Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:49 pm on 19 September 2017.
I think the game was given away by the leader of UKIP when he said that immigration is something that we suffer. I have to say to him that the proportion of EU citizens in Wales is very, very low—well below 5 per cent of the population. It is the case that people work in Wales; that’s true. But he needs to speak to businesses, who will tell him that they need to be able to recruit people in many, many different jobs, some of them highly skilled, some of them not so skilled, but those people are needed. What I say to him is that we should suffer immigration, as he would put it, on the level that is appropriate to the needs of our economy. I have to say to him: he talks about a low-wage economy; he is complicit in driving down wages. Did he support the minimum wage? No, he didn’t support the minimum wage. Of course he didn’t. Is he supportive of ways of enforcing the minimum wage to stop anybody being exploited, regardless of where they are from? No, I doubt that is the case. He cannot, on the one hand, complain about the driving down of wages when his own record shows that he was against the minimum wage and therefore happy to see wages driven down when he was in another place.