Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 14 June 2022.
Well, Llywydd, I continue to believe that, if Wales and the United Kingdom were inside the single market, all those barriers to trade that we see doing such harm to the Welsh manufacturing industry and to Welsh agriculture, those will be removed. It's an inescapable fact that our nearest and biggest trading partners are still in the European Union. Now, trade with them—. Uniquely, as you will remember, nobody was able to find a single example of a treaty agreed that put more barriers in the way of trade rather than trying to remove them. All of this, Llywydd, is now under even greater strain because of the publication yesterday of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, a Bill that 52 of the 90 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly—parties representing 52 of those 90 seats—described today as something they rejected in the strongest possible terms. This is what they said to the Prime Minister:
'We reject in the strongest possible terms your Government’s reckless new protocol legislation, which flies in the face of the expressed wishes of not just most businesses, but most people in Northern Ireland.'
And yet, despite all of that, the Prime Minister's solution to the problem that he himself created—this is his protocol that he agreed, that he described to us in such glowing terms—. He is now prepared to tear that up. The UK Government admits, it says so itself, that it breaches international obligations. It damages our standing in the rest of the world. The good news for this Senedd is that, in the letter received yesterday to my colleague Vaughan Gething from the Foreign Secretary, the UK Government say that the provisions in the Bill are such that a legislative consent motion will be required from the Senedd. And having told us nothing about the Bill, and giving us no advance sight of the Bill at all, the letter has the nerve to go on asking that the Minister should reply confirming that we are content to support a legislative consent motion in front of this Senedd. Well, such a legislative consent motion will be brought forward and it will give Members here an opportunity to look in greater detail at the case for this breach of international law and the impact that it will have here in Wales as a direct result of the barriers to trade that the Prime Minister's deal has imposed upon us.