Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. So, Brexit is done. The UK is no longer a member state of the European Union. In this sense, at least, a very significant if not historic one, the outcome of the 2016 referendum has finally been honoured. But how done is done? And what happens next? While Brexit to date has hardly been a walk in the park, much of the real work and hard decisions lie ahead.

In the first place, there are negotiations surrounding our new relationship with our European partners. This will inevitably mean trade-offs by the UK Government, but also the EU. And let us give credit where it is due, this Government has gone further in strengthening its negotiating stance than the previous administration. If negotiations are to be successful, Europe's negotiators, including Macron, must be made to understand that free trade with the UK is as important to them, perhaps even more so than it is to the UK. The UK trades at an approximately £70 billion deficit with the EU, which means, of course, that the economies of Europe as a whole have more to lose in a trade war than does the UK. Negotiations will of course be played out with a backdrop of failing EU economies. France and Italy's economies actually shrank in the last three months of 2019, as did the economies of the eurozone as a whole. In contrast, the UK's economy grew over this period, despite the uncertainties over Brexit.

France itself is in the grip of industrial disruption caused by Macron's attempt to bring the French pension system—42 different pension schemes—under control and raise the state pension age. There is no doubt that the UK has been subsidising the overgenerous French state pensions for many years. The British people have, in contrast, largely accepted the raising of the pension age, realising that the current age at which pensions are paid is untenable in the long run. Our continued presence in the EU would undoubtedly have meant an increase in our net contributions, invariably helping to subsidise such largesse by European countries. Spain, for instance, pays its old-age pensioners to go on holiday for three weeks every year, whilst our pensioners are literally dying through fuel poverty.

The Government's solid majority will end the legislative stalemate of the last two and a half years, and phase 2 of the Brexit process might be less all-consuming in Westminster than phase 1. But one must never forget that divisions in the UK caused by the political left aligning itself with its traditional enemy, the elite and the rich, to frustrate the Brexit process. This, without doubt, left a bad taste in the mouths of their previously loyal supporters, eloquently expressed in the latest general election result.

Brexit or not, we will continue to be a close neighbour to a European Union whose own future is far from clear. Whilst Brexit will cease, indeed already has ceased, to be a major agenda item in Brussels, the EU faces struggles of its own in dealing with issues ranging from its future financing to migration and the eurozone.

We in the UK have never been isolationists. We have been and always will be a world trading nation. Brexit means we shall now be able to trade with the rest of the world under own terms, not those of Brussels. Free trade is one of the most potent agents in combating poverty and hunger throughout the world. Tariffs, subsidies, exchange controls and regulatory harmonisation, as practiced by the EU, all served to undermine free trade.

There is no doubt that the UK lost thousands of jobs to other European countries through the EU's regional grant interventions: a brand new Skoda car plant built in the Czech Republic for the German motor company Volkswagen with EU regional funding, whilst the Rover car plant was allowed to close, the irony of which is that, through Britain's net contribution to the EU, it was UK money that helped to build the plant in the Czech Republic. Closer to home, the Bosch plant in Miskin was moved to Hungary—again, with the help of European aid.