The Minister said in the statement that we must, in the UK, build a shared vision of the kind of economy and future trading relationships that we want with the EU. Of course, I applaud the sentiment, but it doesn't really bear much scrutiny because all the language of the statement and the attitudes that the Minister herself, in particular, has adopted in recent years, point in the opposite direction. She doesn't share the vision of the UK Government on Brexit at all.

In fact, the statement itself and what she said in reply to other questions earlier on point to the fact that she is still fighting the same debates that we had in the referendum campaign and the general election in 2017 and, indeed, even the general election just a few weeks ago, talking about the need for regulatory alignment. Well, if you go into negotiations on the basis that, 'Yes, we are going to ask for everything that you've got already and we're not going to give anything away', then you're inevitably not going to come back from negotiations with a successful result. No United Kingdom Government is going to pay the slightest attention to the Welsh Government if it carries on harping on about these themes.

The tune is exactly the same. All that's happened as a result of the general election is that they have changed the key. Otherwise, the tune is exactly the same as the one that they have been piping away at unsuccessfully for the last three and a half years. You would think that the Labour Party should at last have learned something from the devastating wipeout of the general election, particularly in Wales, where the Conservatives now hold an unprecedented number of seats at Westminster as a proportion of the total.

If the Welsh Government really wants to be taken seriously by the UK Government, they have to get behind the message that the UK Government itself is putting forward and has since Theresa May, of unlamented memory, departed the scene. Boris Johnson is a different kind of leader from Theresa May. He's going to take a positive, optimistic view of negotiations in the world, and he's going to play, I trust, much more hardball in our negotiations with Monsieur Barnier. Theresa May completely failed to deliver on the referendum result because she adopted the same frame of mind that, unfortunately, I think I still see in the person of the Minister who is making this statement today. I don't think that she particularly wants to be known as the Theresa May of Welsh politics, but she has a danger, I think, at least in this respect, of earning that sobriquet.

The Welsh Government adopted a policy for the last three and a half years of deliberate confrontation with the UK Government. That absolutely, totally failed. Now, it's time to not just open a new page, but actually a new book, if the Welsh Government is to have any influence at all over the UK Government, which I would like to see, of course. The interests of Wales are slightly different from the interests of other parts of the United Kingdom, the same as Scotland's are and the same as the north of England's interests are slightly different from everybody else's as well. The Welsh economy exhibits certain characteristics, in particular the importance of exports to the EU in Wales, which I acknowledge is much greater than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. But, when she says in her statement that we must not lose sight of the interests of consumers as well as stakeholders, I applaud her for that because everybody's a consumer in Wales. Everybody eats food, for example.

Agriculture is an important element in any future trade negotiation with the EU, but we can't just see this through the perspective of producer interest groups. We should see also the importance of negotiating in the interests of consumers. In Wales, particularly, as we're the poorest part of the United Kingdom in income terms and GVA, the interests of a larger proportion of the Welsh population is in getting cheap food and, indeed, cheap everything out of these negotiations: opening up markets, reducing prices, creating a more competitive economy within which to operate.

So, the frame of mind that we need, I think, for the Welsh Government, as for the UK, is firmness of purpose. No, we're not going to the negotiations as supplicants of the EU. They have much more to lose in total than we have—a £66 billion a year deficit with the EU in goods in 2018. We have a massive surplus in services with the world at large. That's not part of the negotiations with the EU. The EU is interested in doing the best possible deal that it can get for itself and we should be interested in doing the best possible deal that we can get for Britain. But if the Welsh Government sees itself as a kind of Trojan horse for EU interests in these negotiations, it will get nowhere. It will in fact further discredit itself and marginalise itself and be ignored by the UK Government, and that has further repercussions as well in terms of the relationships between the devolved Governments and the UK Government on other issues. So, I do implore the Minister, even at this late stage, to change the tone and change the mood music because that's the way to make progress.