I’ll follow your call to arms, Janet—your passion shines through. I think we should be having this debate in relation to how we want our debates to be perceived by the public, and how the public can actually engage with the debates that we have in the Assembly. I say this because I sometimes think that we can come up with quite high-end ideas, but when we talk to people on the street, they’re very simple about what they actually want to see happening in their communities. For example, in Neath, they want to have actual decorations on their Christmas tree that will make the experience of going into town more pleasurable. They want to be able to have a pleasurable shopping experience across Wales, and I think what we’re missing in this debate is a unique selling point for our town centres: Hay-on-Wye, an excellent place to go to buy books; Penarth, boutique shops. Let’s look at how we can make a map of Wales and look at different towns in a different light, and sell that to ourselves and sell that to people who come to Wales.

I often imagine myself as a tourist in Wales, or as a traveller. What would I do if I wanted to go abroad, and what would I want to see? I think we should try and scope our services and our small businesses in that manner to offer somebody something different in the different towns and cities that they visit. I think we are lacking in that. We’re not selling ourselves effectively to Wales, so how then can we sell ourselves to an international community in that context?

Last night, I did a Facebook update on the fact that I was going to buy Christmas presents early to get it out of the way, because I was feeling a bit of a Scrooge and I didn’t really want to spend all of December shopping. I said that I was buying them online, and I had instant criticism from people for buying online. But there are local businesses who sell online, and I don’t want to name brands, but Etsy is a really good website that incorporates lots of different products. You can actually tailor it so that you can buy from Wales only, and then Welsh producers only who make their own crafts and make their own things. And I think, again, this is something we need to be developing and specialising in, because it doesn’t have to mean that if you’re buying from the internet that you’re buying from the Amazons of this world. There is value in just sitting at home, in bed, just clicking on something and not having to go to the town centre. That’s a light-hearted comment; I’m saying there’s a mix of how people want to approach small business, and how we can engage.

But I certainly think what we need to do more of is to see small businesses as part of the community and for the community to feel that the businesses are working with them. Bridgend was used by Adam Price as an example, but I know that businesses there are increasingly frustrated about the fact that they are seeing not enough people coming and shopping in their town centre. The elephant in the room, is it not, is that in some town centres there are not the quality shops or the variance of shops that people want to have? You know, people will not go into our town centres if they do not have the type of shops that they want to shop in. It’s just the reality of life.

In Merthyr, where I come from, my dad has a poem on the bench as part of one of the grants that the Welsh Government gave—a really pretty bench with poems all over the town centre, but that does not mean that more people are going to come into the town to sit on those benches, because the shops that are there are not the shops that they want to shop in. So, I think that these are debates that we really need to be having so that we can encourage people, again, to see the value of our town centres. I don’t know if Andrew R. T. Davies—