Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:35 pm on 30 January 2019.
Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. I beg to move the amendment in the name of my colleague Gareth Bennett.
We are at the culmination of two and a half wasted years. When the EU withdrawal Bill was enacted, the leaving date of 29 March was on the face of the Bill, and everybody has known that we've been heading to 29 March in the last two years. It's a shocking dereliction of duty on the part of the United Kingdom Government that we're in the shambles that we are today. Although, I have to say, it was entirely predictable, given that Theresa May was openly going into a cul-de-sac from which she couldn't emerge, because the EU never wanted a deal in the first place; they wanted a British capitulation.
We know that Monsieur Barnier said in 2016 that he will have done his job if, at the end of the process, the terms are so bad for Britain that the British people will want to stay in the EU. That is the background to the so-called negotiation that has been undertaken in Brussels. We could've read the book Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis, who set out exactly, with, actually, clear precision, all those years ago, the tactics that would face Theresa May and the British negotiators when they got to Brussels, because he said that the EU negotiators are only concerned with one thing: how to signal to the rest of Europe that anyone who votes in a Government or votes in a referendum in a manner that challenges the authority of the deep establishment in Europe will get crushed. And that is exactly what has happened. I'll give way.