Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:27 pm on 22 June 2016.
Again, we would be outside the whole state aid rules of the EU, which preclude us from giving help to industries such as the steel industry in Port Talbot.
We would be able to take control of our indirect taxes. The Labour Government, in 1997, was unable to abolish the VAT on domestic heating fuel, so we now have a 5 per cent charge on everybody’s heating bills, and that’s because the EU won’t allow us to have control of our own VAT. Similarly on tampons, that’s also been in the news recently, again, hasn’t it? So, there are so many different ways in which the necessities of life are taxed and we have no means of taking a decision to remove them.
As regards project fear, we have nothing to fear but fear itself, because this is an opportunity for Britain and an opportunity for Wales for the first time in 40 years, once again, to take charge of our own country. Project fear has concentrated in this Chamber upon structural funds to the Valleys and west Wales in particular; we heard that again this afternoon in questions. Well, over the course of the last six years, that amounted to about £3.5 billion. That’s £600 million a year on average. The net gain that would come to the British Treasury as a result of leaving the EU would be £10 billion—that would be three times that particular budget, in itself. We could do everything that is done at present by the EU, and a lot more, if only we restored our national independence. And, £3.5 billion in six years is a drop in the ocean by the £75 billion annual deficit that George Osborne has as a hole in the public accounts.
Similarly, on workers’ rights, you would think that we never had any workers’ rights in this country before we joined the EU, and yet the Equal Pay Act was introduced in 1970, the Employment Protection Act in 1975 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 also.
So, what the other parties in this Chamber that are against Britain recovering its independence suffer from is a poverty of ambition. What we’re fighting here for is democracy in this country. In fact, because the Labour Party has concentrated on this workers’ rights issue, they must imply that there will never ever be a Labour Government in Britain again, and, with Jeremy Corbyn as a leader, who can blame them for thinking that? But the problem that they fail to identify is that it’s the British people, ultimately, who take these decisions, and, if a Government takes decisions of which they disapprove, under a democracy, you can get rid of them. In the EU, you can’t. If you don’t like the decisions of the European Commission, there is next to nothing that you can do to override them. So, it’s a pathetic lack of self-confidence and trust in the judgment of the people.
As for Plaid Cymru, it’s a most bizarre form of nationalism to want to send power not down further to the people, but further up and away from them. They’d rather be governed from Brussels than from Westminster, which is a most extraordinary and rather—[interruption.] Which is a rather extraordinary reflection for a nationalist party, because, if we left the EU, we could devolve the policies that they are responsible for from Brussels down here to Cardiff. We used to see graffiti daubed all over Wales when I was a boy—’Rhyddid i Gymru’—and their party, of course, doesn’t believe in freedom for Wales, because they believe that we should just be a region of the European Union.
Fundamentally, what both the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru believe is that the people of this country are not up to the job of running our own country for ourselves, and, tomorrow, the people of this country have the opportunity to make the decisive vote to restore our freedoms once again.