Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:12 pm on 5 July 2016.
I don’t think it’s inconceivable, given what I’ve heard about fracking and opencast mining; I don’t believe it is inconceivable. The Clean Air Act came in because people were literally dropping dead in London because of toxic fogs in that city. There wasn’t much choice other than to introduce legislation at that stage. But, certainly, in the 1980s, our rivers were still—. There was a river in Yorkshire that would catch fire, if you threw a match into it; we had rivers in Wales that were hugely polluted; our beaches weren’t clean; our air quality was very, very poor. All that has improved hugely over the past 30 years, and we have been driven in that direction, actually, by the European Union; otherwise, we wouldn’t have done it ourselves. I intend to make sure that the environment the people of Wales have come to enjoy, the environment that people have come to deserve, will remain that way in the future, and will not go back to the days when I was a young lad, when the rivers were polluted, when there were tips everywhere, until they were cleared away, and people expected things would remain that way. That’s not so; we are a country now where we can be proud of our environment.