Getting Brexit done means damaging the economy, risking the livelihoods of our citizens and starving our essential public services of the investment needed. Yet, the Conservatives during the election campaign have again been making completely undeliverable promises, such as that we can turn our back on the EU's approach to state aid and competition and still have a best-in-class free trade agreement with the European Union. If, heaven help us, they return to Government, they will rapidly realise this is a recipe for a breakdown in negotiations. 

So, turning to the amendments from the Welsh Conservatives, while of course we support the merits of free trade, there is a huge risk to British interests if a Tory Government were to rush into the embrace of an America-first Trump administration, an administration that has shown itself in equal measure ruthless and reckless in seeing trade as a zero-sum game, where America can only win if it trashes the interests of its negotiating partner. We can no more believe the assurances given by Boris Johnson that the NHS will never be sacrificed in negotiations with the EU than we could believe that he would deliver Brexit by 31 October come what may.

Let me absolutely clear: the NHS in Wales is run in Wales, for Wales, and, under this Welsh Government, it will remain in public hands. Our NHS is not for sale. And the UK Government has been making all the same mistakes in its preparations for trade negotiations with the USA that it made when starting out on negotiating the withdrawal agreement with the European Union—a lethal combination of indifference, ignorance and woefully overestimating the strength of our negotiating hand. It has failed—not even tried, in fact—to articulate a vision for future trade that is shared by all the Governments of the United Kingdom, and there is also a complete lack of transparency. The UK has not even published a draft negotiating mandate for negotiations with the USA. But we now know, of course, as has been referred to in the debate already, that months of secret negotiations have already taken place, summarised in more than 400 pages of notes and minutes. This only fuels suspicion and undermines trust, particularly when the impact on people, on businesses, on communities across the whole of the UK could be so profound.

By contrast, we have been clear to the UK Government that we need a formal and structured involvement in all aspects of trade negotiations, which brings me to the closing part of the motion from Plaid Cymru. The motion identifies the right challenges but not, I'm afraid, the right solutions. As a Government, we favour an overhaul of the constitution so that it fully recognises and respects the equal authority of the four Governments and Parliaments to deal with issues within their competence.

But even fully federal constitutions like Canada, like Germany, Australia or the USA do not give individual below-federal-government-level governments a veto over trade agreements. And I would stress this is also true in Canada, where the involvement of their provinces in the comprehensive economic and trade agreement process is often held up as an exemplar. Doing so, of course, would make the role of the federal Government in conducting international negotiations, practically unworkable. Rather, they embed the rights of state governments, province governments, or Länder governments to help shape negotiations, and, in some cases, as David Rees mentioned in his contribution, including the possibility of the Länder acting collectively to block treaties, all be that through their representation, as David said, in the federal parliaments.

Only in Belgium do individual state-level governments have a formal role in ratifying and potentially vetoing international agreements. But the devolution settlement in Belgium devolves trade, but does not devolve health. So, that is a signal to us of the caution which we must attach when we look at precedents elsewhere. And those who advocate a veto of international agreements by the Senedd, or by the Scottish Parliament, are, in effect, advocating not to reform, but, in practical terms, the dissolution of the union. And whilst I don't support that objective at all, I do think it would at least have been more transparent to reflect that in the motion.