Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 20 June 2018.
Well, Llywydd, I've never shared the Member's view of the Commission as some sort of malign force, forever out to do us down. In my experience of going to Brussels and talking to people there, I think we are fortunate to have a group of people on the other side of the negotiating table who recognise that it is in their interests and ours to agree a Brexit deal that does the least possible harm to their economies and to the economy of the United Kingdom. I think that's the spirit in which those negotiations have been entered into. The Labour Party's policy in Wales is the policy set out in our original White Paper, and that is an approach to Brexit that insists that it is the needs of our economy, it is the needs of jobs, it is the needs of working people, that should be at the very top of the negotiating list of the United Kingdom Government, and that all the talk of taking back control, of being in charge of our laws, all that sort of thing, leads us to a series of red lines that, in the end, will mean that the UK Government has managed something really remarkable—it will have managed both to damage our economy and to see to it that our political voice in decision making has been diminished. There is a different way, a better way, and the Labour Party has set it out.