Campaigns do indeed reveal character, and people living in the past are the leavers, not the remainers. I’m in the strange position of today agreeing with George Osborne, who says that, if you are wealthy and don’t use public services, then you can afford to toy with the idea of harking back to a bygone era, when Britain ruled the waves, and the sun never set on the British empire. Because that is the direction that the leavers want to take us. They want to take us back in a time capsule. Remember 60 years ago, to the dirty days of the 1950s, when the pea soup fogs were so thick you couldn’t even see your own front door? Yes, it was the Clean Air Act 1956 that started the clean-up, but it is now the 2008 air quality directive that is going to hold Boris Johnson to account for having fiddled the figures on air pollution in the capital city.

Fifty years ago—let’s go back 50 years to the disaster of Aberfan. Impossible today, as a result of the 2006 management of waste from extractive industry directive, which actually quotes the Aberfan disaster as one of the things underpinning it. Let’s go back 40 years ago, where our beaches were full of raw sewage, and today, since the 1976 bathing waters directive, we now have clean beaches and many, many of them in Wales, of which we can be proud.

The people who really, really want to leave the EU are the industrial polluters, the tax evaders, the food adulterers, the irresponsible and exploitative employers. I note that the leave flotilla up the Thames included a fishing trawler called the Christina S, guilty of a £63 million fishing scam in Scotland. These are the sorts of people who want us to leave, and, sadly, a conversation I had the other day with a senior civil servant, who told me privately that if we vote ‘leave’, we can turn this country into a tax haven, so we can attract all the hot money from around the world. Scarily, I don’t think he was joking; even more scarily, he was a retired judge. Contrast him and all the other greedy, selfish people at the top of the establishment who never need to use public services, apart from the bin collections, with people who are struggling in austerity Britain, who somehow think, misguidedly, that voting ‘leave’ will ameliorate their suffering. For example, the unemployed graduate I spoke to last night, who’s planning to vote to leave—he thinks, tragically, his situation will improve when, in fact, the opposite is the case; also the people in my constituency on zero-hours contracts, who’ve had their wages frozen for the last several years, and who are fearful that more immigrants will lead to even lower wages for them; the pensioner who thinks that by leaving, their grandchildren are going to get a house that they currently can’t get. This is an argument for building more housing, not for leaving the EU. The ‘leave’ lot have lost all the economic arguments, so that they are now using the sorry spectre of immigration to peddle their poison. This is absolutely—