I welcome the statement from the Cabinet Secretary in some respects, and I can certainly agree with his evisceration of the Chequers agreement and its internal contradictions. It's quite clear that this is a political exercise not to seek the best outcome for the United Kingdom but to try to paper over the cracks of the warring factions within the Conservative Party, and the dog's breakfast that has emerged from this process in the Chequers agreement just shows what happens when you conduct a negotiation through people who don't really believe in what they're doing. The majority of Conservative MPs voted for remain, an even bigger majority of Members of the Cabinet were remainers. We have a collection of people who fundamentally don't really want to leave the EU, and the Chequers agreement is designed to achieve that particular objective. We will remain in the EU in all but name. So, I'm surprised, in many ways, that other parties aren't more cheerful about it, because it actually delivers for them what they want.

Steffan Lewis, in the course of his contribution this afternoon, talked about the country being held hostage, Wales being held hostage, by irreconcilable ideologues at Westminster. Actually, the people who are holding us all in the United Kingdom hostage in this process is the European Commission and their mouthpiece Monsieur Barnier. Nobody can promise an agreement because of course we can't control the reaction of the European Union to British proposals. So, the First Minister was quite wrong when he said earlier on that we all confidently promised a deal from the EU; I certainly didn't promise confidently any deal with the EU, knowing that actually we're speaking different languages in political terms. We've been talking the language of economics, the European Union negotiators were actually talking the language of politics. For them, the fundamental necessity is to maintain the political project of moving to greater unity politically, and that is one of the main reasons why I have always been opposed to Britain's membership of the EU. I do not want to be part of a federal superstate in the EU, and that is what the permanent bureaucracy of the European Union is determined to achieve. So, this negotiation was always doomed to fail if they had the upper hand, and the British Government's weakness in this regard has actually given them an even greater advantage than they enjoyed naturally.

The Cabinet Secretary very quickly lapsed from that analysis, in which I can agree with him, into his usual jeremiad. I always enjoy his classical illusions, although I wonder how many secondary school children today would understand who Scylla and Charybdis were. Sadly, I don't suppose they even know who the prophet Jeremiah was either. But if ever there's an updated version of the Book of Lamentations, I can think of nobody better to write it than the Cabinet Secretary himself. As Darren Millar pointed out in his contribution, the extravagant claims of project fear go beyond absurdity. The idea that we won't be able to use our passports or that aircraft will not be able to fly over European air space or land at European airports—and, of course, that the reverse would perhaps be true in those circumstances—I think is so ridiculous that we don't need to spend much time on that. I didn't regard it as a refutation of what Darren Millar said that it's in his own Government's documents, because the Government itself is actually part of project fear in this respect, because that helps them to achieve their political objectives as well.

We've heard from Monsieur Barnier himself in the last 48 hours that a solution to the Northern Irish problem is easily available. He doesn't say so directly, but what he did say just two days ago in relation to solving the problem of east-west trade from Ireland, which is equally applicable to north-south trading, is that whether technology could help east-west trade is a different question from north-south. His aim is to make checks as simple and dedramatised as possible, but that's a matter for the negotiating teams. Of course, he heads the negotiating teams, so he is actually working towards a solution that can easily be found. There's no reason to think that that wouldn't be available for north-south trade as well. After all, only about 1 per cent of Irish trade is conducted north-south, and there are well established mechanisms in other jurisdictions throughout the world that could make that as undramatic as possible—automatic customs clearing, electronic border checks and occasional physical checks away from the border areas. So, if there's a will there's a way, and that can easily be achieved. Ireland is actually being used a bargaining chip by the EU, as a means not only of undermining our negotiating position in this Brexit negotiation but also as a means of trying to break up the United Kingdom and, in particular, to create political unity in Ireland, which would, clearly, be a disastrous effect of the Brexit process. But, they're the ones playing with fire, not us. My solution to that would be to say, 'If you want border checks on the Irish border, you put them up'. Let's put the ball back into their court, and let's see what happens then. We could unilaterally decide to have no border and let them cope with the consequences.