Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:41 pm on 4 June 2019.
I thank the Member for those questions. There are three main questions that he asked. In terms of the first question, this will be a subject of debate with UK Government Ministers. I can confirm that that will be true. As I mentioned earlier, we have raised this question, but we will continue to do that and continue to press for specific action to be taken. This has been the subject of debate for a long time with the Scottish Government, and that relationship mentioned the importance of collaboration. We’ve seen in this Chamber where we have succeeded is where we’ve co-operated between Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru in the White Paper, and also with the Scottish Government. That collaboration has been a very important factor in the successes we’ve had along a very turbulent journey since the 2016 referendum.
In terms of the content of the White Paper, well, if it was possible to have an agreement in Westminster, then that would be the kind of agreement that we’d like to see, but we don’t think that’s possible, and just to be clear, I’m not just seeing that as something that’s different to a referendum. We think that we need a referendum on any kind of deal. I don’t want that to be misunderstood. But if a deal was possible, then certainly that’s still the kind of deal, from our perspective, that would be best for us. But the possibility of that, in our opinion, following the elections for the Tory party leadership specifically—we think there’s no realistic possibility of that in terms of my personal analysis.
In terms of the final question that the Member raised, I think this goes to the heart of the issue, because we have been discussing the relationship between the UK and the EU for three years, and every second of that time that we’ve been discussing that is a second where we could have been discussing the issues that are really at the heart of the decision of people to leave the EU—austerity and pressure on public services and so forth. I believe that when we can communicate directly with people and explain, for example, that voting for the Brexit Party means a vote for putting the NHS on the table for discussing that in a trade deal with the US Government—that’s the kind of policy that’s at the heart of the party behind me, not the relationship with the EU. That’s a starting point for the kind of UK and kind of Wales we would not want to see, and undermines the communities that we represent.