look at everything that is currently on the legislative statute book and consider it afresh as to whether it’s fully proportionate, whether many of these regulations could be dispensed with altogether or mended in some form to reduce the cost to the public without endangering any of the public benefits that they’re designed to protect. Over 45 years, a mass of legislation has been generated in the most minute detail, very often with very little parliamentary oversight at all. Regulations that are directly applicable, for example, have never been in any way voted on in the House of Commons. With many of the directives—having sat on committees considering them but not having the power to make any amendments many times in the past decades—I’ve come to be fully aware of the democratic deficit, so we should address that. It will take a very, very long time indeed, but nevertheless I think we should take a flexible view of this. And in the interests of Wales, given that we are the poorest part of the United Kingdom, we should want to make ourselves as competitive as possible to raise the level of income of our people. So, I give the First Minister broad support for the approach that he has taken today, and I think this is a much better document than the joint document that was produced with Plaid Cymru. I think he’s much better when he is ploughing his own furrow, rather than having somebody slowing down the speed of the plough behind him.