I thank Lee Waters for what I thought was a very good contribution to today’s debate. I think today’s debate is an important one as I believe it touches on the tension that is sometimes generated when two separate political objectives come into conflict with one another. One of the objectives is the Welsh Government’s aim of achieving 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050, in which education will play a crucial part, as Darren Millar articulated. The second objective, or perhaps I should say principle, is the principle of parental choice.

Now, in the Welsh Government’s education policy generally, there is a certain amount of commitment to parental choice and it would certainly be a strange Government that openly opposed this principle. But, in Llangennech, we seem to see that principle of parental choice coming up against the drive for more Welsh-medium education. My belief is that much of the community of Llangennech is opposed to this drive for Welsh-medium education in the form that it is proposed, that is, turning the dual-stream primary school into a Welsh-medium one. By trying to push the change through by force, I believe Carmarthenshire County Council may actually be working against the target of 1 million Welsh speakers.

This was recognised by the local Labour MP Nia Griffith, whose contribution to the consultation was outlined earlier today by Neil Hamilton, so I won’t repeat the quote. But what Nia Griffith was expressing was her fear that, if the school were to go over to being Welsh-medium, then many parents might simply switch their pupils to an English-medium school, even if it meant moving home. This would tend to defeat the purpose of Carmarthenshire council’s—[Interruption.] This would tend to defeat the purpose of Carmarthenshire council’s aim of increasing participation in Welsh.

The Welsh Government’s Welsh language policies have, to some extent, been driven by Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, which is a highly successful pressure group. One of Cymdeithas’s stated aims is ‘addysg Gymraeg i bawb’, meaning, I believe, ‘Welsh learning for all’. This is fine as long as it does not mean force-feeding Welsh-medium-education to those who don’t want it. That will simply be counterproductive. To conclude, we have to move away from compulsion, which is what we seem to be moving towards in Llangennech, and return to the concept of parental choice.