Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:42 pm on 28 March 2023.
Look, I know we hear a lot of twaddle in this Chamber, but that was absolute tripe, frankly. The UK Government has not stopped anybody joining a trade union in any way, shape or form, and it's not stopped anybody being able to strike; what it has done is it's set out a very clear route to protecting minimum standards in our important public services that should be upheld from a public safety point of view.
The third thing that, of course, the UK Government has given a clear commitment to do is to take the necessary action in order to safeguard the substance of any important EU laws, so that the legal effects of those obligations under things like the EU withdrawal agreement, for example, can continue to be upheld. Now, the process of reform has already started and is already well under way. Eighteen per cent of EU law has already been reviewed and 18 per cent of EU law has already been retained, revoked or completely reformed. That's the information that's publicly available to everybody in this Chamber on the retained EU law dashboard, which is available from the UK Government for everybody to see. You can see all of the laws there that are being reviewed, the status of each and every single one of them. And I know the Welsh Government wants to just sit on its hands, do nothing and wait until the end of the year, so that it can manufacture a crisis over this. You need to pull your finger out, frankly, and start having a look at the laws that you want to be able to retain, so that you can have a dialogue with the UK Government and make it clear which parts of the EU law are important to you, so that they can make sure that they take those things into account.
We've already, of course, seen some of the benefits discussed in this Chamber of the revocation of some of the EU law in things like procurement. We've been debating procurement this afternoon. We've got huge opportunities as a result of the withdrawal of Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom from the EU as a result of that. So, I want to encourage you: stop being so negative, take a look at the dashboard, have a look, department by department, at the EU law that affects Wales that you want to see retained, make your views clear to the UK Government, and they can then be taken into account. But stop being alarmist, stop the tripe, stop the nonsense.