Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:42 pm on 13 June 2017.
First of all, again, he misses the point about border control. If you want to have border control, you have a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. There is no other way of doing it, unless you want to put British border agency officials in the Republic’s airports and ports, and that is a strategy fraught with problems, if I can put it diplomatically. That situation has still not been properly resolved. But, for me, the issue of low wages is driven by the austerity we’ve see for the past seven years, the fact we haven’t seen real increases in pay, the fact that we’ve seen people who are in work lose in-work benefits. We used to say—and the Secretary of State got himself into trouble on this—to people, ‘If you get a job, your income will increase’. That is no longer the case because of the fact that those at the top of the income scale have received more money through tax cuts and those at the bottom have received less money through the reduction and loss of in-work benefits. That’s what the focus should be on—making sure that those people who are working hard, working long hours, get the support they deserve, and they haven’t had it over the last seven years.