I thank the leader of the opposition for his contribution. He starts by saying that the people of Wales would rather us be talking about education and the health service, and yet, I notice that when he had the opportunity to ask me questions, he chose not to deal with either of those matters. Indeed, I cannot help but notice that in the weeks that have now gone by since the election, he's not chosen once to ask me a question about the global pandemic in which Wales is still gripped. So, we all make choices, and the leader of the opposition makes his. 

I don't agree with him in his general suggestion that we shouldn't be focused on constitutional matters. We have no choice but to be focused on them. We're dealing with them every day. When I meet, as I do every week, with Michael Gove and the leaders of the other Parliaments in the UK, I see absolutely close up the stresses and strains that there are in Northern Ireland, and the impact that the Northern Ireland protocol is having on relations between the Government there and the Government in the United Kingdom.

The Scottish Government was elected on a platform of another referendum on Scottish independence. If that happens, it will happen during this Senedd term. How can we not grapple with those issues here if we are not serious about them? I'm sure the leader of the opposition is serious about his commitment to the continuation of the United Kingdom. The point I'm trying to make this afternoon is that we won't be able to make that case if we don't spend some time now thinking about what that case should be. We have to persuade people in every part of the United Kingdom that it is in their best interests to remain part of the United Kingdom. We won't do that without having the arguments that convince them of that, and that's what our document is designed to do. It's designed to show that there is a different way of organising the United Kingdom, which I think would add up to a compelling case for its continuation. You don't make that case by taking decisions away from the Senedd that was elected to make them.

If the Member can't think of any, let me just give him these three. The UK Government decided to take away from us the powers that we have to design a compensation scheme for fishers here in Wales. That's been devolved to us since the very beginning of devolution, and yet, in the post-Brexit era, instead of us being able to design a system that would fit Wales, and then using the funding to implement that scheme, the UK Government decided that it will make the scheme for Wales, and it avoided any scrutiny here in the Senedd by doing so. The UK Government regularly threatens—the Secretary of State was at it again only last week—to impose a free port on Wales without the agreement of the Welsh Government. And just to be clear, the Welsh Government has always said we will be prepared to agree a free port on the terms that we set out in our letter of February of last year, a letter to which we have never received a reply. 

And here's a third example for him: the overriding of the expressed view of this Senedd when it comes to the Sewel convention—not just now in relation to major matters of state. While I don't agree with the UK Government's use of the Sewel convention, I could at least understand why it felt it needed to do that in those circumstances. But during our election, we had an example where a most routine matter, where this Senedd ought to have been able to be asked for its consent—because it was convenient to a UK Government, they just went ahead and did it anyway without that ever coming to Members here as the constitutional settlement required. That is a casual level of disrespect for the devolution settlement, which has got into the way of thinking of the current UK Government. It's bad for devolution, it's bad for the United Kingdom.

There is a better way. It's set out in our document, not because we have all the answers, but because we believe in a serious debate. I was heartened by some of the things that the leader of the opposition said about his commitment to that serious debate. I didn't make the remarks that he repeated several times in his questions, because every statement a Government Minister makes says 'check against delivery' at the end of it. The Member was checking, and yet he didn't think that he would follow what I had said rather than a document that I didn't follow. I didn't do it for some of the reasons that he himself outlined.

Let's hope that, across the Chamber, we are able to go on having these absolutely necessary discussions—those of us who believe that there is a case for the United Kingdom that's there to be made but can only be made on the basis of a different sort of future, a future that regards our collective interests as a voluntary association—I'm quoting Mrs May, his previous Conservative Prime Minister—of nations, where we stay together because we know that the case for doing so is compelling.