Part of 2. Questions to the Counsel General and Brexit Minister (in respect of his Brexit Minister responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:38 pm on 20 March 2019.
I thank the Counsel General for a wholly uninformative answer, of course. But just to revert to the question that Lynne Neagle asked earlier on about the effect of a 'no deal' on the automotive industry in her constituency, as she alleged at any rate, has the Counsel General seen that today, in fact, Toyota has announced that it's going to begin producing a new generation of hybrid cars at its factory in Derbyshire next year, despite the global car industry downturn, and that these cars that will be built for Suzuki will also use engines produced at Toyota's Deeside plant in Wales—all despite Brexit, of course? Meanwhile, Ford has also announced that it is cutting 5,000 jobs in Germany, which, of course, is nothing to do with Brexit, and, therefore, what is happening in the world, certainly in the automotive world, is that the tectonic plates are changing and that Europe, as a whole, is going to suffer from its addiction to over-regulation and inward-looking protectionist attitudes, and that if we were outside the common external tariff and the customs regime, we would have the opportunity to exploit the 85 per cent of the global economy that is not part of the European Union and that is expanding, unlike the European Union, which is contracting economically.