Mark Drakeford has defended the speech made by UK Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer where he said the United Kingdom would not rejoin the European single market or the customs union if Labour returned to power. Mr Drakeford, who campaigned for Wales to remain the EU, told the Senedd "the world has moved on".
Mr Starmer has been criticised for not being willing to make the argument for remaining outside the EU but re-joining the single market. Other countries, like Norway, are part of the single market while not being EU members. Labour MP Rosie Duffield shared a clip of Sir Sir Keir's speech saying "not in my name", Labour's London mayor Sadiq Khan has called for the UK to re-join the single market and Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins described the Labour leader's stance as "a mouse of a policy".
Instead, Mr Starmer said that he had other proposals to "make Brexit work" and claimed that re-joining the single market, which would allow UK businesses to trade freely in Europe again but also allow the free movement of people, would revisit "arguments of the past".
In plenary in Cardiff on Tuesday, July 5, the First Minister was asked if he agreed with the policy. He said: "The world has moved on. The United Kingdom is no longer a member of the European Union. That is to the regret of many of us in this chamber, but it just remains a fact. I can't remember how many times I will have said here that once the referendum was held, the focus of the Welsh Government was not on the fact of the Brexit because that had been decided in a referendum, but on the way in which we left the European Union.
"The speech given by the leader of the Labour Party is focused on our future relationship with the European Union, a relationship in which we are no longer members of the European Union and we'll have to work very hard indeed to repair the damage done to that relationship, which continues to be done every day, by the current Conservative Government in Westminster."
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Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price read a quote the First Minister had previously made saying: "We cannot allow different parts of the UK to be more favourably treated than others. If one part of the UK is granted continued participation in the single market and customs union, then we fully expect to be made the same offer' here in Wales.' Have you changed your mind or has Sir Keir's speech yesterday changed it for you?"
Mr Drakeford responded: "Here's the position of the Welsh Government: we are in favour of the closest possible frictionless trade with the European Union. The idea that you can simply pop back into the single market or the customs union is fanciful. We may wish that we could, but we simply can't. We are no longer members of the European Union. The conditions in which we could do that simply do not exist."
He admitted that he had previously argued for leaving the European Union but remain in the customs union and the single market, "but that was before we left the European Union".
"Unfortunately, we have left the European Union since then, and imagining that the prescriptions we put forward in those circumstances simply isn't there to be done. So, while I agree with what he says about the damage that is being done to Welsh ports and to Welsh businesses, the problem he has is that he is advancing a solution that he doesn't have available to him. Just returning to the single market, it's not like leaving Plaid Cymru and agreeing to join it again next year," Mr Drakeford said.
"Here is what we would wish to see as a Government. We want to see constructive steps, and you can only have constructive steps if you are in the room together talking, to fix the Northern Ireland protocol. We want to see those unnecessary trade barriers reduced and we want to secure access to those joint programmes, particularly Horizon 2020, which this UK Government said it had negotiated as part of the deal when we left the European Union. All of those things were put in front of the UK Government yesterday, by my colleague Vaughan Gething, in meetings with them. All of those things appear in the speech made yesterday by Keir Starmer. What the leader of the Labour Party is interested in is a genuine realignment of our relationship with the European Union, based on the realities that we face, rather than, I'm afraid, magical thinking.
"The well has been poisoned in the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union, and continues to be poisoned by the fact that we have a Government that's prepared to breach international law and to override the agreements it itself signed up to and commended to people as a deal that they should vote for in a general election. The notion that you could simply rejoin something that has moved on, and where the invitation to rejoin does not exist, is not the basis for a sensible policy.
"What Keir Starmer set out yesterday was a different approach in which a Labour Government will renegotiate a very different relationship with our nearest and most important trading partners; a relationship based on respect—respect that is so sorely missing in the way that the current Government treats those partners—and a relationship that will achieve the closest possible frictionless trade for businesses across the United Kingdom and here in Wales. That is a realistic possibility. The idea that, in a debating-society sense, we should say that we should rejoin something that's no longer available for us to join does not seem to me to be the sort of policy that would actually make the difference we'd like to make."
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