It’s never a good idea to compare yourself to Lance Corporal Jones in ‘Dad’s Army’, is it? It was Clive Dunn who said so on the benches over there; he realised his mistake as soon as he said it, but I’ll leave him to reflect on that. Churchill—. Apart from the fact he talked about the wrong Chamberlain, Churchill is probably the wrong person to invoke in European debates, because Churchill said three things. First of all, at the time of the war, he wanted the UK and France to become one state—one country, one state. That was his view at the time. He was the first to be enthusiastic about a European Union. He was the first to mention a European army, actually, Churchill. Churchill would have had no truck with Brexit—I can promise that now—not considering what he said in the past.

Now, in terms of the final thing that he said, I can say that—. Yes, the Secretary of State for Wales—he does not have a good record of co-operation; I’ll put it that way. Let me give him an example of what’s happened recently. A brochure has been sent to all businesses in Wales, apparently from the Secretary of State for Wales’s office—not a single Welsh flag on it, may I add—explaining how the UK Government can help businesses. Well, so far so good, you might say. But then it goes on quoting different businesses in Wales who’ve had support from the Welsh Government, and many of the things that are mentioned there are export support, trade missions, finance, that have come from the Welsh Government, which the Secretary of State has tried to claim as his own. It’s not the first time he’s done it. He’s already claimed he brought Qatar Airways into Cardiff. He had no role at all in that. That was done—and I give credit to the individual who did it—by Roger Lewis, who is the chair of the airport. He was the one who showed the persistence to bring Qatar Airways in. So, the UK Government—. Well, no—the Secretary of State for Wales has a very poor record of co-operating and asking for co-operation when he sees fit. He has been invited, if I remember rightly, to the council for economic development. He hasn’t been yet, but nevertheless an invitation is there for him to come along. That is the forum for Welsh businesses to work with the Welsh Government, and there’s no reason why the Secretary of State can’t be at that forum rather than trying to create his own, which is what he’s trying to do at the moment.

Now, let’s turn to the points that Mark Isherwood made. Is there a need for co-operation? Yes. Is there a need for common standards? Yes, and in fact there’s need for common standards with the EU, actually. We can’t have our own standards. It makes no sense for that to happen. Secondly, is the destination in terms of certainty shared between us and the UK Government? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. We understand the need for there to be certainty for businesses, for there to be minimal interference in the single market of the UK. We understand that. The difference is we take the view that that destination should be travelled and reached by agreement of the Governments and not by the imposition of one rule by one Government on the other two—hopefully the other three in the future. So, what it means is that the UK Government could do anything it wanted in England, but we could not do the same in Wales. It means, for example—and he’s acknowledged he shares some of these concerns—that UK Ministers could amend devolved legislation passed in this place without asking this place or Welsh Ministers, or, indeed, the UK Parliament. That has to be wrong in principle. This is not designed to be a situation where London simply becomes the new Brussels, and is seen as somewhere that is remote and undemocratic. That is not something he and I would want to see, surely, as two who believe in the union.

In terms of the second phase of talks, he’s wrong to say that the EU and its constituent states have given the green light to the next phase of talks; what they have done is begun preparations for them. They are two different things. At the moment, the talks are stalled. I don’t want to see the talks stall—clearly not. I want for there be movement in those talks, and I hope that movement is there by December so that this can progress, so we don’t end up falling off the edge of a cliff in March. But it’s not right to say that the second phase of talks has been initiated. The reality is at the moment that the EU is far more united in terms of its aims and its goals than the UK is. We have a Prime Minister, and much of what she’s said I agree with. The Florence speech: there was much in that that I welcomed. And then you have Boris Johnson, who says something different. And then you have another Minister, Liam Fox, who says something different. The problem—and the frustration at EU level—is that the UK is seen as not having a clue what it wants, and not having an idea of what sort of outcome it wants to see.

The Prime Minister made what I think was a tactical mistake. She presented herself as being in favour, although she was a remainer, of a hard Brexit—outside of the customs union, outside of the single market—and went into an election thinking that was an electoral asset, and it wasn’t. As a result, she now has no mandate to take the UK forward on that hardest of Brexits. It’s hugely important, then, that the UK Government works with the devolved administrations to deliver—and we have to deliver Brexit—the kind of Brexit that has minimal negative effect on the economy of Wales and the rest of the UK. There is no justification for saying that, when people voted to leave the EU, they voted to leave the single market. There is no justification for saying that, when people voted to leave the EU, they voted to leave the customs union. None of these things were highlighted in the election, except by politicians from UKIP. Because politicians from UKIP said—for example, Daniel Hannan—nobody’s going to leave the single market. Nigel Farage said, ‘We can be like’—[Interruption.] I know you don’t like it, but Nigel Farage said, ‘We can be like Norway’. He said it. ‘We can have our cake and eat it’, to quote Boris Johnson. ‘We can be in the EEA’. People were misled last year. They were told that German car manufacturers would force a free trade agreement on the EU. It’s not going to happen. They care more about the single market than anything else. None of those things have come to pass.

Now, when we talk about ‘no deal’, we should be very clear about what that means. He doesn’t advocate it. That’s not what he’s advocating, but there are plenty in his party who do—not everybody. If we cannot negotiate a deal with our closest neighbours, with whom we share a land border, with whom we share a great deal of regulatory convergence, we have no hope of negotiating a deal with countries that don’t have any of those factors in common with us. How on earth could we? I don’t accept this idea that there is a nirvana out there of free trade agreements that will be to our benefit. There isn’t. If we leave the EU without a deal in March 2019, we will not have a free trade agreement with anyone—not with anyone—because none will have been agreed at that point. Where does that leave us? Isolated and unable to trade freely with other countries. That surely is not what anybody wanted to see. I don’t think that free trade agreements are the answer, actually. I think free trade agreements work well when they are concluded with countries with a similar income level as you. When they are not, you invite jobs to leave your country and go somewhere else. That was the main complaint in the US in the presidential election, that jobs had gone to Mexico because labour costs were cheaper. And that was because of a free trade agreement. So, we must be very careful about seeing free trade agreements as the panacea for everything. It depends which market and which country you are talking to.

Finally, he mentions the border. He will forgive me: I know it well, that border—very, very well. It’s unpoliceable. I remember it when the Troubles were still flaring. There were security checkpoints. Minor roads were blown up by the British army to stop people crossing them. There were designated checkpoints. Even then, it was not possible to police that border. No-one wants to go back to those days. Any kind of manifestation of a border invites problems in Northern Ireland. You come back to this point—I’ve heard the argument made—that there will be technological solutions. There aren’t any technological solutions. How can there be? For example, if goods are crossing between Ireland and the UK and vice versa, who regulates them? Nobody. There’s a self-declaration system, possibly, but, actually, it’s a light touch of policing; it’s an invitation for smuggling. Secondly, if there is no passport control on the border between Ireland and the UK, as long as somebody can get into Ireland, they can get into the UK. The UK loses control of its border in those circumstances. So, the idea that the UK will control its borders is impossible unless there is a physical manifestation of a border in Ireland. Technological solutions won’t work in that regard. It’s been suggested to me that there’ll be cameras. Those cameras won’t last long, because people will not accept any kind of manifestation of a border beyond the changing of colour of the lines at the side of the road, between yellow on one side and white on the other.

Now, these are issues that are not easy to resolve. They can be resolved if we stay in the customs union—done. There’s no problem in terms of goods. There’s more of a problem in terms of passport control, that’s true. It helps that the Republic is not in Schengen, that’s true. But, nevertheless, these are difficult, difficult questions that need to be answered, and we will offer our help to the UK Government to help to come to the conclusions that people want to see, namely a Brexit that satisfies what people voted for last year, but a Brexit that does not have a negative impact on the economies of Wales and Britain.