8. Plaid Cymru Debate: 'No Deal' Brexit

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:59 pm on 16 January 2019.

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Photo of Mick Antoniw Mick Antoniw Labour 5:59, 16 January 2019

I've only really got a few matters that I wanted to contribute because what's being created is the impression that with no deal, well, it's okay because we'll just fall back on WTO rules and half the world and half our trade is all on WTO rules, et cetera. I mean, quite frankly, that is absolute rubbish. We would be the only country in the world that is trading on solely WTO rules. I think Mauritius, at one stage, was trading on WTO rules; maybe the extent of their economy is what Theresa May has in mind for the UK economy, but it is an absolute nonsense. The moment we fall onto WTO rules, firstly, for non-agricultural produce, there are massive increases in tariffs, but not only that, we don't have the option of just trading with them, because there are quotas for all sorts of products. It would be an absolutely disastrous scenario. What we would actually lose out on is every single free trade deal that we actually have the benefit of at the moment. There are 35 free trade agreements that we benefit from by virtue of our membership of the EU, and there are 48 that are partly in place at the moment, there are 22 that are pending and there are 21 that are under negotiation. We would lose the benefit of every single one of those and we could only replace them by having to negotiate some 100-plus new trade deals with every single country in the world.

Now, it's taken Theresa May over two years to come up with a rubbish deal with the EU that she can't even get through Parliament. The idea that this Government is capable of negotiating 100 new free trade deals, or even 10, even one or two new trade deals, within a matter of years is an absolute nonsense. The immediate—