I’d like to declare an interest, Llywydd, as an associate lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. I’m going to be supporting this motion today, and I was hopping up and down in agreement with Llyr Gruffydd’s speech. Particularly, I’d like to draw attention to points—it doesn’t happen very often, but there we go. [Laughter.]—4(d) and 4(e) in the motion. Higher education is an international vocation, and collaboration across nations in teaching and research is highly valued by the academic community. Indeed, I was, in my previous role as a senior lecturer, a link tutor with a college in Greece, where we validated courses, in Perrotis College/ American Farm School in Greece, in Thessaloniki, and I considered myself to be a Welsh export.

I believe that the UK Government’s visa controls, which Llyr has already mentioned, introduced by our Prime Minister when she was Home Secretary, are part of a wider attack on the value of international students and the international student sector to the economy. I think, Darren Miller, you were talking—as a former higher education lecturer—a load of rubbish towards the end of your speech, it has to be said. Theresa May scrapped post-study work visas in 2012. These had allowed non-EU students to stay in the UK and work for up to two years after graduation. Now they are only able to stay for four months. She wanted to go further at that time and expel international students from Britain immediately after graduation, until business leaders talked some sense into her about the potential negative impact on the economy.

In my previous role, I taught the Cardiff Met MBA. In 2008, there was an average of 150 international MBA students on the programme per semester. As a direct result of UK Government policy, there were 30 students left on the programme when I ended my full-time employment in 2016. That’s a direct result of UK Government policy, and it is insulting—[Interruption.] In a second. It is insulting to say that this was because of misdemeanours by those students. That was not the case.