I’m grateful to the First Minister for his statement, but to be honest, and this is no criticism of him, it’s a bit of a non-event, because what he’s reported is modest progress within the United Kingdom on the future relationship that the Welsh Government will have and this Assembly will have with the British Government and the United Kingdom Parliament. And as the First Minister rightly said, there’s been virtually no movement within the EU at all.

The only agreement that they have offered is that they might possibly talk amongst themselves about the way forward, but there’s certainly no firm offer on the table about the way further progress will be made in Brussels. I think we have to recognise that it’s that intransigence, not any intransigence on the part of the British Government, that has brought us to the pass that we’re at today.

It’s perfectly clear from the demand from the European Council that we can’t even begin to talk about trade negotiations until we solve what the First Minister in his own statement says is the minor matter of the money. We are talking about £20 billion that the Prime Minister has offered—British taxpayers’ money—which she shouldn’t have, in my view. The EU have not named a specific figure; it could be anything between £60 billion and £100 billion of our money that they are demanding, by way of ransom, before they even begin the negotiations on trade.

So, let us be quite clear where the principal fault lies here: it is not on the part of the British Government, although I’m certainly no admirer of the way in which they have conducted themselves in the course of this non-negotiation. All that the First Minister and anybody else has to do in order to understand the process that is going on here is to read the book that was published not so long ago by Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Adults in the Room’—a left-wing socialist who perhaps might not regard the First Minister as a socialist himself. But nevertheless, he has set out—[Interruption.] He is indeed a remainer. But he has set out in the course of this book what the EU’s negotiating tactics would be in the course of the Brexit negotiations. And the sequencing is absolutely key to it, because what the EU is playing here is a game of chicken—who is going to blink first? And if the money is unimportant to us, it’s even less important to the EU, because the GDP of the EU, of course, is many times that of the United Kingdom. So, the EU has as much of an interest in a sensible trade agreement with Britain as Britain has with it in the future. But they are playing a different game from the one that the First Minister seems to think they are playing.

Now, I’m pleased with the small progress that seems to have been made on sorting out the constitutional arrangements for the future within the United Kingdom, and I certainly agree with the broad general approach of the Welsh Government and, indeed, even with much of what the leader of Plaid Cymru said earlier on. But the principal difficulty that we have here is that EU withdrawal was voted for by the electorate of the United Kingdom and, indeed, by the electorate of Wales, and whilst I certainly am against any kind of legislative power grab from Westminster, even on a temporary basis, nevertheless the more important objective is for the whole of Britain, including Wales, to leave the EU, and the terms upon which it does that are not entirely within our control, obviously, because in an agreement you have to have both sides to come to a common position. And we have no idea what the EU’s bottom line is, but if we say that our bottom line is that we’ll take whatever’s going, then there won’t be any negotiation at all, which seems to me the fundamental basis of the First Minister’s approach to this. A ‘no deal’ is unthinkable; we can’t in any circumstances have no deal. Who on earth in business goes into a negotiation and says, ‘I’ll take whatever you offer me.’ That would be utter, utter madness. Of course, we want to have a deal—we’d like to have a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU—but if they’re not prepared to offer it, there’s nothing that we can do about it. And I would not accept the ransom approach that the EU seems to be proffering at the moment. The tactic is that Monsieur Barnier says that he doesn’t have a mandate to negotiate on anything until he is told he can do so by the European Council, so when Theresa May goes to the European Council to say, ‘We want to talk about free trade’, they say, ‘Oh no, you must go and talk to Michel Barnier’, and we get no further. And that’s why we are in the position that we’re at today.

I’m sorry that a good part of the statement is devoted to continuation of the ‘project fear’ approach that we had in the referendum, with the litany of bodies who are saying that we must have a deal at any price. The most preposterous of them, of course, is the British Retail Consortium saying that reverting to WTO tariffs might mean UK shoppers paying up to a third more for everyday food items. What is the point of the CAP if not to keep out cheap foreign food? The whole point about it is that world food prices are below the food prices of the EU. There wouldn’t be any point in having tariffs if food prices were more expensive in the rest of the world. Indeed, the average food price at farm gate levels in the EU is 17 per cent above that which applies on world markets. That is a significant dipping into the pockets of ordinary British people. Now, of course I believe in supporting British farmers, but the truth of the matter is that for every £1 that British taxpayers spend through the aegis of the EU on British farmers, we pay another £1 to support farmers in other parts of the EU. So, the idea that we couldn’t continue some form of agricultural support having left the EU is utter nonsense. In fact, we’d have more money to spend on farmers if we decided that was a desirable thing to do.

The First Minister says in the course of this statement that he doesn’t believe in selling taxpayers short, but he’s prepared to accept any deal that is going, so any sum that the EU wants to demand of us he will be prepared to pay. It could be £60 million, £100 million, £200 billion—any figure: ‘You name a price, we’ll pay it.’ That’s a brilliant negotiating tactic, isn’t it? No sensible person, certainly no responsible person, could ever go into an international negotiation on that basis. Of course, we have problems to sort out, not least the Irish border, which the First Minister knows a great deal about, as indeed do I, having been the Government whip for Northern Ireland at one time. But you can hardly talk about the future of our trade relationship with the Irish Republic if we can’t talk about our future trade relationship with the EU. So, the sequencing here is all wrong. So, they want us to give way on everything before they’ll talk about anything. Well, that isn’t a negotiation at all, and it’s very much against British interests if we were to support that.

So, I think that the First Minister would have got a good deal further in his, what we might call ‘domestic’, negotiations with the British Government if he’d been rather more optimistic about the outcome of Brexit or at least the opportunities for British success as a result of having the freedom to trade more freely in the world. I know he’s very pessimistic about the possibilities of entering into free trade agreement with other countries, but there are many countries, particularly Commonwealth countries, who are very keen to begin the process of talks. And, indeed, they are, in an informal way, beginning. But, as the clock ticks, let’s be absolutely clear that the British people and the Welsh people on 23 June last year, voted to leave the European Union, no ifs or buts. The idea that nobody was told that this would mean leaving the single market or the customs union—. Every single remainiac was banging the drum and using those words every single minute of every day during the referendum campaign. And, of course, nobody could guarantee what the outcome of future trade negotiations with the EU might be. They may not appreciate where their rational self-interest lies. After all, there’s a great deal of irrationality contained within the EU. What is the eurozone if not a monstrous edifice of irrationality that has beggared half a continent?

So, if only the First Minister were to be a bit more optimistic about not just the hopes and aspirations of the British people but also their ability to make a success of their country in the world in the future, he might have had a great deal more listening from the British Government to what he’s had to say.