Well, the eurozone’s doing very well, actually—better than Britain is at this moment in time. I don’t know if he’s seen the growth figures in the eurozone. There was a strand of naivety that went through, once again, the speech that was made by the leader of UKIP. Let’s recap what was said last year. I don’t want to re-fight the referendum, but it’s worth reminding ourselves of the context here. Three hundred and fifty million pounds a week will be available for the NHS: rubbish. We will control our own borders: nonsense. There will be an immediate free trade agreement with the European Union because the German car manufacturers will force it to happen: cloud-cuckoo-land. There will be free trade agreements in place with all manner of countries before March 2019: ridiculous. For a start, the UK has no experience of negotiating free trade agreements. All these things that were said last year are simply not true. They never were true. So, we have to adapt to the current situation.

Now, the thrust of what the leader of UKIP was saying was basically this: it’s not fair the EU won’t give us what we want. He’d used a word like ‘ransom’. What business negotiation takes place where one side goes in and says to the other, ‘We want absolutely everything our own way; absolutely everything our own way, and, if you don’t compromise, then we’re going to walk away’? That is not, I tell you, a sensible place to be in a business negotiation. It was believed that the EU would fall apart. It’s not going to fall apart. David Davis said he’d be in Berlin first, negotiating with the Germans. It’s not going to happen. The single market’s far more important to German industry than anything else. Britain’s an important market, but the EU single market’s far, far bigger than Britain. The reality is that Britain’s a fifth of the size of the EU. I think he summed it up himself that the difficulty was the vote last year. Well, it was the difficulty he advocated. So, he can’t resile from it now. I don’t accept that people last year voted to leave the EU on the terms that he has suggested. The reality is that people were asked to vote for a concept. They weren’t asked to vote as to how that concept would operate. They weren’t asked about a customs union. People didn’t understand what it was. They weren’t asked about the single market. People didn’t understand what it was. Despite that, there were remainers saying, ‘We will stay in the single market. We will be fine. We’ll stay in the customs union. We will have a comprehensive free trade agreement.’ And now he’s criticising the EU for doing what he himself would advocate the UK doing—looking after their own interests. Of course they’re going to do that. So, there has to be an admission here that there has to be compromise on both sides.

The problem lies, to my mind at the moment, with the UK. The UK doesn’t know what it wants. We’ve got a UK Government that doesn’t really know what kind of Brexit it wants to see, and that needs to be resolved first. He mentioned food prices. Of course, what he doesn’t seem to understand is that we would then see tariffs imposed on food coming in from the rest of the EU, where a substantial amount of our imports come from. Prices are bound to go up because tariffs on food are very, very substantial. On top of that, Welsh exports—Welsh lamb, particularly—would become massively more expensive overnight. It’s bound to. If you have tariffs, there’s no avoiding it; that’s going to happen. It means Welsh lamb is more expensive in its most important market. That’s what ‘no deal’ means. It means demand will drop. It means farmers will have animals they cannot sell. No amount of money is going to help them if they can’t sell what they produce. So, there are animal welfare issues that will have to be looked at. There is no getting around this. We will find ourselves in the position, if we have tariffs, where many goods are more expensive in the UK, particularly food and drink, and we will find that what we export becomes much more expensive, and we don’t need to do this.

Nobody advocates the imposition of tariffs, that’s true, but we should be very, very careful not to be in a situation where tariffs are, in fact, imposed. Who’s going to govern the tariffs between the Irish Republic and the UK? Who’s going to do it? There are no checks, so what do we do to mitigate smuggling, both ways? If there are no border controls, what are you going to do to mitigate people trafficking? All of these things have just not been thought through. The arrogant assumption of many of the Brextremists was that Ireland would leave the EU with the UK, because the people of Ireland are well known for doing what they’re told by the UK. None of this was thought through.

Now, he talked about the freedom to trade. It’s seductive. If I was Australia and New Zealand, I would love to have a free trade deal with the UK. Why wouldn’t I? What do we get in return? Australia is much smaller than the UK, and New Zealand has 4 million people. If you have a free trade deal with New Zealand, it’s wonderful for New Zealand—I concede that. Their lamb would be able to come into the UK without any kind of restriction at all. Where does that leave Welsh farmers? What do we get out of it? How can you replace a market of 500 million people with a market of 4 million people? It just doesn’t work. The arithmetic isn’t there.

I know, in India, for example, that the discussions with the Indian Government went badly, because the Indian Government, the Indian Prime Minister, made the point, ‘Well, if we’re looking at a free trade agreement, what about our students? What about the visa restrictions you put on our students?’ The Indian Government’s position, if I can sum it up—and I think I do them justice—is to say, ‘Well, if you want a free trade agreement, we want to see freer movement of people.’ That’s the reasonable position of India, with over a billion people. That’s the position that they will take. Of course, when he talks about our free trade with Commonwealth countries and, perhaps, freedom of movement with Commonwealth countries, he doesn’t mean every Commonwealth country, does he? He means those such as Australia and New Zealand.

So, these things have to be considered very, very carefully. What I do know is that all the things, all the optimism, that the Brexit camp said was there last year has gone. All the things they said would happen, they haven’t happened. They haven’t happened. So, we have to be realistic. Yes, we have to implement the vote that people had, but I do not believe that a Brexit on the hardest terms is what people voted for. They were told it wouldn’t happen, and if that is what people are being asked to face, if it is the case that we end up with no deal, we’d have an immediate general election. People would have every right to express a view on what would have been a failure and what would have been a set of circumstances where they felt they would have been misled. I hope it doesn’t come to that, because people will suffer if it comes to that. Jobs will go and people will be paying more for what they buy. I don’t want that.

So, let’s put aside this talk of no deal. Of course no-one’s suggesting that we should pay whatever the European Union asks for. I made that point in my statement. There has to be a sensible compromise on this. We have to sort out the issue of each other’s citizens. People feel that they are being held hostage, within the EU as well as the UK. That needs to be resolved. But we are now 15 months on and still not enough progress has been made. We need progress by December. We need to move on. Let’s put aside this fantasy land of massive and huge amounts of free trade agreements in place by March of 2019—that isn’t going to happen—and let’s focus on getting the best deal with our closest market: 400 million people after we’ve left, our nearest neighbour. That has to be the challenge. The idea of walking away from our obligations basically sends the message that the UK does not stand by its commitments. Who would trust us after that? The matter in hand is dealing with getting access to our biggest market, and that’s the single market. That is where the focus should come and not anywhere else at this moment in time.