Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Our NHS is in dire peril. We are now a week away from the election. The election that's meant to get Brexit done, according to Boris Johnson. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is visiting the UK to assure us that he has no plans to gain market access to our NHS. Both these viewpoints are lies. The Conservatives' Brexit plans will not get Brexit done. Passing the withdrawal agreement will only be the end of the beginning, while the future relationship negotiations are yet to begin. And Donald Trump's assurances are about as reliable as a Tory manifesto commitment for Wales, unfortunately.

Trump said yesterday that he wouldn't want the NHS to form part of any deal, and that he also had no idea who started this vicious rumour in the first place. Well, I can help him with that because it was, of course, Donald Trump himself who did just that. During a visit to the UK on 4 June, he was asked whether the NHS should be on the table, and his answer was:

'When you’re dealing in trade everything's on the table, so NHS or anything else or a lot more than that but everything will be on the table, absolutely.'

So, that's clear, then. Two days earlier, the American ambassador, Woody Johnson, had told Andrew Marr the same thing. There is also clear evidence that gaining partial access to the NHS forms a big part of the US's trade objectives, which are to be found in an official US department for trade document entitled 'United States-United Kingdom Negotiations'. Further proof was contained in the documents released last week by the Labour Party, which show exploratory talks were already ongoing and that drug patents and pricing, health insurance and medical devices were discussed. And only yesterday, Dominic Raab confessed on Sky News that US companies could indeed increase drug prices for the NHS through provisions likely to be enacted in a future trade deal.

Now, I think it would be useful to give some detail about what exactly the US is after here, and how it could affect patients here. We're not talking about privatising the whole of the health service. Private companies would have no interest in running accident and emergency departments, for example, because, to put it bluntly, there are no easy profits to be made there. What they want is to cherry-pick the most lucrative parts of the market, in order to divert money from front-line NHS services to the pockets of US big pharma. The simplest way of doing this is through changing rules around patents and drug pricing, which is exactly why these two factors form the main part of US negotiating demands. Now, if the US were successful in gaining full market access for US drugs, they would greatly limit the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence's ability to decide which medicines patients can receive. In the US, drug prices are inflated to, frankly, obscene levels, because the licensing is lengthy and under control of powerful lobbyists, which means only a few companies have the expertise to navigate the process.