I think the relevance of higher education in Wales can be demonstrated by the recent announcement from Cardiff University to spend £23 million on a new maths and computing building and £32 million on new student accommodation. Indeed, the face of Cardiff has been transformed in the last 10 or 20 years, much of it by the investment from our principal university, and I’m delighted to say I’m a graduate of that university.

I think it’s really important to focus on what will be needed to retain the UK’s universities as probably the second best set of universities in the world after the United States. We are second only to the United States in the number of Nobel prize winners and, if you look at academic citations, we’re miles ahead of any other country with the sole exception, again, of the United States. I mean, we really are a world leader. Incidentally, it’s on relatively modest investment in terms of the total funds required. In preparation for this debate, I did look at the Universities UK website and there are four essential requirements really for the sort of university sector we will need and what that will require to thrive in a post-Brexit environment.

International research collaboration is absolutely key, and it should not surprise anyone, but we are likely to be in a world that is moving away from the natural desire to co-operate with our neighbours, and any shift towards a closed world—. And we’ve heard how visa policy is a very practical way of creating certain unintended consequences. But also as an attractive place to come and study and have a future career, possibly, if you’re in that elite group that’s going to be leading research on new products and all sorts of things.

Secondly, the UK’s got to be seen as a top destination for students. Now, inevitably, as Indian and Chinese, for instance, universities develop, they will be retaining many of their most distinguished students and that’s not a bad thing. But there will be more competition in general for that elite sector of international students. Basically, we are the second destination of choice at the moment, again, second only to the United States, and we have to work very hard to ensure that we retain that.

Thirdly, we have to invest in the research base. That is why our universities are so exceptional. Most of us here were undergraduates and it’s very important, the undergraduate education that is provided by our great universities, but it is actually—. They do that as a consequence really, as a very pleasant secondary effect, of having outstanding research. That’s why they have the lead in the pursuit of knowledge. Without that research base, you will soon lose the ability to educate undergraduates to a high level.

Staff and students need to access international opportunities. I was very fortunate to have a year’s study as a postgraduate in Virginia and I had a particular interest when I was there in the American constitution and federalism. Now, for good or ill, I’ve used it in a UK and a Welsh context, and probably bored you silly on all those matters over the years, but it was basically as a result of my study abroad.

So, I come down to—you know, there are great educational and cultural changes occurring in the world. I’ve mentioned internationalism. The move away from the excoriating experiences of two world wars and then building strength in methods of international co-operation—and education was key to that, as was building international institutions as well. The respect for evidence—. You know, this is the enlightenment—well, that’s what it’s based on, a respect for evidence. I don’t want to bore you about the Tory empiric tradition, but I think it is important to establish what can be tested, what works, and to take that evidence and to accept evidence, sometimes, that perhaps was rather against your initial hypothesis. Above all, the pursuit of knowledge—it is the pursuit of knowledge that improves human outcomes and has led to the most astonishing advances, many of which could not be predicted but occurred as a result of that natural spark, and that’s what we should be pursuing rather than the will-o’-the-wisp, for instance, of a slogan like ‘take back control’.