Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:04 pm on 22 October 2019.
We have remainer Parliaments that are determined, and always have been determined, to defy the will of the people. Before the referendum campaign, every imaginable horror was conjured up by exactly the same people of what would happen if we left the customs union and the single market. There were plagues of boils and frogs and so on and so forth. So, the idea that these arguments, which we’ve gone through endless times in the last three and half years, didn’t feature in the referendum campaign is an absurd rewriting of history. Only last week we were taking about Catalonia in this place, and the leader of Plaid Cymru was waxing lyrical about the right of the Catalonian people to determine their own future by means of a referendum. The Spanish Government, of course, takes a totally different view. As far as Plaid Cymru are concerned, in these debates, they have assumed the role of the Spanish Government because they are determined to keep us in the unity of the supranational empire, which is what Guy Verhofstadt describes it as, of the European Union. Britain and Wales should never be allowed to secure their freedom from this supranational body. Plaid Cymru are quite happy for us to be a colony in the Belgian empire; they just don’t want us to be a part of the United Kingdom. And the absurdity of that position is that whereas, however inadequate it might be—at the moment we’ve got 40 Members of Parliament at Westminster—if Wales were to be independent within the European Union, it would have a handful of Members of the European Parliament, you’d have a miniscule percentage of the votes in the Council of Ministers, and you’d have one European Commissioner, who would be bound to be independent. I give way.