In saying, Dirprwy Lywydd, that a tourism tax was an idea worth serious consideration, of course we looked at evidence from other parts of the world, and we saw then that tourism taxes operate in different ways and at different levels. We saw that they are almost always opposed by the industry itself, and indeed that the predictions of dire consequences regularly fail to materialise. I looked at what the head of the tourism organisation in Barcelona said when opposing the introduction of a tourism tax, just as visitor numbers to Barcelona rose more strongly than they ever had before. I looked at what the tourism organisation in Majorca said, just before the tax turned out to be so successful that they intend to use it even more next year.

I don’t say that the debate is in any way settled. I thought that Angela Burns’s speech this afternoon would have been a perfectly proper speech to make in a debate about whether a tax is a good idea or not. I thought the questions she raised were absolutely proper questions, the sort of questions that we would want to explore, that ought to be answered. Where I disagree with her and with her party is in believing that now is the moment at which you should try to shut all that debate down.

I normally listen very carefully to what the Member for Monmouth has to say. I think there’s only two points that I can take from his contribution this afternoon. He objected to the idea of a tourism tax on the grounds of fairness—this from a party that represents the bedroom tax in every part of Wales. Every Member on that bench is prepared to say to people who live in their constituencies that it is perfectly fair for them to pay £15 a week for a bed in their own home, but apparently it is utterly outrageous to suggest that someone coming to a wedding in Pembrokeshire might pay £1 a night to stay in Wales as part of that visit.

Instead, they will approach the newly liberated Severn bridge, slam the brakes on and say, ‘I was going to go to a wedding in Pembrokeshire, but I think now it’s going to cost me a £1 I’ll go to one in Hereford instead.’ I mean, it’s absurd. It’s absolutely absurd and they have to know that that is the case.

Not only, though, are they worried about fairness but they’re worried about the border. We know they’re worried about the border because Tories have always regarded that Wales’s chief advantage is that we come cheap. It was the whole basis of their whole economic policy in the 1980s—[Interruption.]