Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:53 pm on 21 May 2019.
Llywydd, it's an afternoon for irony on the floor of the National Assembly, clearly. The Member asks me about respect and mandate. Here is somebody who I shared a platform with during the run-up to the last Assembly election when he urged the audience in front of us to support the United Kingdom Independence Party. No sooner had he arrived here under that ticket than he flew across to the other side of the Chamber to be a cuckoo in the nest of the Conservative Party. Now the bird has flown again. This sort of peripatetic approach to politics is not one that I think leaves him in any position to ask others in this Chamber questions about respecting democratic mandates. The Welsh Government has always respected the result of the referendum. We have always recognised the way in which people in Wales have voted, and we've been focused, as we've said so many times, on the form rather than the fact of Brexit. Of course the Brexit Minister was right to say we have to balance what people said in that referendum against the harm we know would come to Wales from the sort of Brexit that he and his party now advocate.