Mr Neil Hamilton: I said that a moment ago. To carry on debating on the basis that the United Kingdom has the slightest possibility of adopting this policy is a complete and utter waste of time and actually undermines the good points that we could make. That is the burden of what I want to say in this debate. The idea that single market membership, however defined, is going to be a runner is, again, not...
Mr Neil Hamilton: I don’t think I’ve got time, I’m sorry. The great opportunity that lies for us in being outside the customs union is that we can enter into trade agreements with the major players in the world. It is difficult; it takes time, obviously, to enter into free trade agreements. We don’t have that possibility when the details of those agreements have to be agreed with 27 other member...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. The world population at the moment is about 7.5 billion people, and 7 billion of them are subject to United Kingdom immigration control. They have no right to enter the United Kingdom to live, work or to study, unless they can obtain a visa, and in many cases—most cases, in fact—they need a visa just to visit. Yet, if you’re a citizen of the European...
Mr Neil Hamilton: And what I don’t understand is why the parties who take a different view from us on immigration—those who are going to oppose this motion today—want to discriminate against the rest of the world, because that’s what our immigration policy does. If it’s a benefit to Wales and the United Kingdom to have an open door to immigration in the EU, why isn’t it similarly to our advantage...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Well, our policy is the one that we stood on in the general election, in our manifesto, which is—
Mr Neil Hamilton: No. It is a non-discriminatory immigration policy that is based on skills. The overall general target, over a period of five years, is to reduce net migration to zero.
Mr Neil Hamilton: Yes, net migration is what we’re talking about. At the moment, we’re adding 0.5 million people to the UK population every single year by a combination of immigration and natural population increase. That is fundamentally unsustainable in the longer term. The population of the UK in 2001 was 59 million. It was 65 million in 2015. It will be 73 million in 2023. Of course, we have no idea,...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Yes, I will give way.
Mr Neil Hamilton: Well, Germany has a different problem. They will have a declining population over the next few years because their replacement rates are even lower than ours. There is a population bulge, which has long since been exceeded in Germany, and the German population will actually fall over the next 30 years. The opposite situation applies in the United Kingdom. We are adding, as I said at the start...
Mr Neil Hamilton: I will give way, yes.
Mr Neil Hamilton: Well, it’s a problem of supply and demand. If you increase supply relative to the demand, you will depress the price. It’s the inevitable consequence, I’m afraid. Of course, there are exploitative employers, and we’ve referred to this many times. David Rowlands, in this Chamber, has raised many times the problem of car washes, for example, and people who are employed at a fraction of...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Well, I can’t answer that question. I don’t know the statistics. But the point that I’m making is that, whatever that figure is—[Interruption.] It may be tiny, and perhaps this is not the day to quote Tesco, considering the announcement of the closure of their call centre in Cardiff, but, in the sense that every little helps, anything that we can do to reduce this downward pressure on...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Thank you, Presiding Officer. I suppose it was inevitable that other parties’ contributors to this debate would just refuse to engage with the real burden of our motion, which was wage compression. There’s no dispute by UKIP about the virtues of migration. Indeed, I went out of my way in my speech to say that the real problems that we are seeing today have arisen only since 2004 in...
Mr Neil Hamilton: 6. Will the First Minister make a statement on social care in Mid and West Wales? OAQ(5)0690(FM)
Mr Neil Hamilton: We’re not going to move on very far, Llywydd, I’m afraid, because I’m going to continue the line of questioning by the leader of the Welsh Conservatives. Isn’t it now absolutely clear why this decision has been delayed until after the general election? And what the Welsh Government has done today is actually to kill the hopes of the people of Blaenau Gwent and a much wider area. There...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Well, what we’re talking about here is a bean-counters convention. [Interruption.] It is nothing new. We knew in advance of the decision being taken, months and months ago, what the ONS rules and Treasury rules on how to treat long-term spending of this kind were. So, this is something that could have been decided a very long time ago. Why has the Welsh Government allowed this project to...
Mr Neil Hamilton: All the money that is going to be provided upfront to build the Circuit of Wales is private sector money. All that the Welsh Government’s being asked to do is to guarantee payments that will be made to the senior bondholders for less than half the capital employed, in a period that only starts when the whole site has been developed. So, there are physical assets then, against which the...
Mr Neil Hamilton: I thank the First Minister for that reply. We all appreciate the financial challenge that social care will pose for us in the future. We have a situation in north Ceredigion now where the council has announced the closure of a care home called Bodlondeb. This has come as a bolt from the blue. Nobody knows where the residents will be sent to. There is no social care plan for north Ceredigion,...
Mr Neil Hamilton: I hope I can be perhaps a little more positive in my contribution to this debate than the two contributions that we’ve just heard. There is much in the legislative programme that UKIP can support. There are, of course, things that we will oppose. I can certainly agree with what the First Minister said at the end of his statement in relation to a continuity Bill and the Brexit settlement. It...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Well, there can be no better illustration of the dead hand of Government than this decision today, and the contrast is most instructive between what’s going on an hour away from Cardiff along the M4 by James Dyson creating an international technology park, which is going to cost between £2 billion and £3 billion, and our utter failure to be able to be the handmaiden of private finance for...
