Thank you, Presiding Officer. This is the first European Union debate I have spoken in at this Assembly. I certainly would not describe myself as a Europhile. I speak as someone who voted to stay in the European Union in the 2016 referendum, but, as a teenager in 1975, voted not to stay in. We have to acknowledge that the people of Wales voted to leave. We expected everyone to accept the result of the 1997 referendum on creating the Welsh Assembly, even though that vote was closer. We must accept that the majority of people in both Wales and Britain want us to leave the European Union.

We must remember that, whilst the majority is not always right, it is always the majority. It also seems to me, though, inconceivable that people do not want to continue trading with our largest export market. From the corn laws onwards, it’s only the rich who have benefitted from protectionism. One of the immediate effects of the referendum result has been a sharp drop in the value of the pound. Whilst there has been some fluctuation, the direction has been downwards and downwards. Devaluation, of course, does two things: it gives a short-term boost to the economy. If the response was long term, the series of post-war devaluations against the dollar would mean the British economy would be thriving. We’ve gone down from over $4 to the pound to just over $1.2. It also leads to price rises in imported goods such as oil, leading to increasing petrol prices, as people probably have seen when they put petrol in their cars at the petrol station.

It also leads to the increased cost of imported raw materials for manufacturing, and, thus, some of the benefits of devaluation end up being lost. At what value of the pound to the dollar will the Bank of England intervene to protect the currency? Will it let the pound go below parity with the euro or the American dollar? Both are likely, and probably likely this year, without any intervention. Whilst devaluation means—