Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Counsel General and Brexit Minister (in respect of his Brexit Minister responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:30 pm on 4 December 2019.

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Photo of Jeremy Miles Jeremy Miles Labour 2:30, 4 December 2019

I know that the Member will be familiar with the work of the Institute for Government and its thorough review of the arrangements made by a number of constitutions, a number of states, even those with federal written constitutions, into how they deal with questions of the impact of international agreements on what we would describe here as devolved competence. I will be absolutely clear that she's right to say that I have significant concerns in relation to what we know has emerged from the dossier that has been put into the public domain recently and the mandate that the US Government published in relation to its aspirations from a trade agreement with the UK. It is absolutely clear from that that the UK Government's intention is to seek access to the NHS, and to commercialise it, marketise it and use it to drive up the costs of medicines for the benefit of its own pharmaceutical companies. So, I absolutely share with her the strong anxiety and concern about what appears to be under contemplation.

But, the sort of arrangement that she and the Plaid Cymru motion advocate is, essentially, a veto on international agreements, and our view—and it's articulated, I think, comprehensively, most recently in the document that the First Minister published about the reform of the constitution at large—is that, in common with, I think, all other federal constitutions, not that I claim that ours is federal, apart from the constitution of Belgium, the appropriate mechanism for dealing with that is to provide an embedded mechanism for states that are not the equivalent of the federal state in those constitutions to genuinely influence the mandate and the negotiation of those agreements. And I think that is the better way for us to proceed in relation to this question.