This motion truly does go to the heart of what UKIP is really about, which is selection and segregation. Circular 10/65 is an important landmark that shaped education in this country in the second half of the twentieth century. Fifty-one years later, it still stands as one of the defining progressive achievements of the radical 1964-1970 Wilson Labour Government, and we will talk about a few experts and a few people who have got merit in my speech. Anthony Crosland was the education Secretary who sent an important memorandum to local authorities. The document instructed local officials to commence converting grammar schools into comprehensives. Anthony Crosland was a giant of the Labour movement and was unashamed in his determination to abolish regressive and retrospective grammar schools, and I share Crosland’s viewpoint. I am very proud to rise in this debate to oppose this UKIP motion that seems to have been dusted down from the Conservative Party HQ cupboards from the 1950s, although I take it they don’t actually agree.

It is important to remind us of the text of this memorandum, one of the most beautiful, I think, ever written, and it goes like this:

‘It is the Government’s declared objective to end selection at eleven plus and to eliminate separatism in secondary education. The Government’s policy has been endorsed by the House of Commons in a motion passed on 21 January 1965’.

And this is important:

‘this House, conscious of the need to raise educational standards at all levels, and regretting that the realisation of this objective is impeded by the separation of children into different types of secondary schools, notes with approval the efforts of local authorities to reorganise secondary education on comprehensive lines which will preserve all that is valuable in grammar school education for those children who now receive it and make it available to more children; recognises that the method and timing of such reorganisation should vary to meet local needs; and believes that the time is now ripe for a declaration of national policy.’

The need to, as the memo says,

‘raise educational standards at all levels’ is as vital today as it was 51 years ago and as has been pointed out by other Members in this Chamber. It is absolutely lamentable that members of UKIP in the National Assembly for Wales not only want to banish their national leader in Wales, the newly independent AM, Nathan Gill, they want to banish the children of Wales back over half a century to an era of short trousers, class divides and a world of limited opportunities.

Who was responsible for replacing this circular? Let me guess: one Margaret Thatcher, on a par with Theresa May, who currently still supports that, when she became education Secretary in 1970, and this is contextually important. You have all you need to know when UKIP are cheerleading for Margaret Thatcher, and they have the cheek to portray themselves as the heirs to Labour in the south Wales Valleys. Post Brexit, they have nothing to offer the people of Wales but Tory policies and the notion of a Maggie Thatcher airport, but I digress. As President Obama once famously said, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

We all know of independents who sit on councils who are too afraid to run under the banner of the Tories. Now, we have UKIP Wales—a home for reject Tory politicians whose leader in Wales sits as an independent—with the Tories, their friends, in the Chamber, opposite. So, what is inspiring—[Interruption.] I didn’t catch that. What is inspiring this regressive flight of fancy from the UK Prime Minister? Let’s ask a serious, serious question. What is inspiring her now that UKIP members are up with her?

It’s certainly not a popular desire amongst the people. Only one in three people in England thinks that the UK Government is right to increase the number of grammar schools and select more pupils by academic ability. We have heard here this afternoon why, because as far as education pedagogy goes, it is outdated, it is regressive and it does not work. Let us look to Finland for answers; let us not look across the border to England. If you respect and understand, there’s a YouGov poll for ‘The Times’, and it says that the policy was backed—which is to get rid of grammar schools—by a mere 34 per cent of those polled, with the remainder not signing up to it.

So, social segregation by education is varied. It’s only those in denial who remain. They’re sort of trying to exhume the corpse, like a desperate Heathcliff raging for his Catherine in ‘Wuthering Heights’, although the Member for Mid and West Wales is an unlikely Byronic hero.

So, what are the views of the education experts? I said I’d speak to those. On this issue, the proposer, Theresa May, has managed to actually unite, in opposition, former Labour and Conservative education Secretaries, the teaching unions and the parliamentary Labour Party. So, Prime Minister May was actually unable to quote during Prime Minister’s question time last week a single expert who backed the extension of grammar schools. Let’s take a look at the esteemed and lauded, then, Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of England’s education watchdog, Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. Sir Michael has stated that the selective model of schooling is, and I quote, ‘a profoundly retrograde step’. This is the head of England’s watchdog.