Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:54 pm on 15 June 2016.
Thank you very much, Llywydd. It’s a very difficult task to respond or even summarise a debate such as this, but I am grateful to all Members for us having a reasonable and relatively rational debate in the contributions made. We started with Mark Isherwood referring to the agricultural arguments and the kinds of arguments that I have heard a number of times in the area that I represent, and across west Wales: this concept that we can secure a future for Welsh agriculture and fisheries by returning to a regime that many of us well remember, before we had things such as the European lamb regime to develop and safeguard our industry, and likewise our fisheries are now protected through the system that we have in place. Because what’s important to bear in mind about the European Union is that it’s a union that has changed and reformed across the years. That was emphasised by Huw Irranca-Davies in terms of the importance of the investment in his community, the contributions of the structural funds to the economy of the Valleys of Wales time and time again.
Then, we came to the interesting and amusing contribution, as always, from Neil Hamilton, where he tried to emphasise on the one hand that ensuring that the United Kingdom were to actually exit the European Union would somehow ensure that there would be greater control over what happens in Wales, in England, in Ireland and in Scotland. This is an argument that I have failed to understand, because it seems to me to reject the most important argument about what the European Union provides us with. We live in a globalised world. That is the nature of what has developed across the globe. We have huge economic regions across the globe. Yet, you see this argument that’s put forward that for us as a kingdom to be outwith that global region would somehow be beneficial to us. I can’t accept that argument that the trade deficit between the European Union and the continent and the UK will be any sort of guarantee that we can have a new free market within the single market.
That’s what’s important, I think, that we bear in mind, that there are four main freedoms that are fundamental to the European Union: the freedom of movement of goods; the freedom of movement of services; the freedom of movement of capital; and the freedom of movement of people. This is where the debate on immigration confuses people more than any other, because it is not immigration when people come from the continent of Europe, which is part of the European Union, to work in Wales. That isn’t immigration. What that is is fellow citizens of a whole continent sharing work opportunities, as I can do if I were to go out to work within the European Union, or as our students working from Bangor University, where I—