Under her Conservative successor, the Maastricht treaty of 1993 spent 23 sitting days in the House of Commons Committee Stage alone. Llywydd, I suspect that the official record does not contain many instances where I have made positive references to Mrs Thatcher, but at least the notion of parliamentary scrutiny appeared to have meant something to her.

Of course, the opposition here will say that all this is driven by the lack of time, as if the Conservative Party had not had four and a half years to deliver a deal that we were told would be the easiest ever struck, or the Prime Minister will be threatening us with the consequences if the future relationship Bill is not enacted before tomorrow evening. But all of that is simply wrong. The EU is bringing the treaty into provisional application, and the European Parliament will have several weeks to understand the implications of a text that is about the same length as the Bible. Why are we not able to do the same? How has taking back control collapsed so quickly into having no parliamentary control at all?

Llywydd, this Senedd should refuse to play along with this pretence of scrutiny. The first time the Welsh Government saw even one clause of the treaty was on Christmas Day. The Bill itself, to which we have been asked to give consent, has been with us for one working day, and that under strict embargo. It is plainly impossible for anyone in this Senedd to have a clear understanding of the ways in which this Bill will affect our competence. When we tabled the motion for debate today, Llywydd, we could not refer to the Bill because it had not been introduced and was not in the public domain. And if we had put the debate off until tomorrow, it would have been after the Bill had been enacted. This is not how a democracy should work. And let me be clear that, in these circumstances, this Government will not bring a motion seeking either to give or refuse consent in such circumstances.

Now, the amendment laid to the debate from the Conservative Party in Wales invites us to provide legislative consent to a Bill that they cannot possibly have considered. We will oppose that amendment, and the amendment in the name of Caroline Jones, which seeks simply to refight battles that that amendment itself says should be put behind us. We cannot support the third amendment, from Plaid Cymru, which fails to recognise that a deal is better than no deal for the reasons that I have already set out. The Government will abstain on the fourth and final amendment on the order paper today, Llywydd. The Welsh Government does not support the deal, but nor do we believe that it is for the Senedd to instruct MPs as to how they should vote any more than Members of the Senedd would be prepared to take instructions from parties at Westminster.

Llywydd, all this brings me to my third point. Just why is it that the UK Government has not given more time to Parliament and to the other UK legislatures to scrutinise this treaty? The answer is simple: the UK Government wants to get the Bill on the statute book before all the details of this deal have had time to emerge. But we know here that businesses will have a treaty that will make trade with our largest and most important market more expensive and more difficult—the loss of contracts because of new rules of origin arrangements; the cost in time and money of export health certificates and sanitary and phytosanitary checks for agriculture and food exports; the end of the mutual recognition of professional qualifications; the failure to include access to the single market for UK services, meaning businesses will have to rely on 27 different sets of national rules to trade across the EU where they have only one today. This is a bad deal for business and for business here in Wales.

And for our fellow citizens, what will this deal mean? Queuing at airports, visas for longer stays and the elimination of the freedom to live and work anywhere across the continent of Europe, mobile phones where calls cost far more or may not work at all, fewer people from the European Union able to work in our health and social care system looking after people here in Wales who need their help. And for our young people in particular, Llywydd, the cultural vandalism of cutting them off from the Erasmus+ programme, the largest international exchange programme in history, which people from Wales have done so much to shape and foster. Instead, we will be offered an English system, because, let's be clear, that is what is now proposed: a scheme made in Westminster and administered in Whitehall, with all the responsibilities that this Senedd holds for further and higher education in Wales not simply sidelined, but written out of the script altogether.

Llywydd, unlike other parties here in this Chamber, the Welsh Government has always argued that a deal was preferable to no deal. Even this thin and disappointing treaty, so different from what was promised, is better than the bitterness and the chaos that would have followed no deal at all. This Government will now redouble our efforts to work with businesses in all parts of our country to limit the damage that this deal continues to inflict, to work with our public services to limit the damage done to Welsh citizens, young and old, and to work with our friends and our partners in the European Union to reaffirm this Welsh nation's determination to go on being outward looking, international in perspective, and welcoming to the rest of the world. Llywydd, diolch yn fawr.