8. Plaid Cymru Debate: People's Vote

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:28 pm on 3 October 2018.

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Photo of Mick Antoniw Mick Antoniw Labour 5:28, 3 October 2018

I will take an intervention when I've actually made a few more points, okay? So, don't jump in; hold your horses. 

What he said was:

'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.'

And Owen Paterson, Tory MP, prominent campaigner for Vote Leave, also said,

'Only a madman would actually leave the market.'

So, people were clear on that. They also said—we had the bit of racism that UKIP and the Tories introduced into this—'Turkey is going to join the EU and millions of people will flock to the UK.' Where are we? All negotiations with Turkey are suspended on human rights grounds and there is absolutely no prospect of that happening. That actually was probably the most disgraceful part of the whole campaign, because it introduced a racist element built on a lie, and it was a disgrace.

The other thing that people have voted for, quite simply, was because they knew that a free trade deal with the EU, as they were assured by Liam Fox, would be the easiest thing in human history. This is what Liam Fox said, that the free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be

'one of the easiest in human history'.

And they were also assured, it was very clear, that we would be saving for the NHS £350 million a week. It sounds like a very, very good offer. They also said that we would protect workers' rights, there'd be no problem with workers' rights. Well, we now have a Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, who has described workers' rights as 'obstacles to British business' and UK workers as the 'worst idlers in the world'. Last week, at Tory party conference, he said absolutely nothing about the protection of workers' rights. And we were also assured that Wales would not lose a penny, we'd be better off, in fact—we'd not only not lose a penny, we'd probably have a few more pennies—and yet Theresa May has refused at every stage to give that guarantee. It would be so easy—[Interruption.] Yes, I'll take an intervention.