Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 16 November 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:03, 16 November 2021

Well, Llywydd, I think Sir Keir Starmer, who led for Labour during those long months of the exit negotiations, will have been pointing to a distinction that the UK Government was so reluctant to recognise. The United Kingdom has left the European Union. That battle is over. There was an opportunity to strike a new economic relationship—no longer part of the political union, no longer part of the social union, but an economic relationship—which would have been absolutely acceptable to Mrs Thatcher, who negotiated most of it, and which would have preserved the ability of businesses here in Wales to go on trading and to go on developing markets that they had invested so much in over the 40 years. That was an argument that Sir Keir Starmer made regularly and routinely during all of those negotiations. I heard him myself. I had the opportunity to be in meetings with him where he made that point to UK Ministers—that you could leave the European Union in the political sense, in the way the referendum had determined, but that did not mean that you had to damage your economic interests in the process. Rebuilding an economic set of arrangements that allows trade to flow, that allows businesses to thrive, seems to me to be the most modest ambition that anybody looking at the current state of play would want to pursue.