Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:50 pm on 10 October 2017.
We indeed know what the EU’s position is—they don’t want to do a deal, therefore the whole process is a waste of time. Of course, he’s quite wrong—we didn’t say in UKIP last year that the Germans would do a deal; we said it was in their economic interest to do so. And indeed, given that they have this year a €42 billion trade surplus with Britain, if they don’t support a free trade deal they will be cutting off their nose to spite their face, which they may well want to do in order to keep the fourth reich together. Nor, of course, could we in UKIP determine what anybody else in any other party would be doing in any country in the EU. All that we said last year was that it is in everybody’s rational self-interest that we do a deal to make trade as free as it possibly can be. But if they don’t want to do a deal, 85 per cent of the global economy is outside of the EU—that’s growing, and we should be concentrating on other parts of the world. Therefore, what we should be doing now is scaling down the Department for Exiting the European Union and transferring those officials to the Department for International Trade, and concentrating on getting on with the real business of making Brexit a success in the rest of the world.