So, I think there's every reason to think that the Welsh economy is going to benefit in the medium and longer term—and even in the short term—from Brexit. We have had one of the most ridiculous statements that I've seen from project fear in the last couple of years in relation to the chief executive of Aston Martin recently, who was predicting that car production would come to a complete halt at Aston Martin if we didn't do a deal with the EU. That was based upon a prediction that there might not be type approval for cars made in Britain in the EU and vice versa. Well, Aston Martin exported 600 cars to the EU last year, and if they couldn't sell their cars into Germany at £160,000 a time, the Germans would not be able to sell their 820,000 cars a year to Britain, which is 14 per cent of their entire manufacturing of passenger cars. Eighteen per cent of German passenger car exports come to Britain. Somehow or other, I don't think that this is going to come about. And so, we need to look at the realities here: the impact of the kind of predictions such as we had from Aston Martin would be so great and disastrous—even to a powerful economy the size of Germany—that it's inconceivable that this would be allowed to happen, particularly now that Chancellor Merkel has some more pressing problems at home trying to form a Government: something which has not obtained in Germany since the years of the Weimar Republic. So, things are very much changing. There are uncertainties in Germany as well as there are in Britain, and we should reflect upon that as being just a fact of life.

Now, obviously, agriculture is very important to Wales, and I want to spend a couple of minutes just talking about that because there are particular sectors of agriculture for which Brexit will be a challenge, because even if we do manage to do a comprehensive trade deal with the EU, there may be certain wrinkles in relation to agricultural products because of the protectionist nature of the common agricultural policy. This is something that we can't shy away from, and I've never denied that, particularly for exports of lamb, this is going to be a big challenge for us, but we've got to see this in perspective, you know? The market for these products is relatively small compared with the total market—. You know, we're talking about £120 million a year exports of sheep meat from Wales: £120 million is peanuts in the context of the economy of Wales and the United Kingdom. If there are temporary and transitional problems in the export of lamb, then we will have the resources to deal with them because of the £8 billion a year net contribution that we make to the EU that we will no longer be paying, and there is also, of course, the massive opportunity with import substitution: we're only 66 per cent self-sufficient in the production of lamb. So, a third of the market for lamb currently, a lot of it comes from New Zealand, true, but a lot of it comes from elsewhere as well. In relation to beef, we're only two thirds self-sufficient again. Imports of pork, we're only 40 per cent self-sufficient; and poultry, we're 73 per cent self-sufficient. So, there's a big home market that we've got, which we can continue to develop to take up whatever we can't export to the EU.

It's not a zero-sum game here: there are opportunities for us as well as the problems. And for European agriculture, of course, it's going to create massive difficulties as well, because we're—. And particularly in certain products, I mean, I don't think Danish farmers are going to be too keen to find that they can't any longer sell us pork and bacon, for example. And goodness knows what kind of deal we'll be able to do with the Irish Republic under the current intransigent attitude of Monsieur Barnier, but it's of massive importance to the Irish economy that we have some kind of a deal that frees up trade between us in agricultural products, because, overwhelmingly, the imports to this country of beef and dairy products come from the Irish Republic, and agriculture's a much, much higher proportion of the value of the Irish economy than it is of the British and even the Welsh economy.

So, I think that there is plenty of scope for us to be optimistic, but the Welsh Government, of course, has to play its part in this as well, and it should want to play a positive part in the development of future trade links. I know that the Cabinet Secretary goes frequently on trade missions around the world, and he will know that the rest of the world, which is 85 per cent or more of the global economy outside the EU, is a massive opportunity for Wales. But, we need to have the legislative infrastructure and the tax infrastructure, which we were debating earlier on this afternoon, that is going to maximise those opportunities.

If we use the new freedoms that we'll get by the repatriation of powers from Brussels to Cardiff, as well as from Brussels to Westminster—we'll obviously have control of agricultural policy here in Cardiff and environmental policy as well—we can revisit much of the legislation that has been imposed upon us in the last 40 years, which was never debated in any parliamentary institution. I was both a member of the Council of Ministers in the EU and also a Minister in the UK Government at Westminster, and I was a Member of Parliament for many years, presented with statutory instruments imposing regulations upon us, which we could debate but couldn't amend and certainly couldn't vote down. So, much of this legislation has never actually had any formal legislative scrutiny.

There must be scope, particularly where legislation has been on the statute book for such a long time unamended, for us to tweak the details in a way that will, without prejudicing the interests of the public and protection of the environment, et cetera, enable us to make life easier for small businesses in particular, which are very important in Wales, especially in agriculture, where the bulk of self-employment in Wales is in rural areas. It must give us the opportunity, I think, to make life easier, cheaper, and therefore to make these businesses more efficient and better able to cope with the challenges that are to come.

So, I say to the Welsh Government: let's embrace the future; let us rise to the challenge, but do it in an optimistic way. We created a great empire around the world in the nineteenth century, and we were the workshop of the world. Britain has been a fount of innovation and still is. If you look at the number of Nobel prizes that we've won, there are more Nobel prize winners in the common room of Trinity College Cambridge than in the whole of France. So, we are, as a nation, inventive, innovative and enterprising, and so I invite the Welsh Government to play its part in ensuring that Wales has a prosperous future.