In Plenary, a few days before recess, the First Minister said that leaving Europe would raise the cost of food for us in Wales. Well, perhaps the next time you shred the cabbage for Sunday lunch, or dice the carrots, you should spare a thought for the human cost of putting these and many other products on your table.

I want you to picture a scene at a BP petrol station. It's 4.00 a.m. on a cold January morning, the sky is still black, but the garage attendant has already been serving migrant workers for an hour or more. By 4.15 a.m., the silent figures from across the town have become a steady flow. Summoned by a text message the previous evening, they huddle on the forecourt waiting for a succession of vehicles that would take them to the factories or fields around the area, where they would be put to work for 10 to 12 hours. 

A female police officer is watching from her office in the police station, which, coincidentally, overlooks the petrol station. She was moved to this station, because she has special expertise on organised crime. She has observed the same scene being played out regularly for the last few months. She recognises this as a criminal gang-led activity, but is powerless to stop it. The sophisticated methods used by modern-day criminal gangs make prosecution very difficult. Victims are almost impossible to recruit as witnesses, far too scared to give evidence against these gangland bosses. This is quite understandable given that the local area has seen a spate of apparent suicides amongst young east Europeans over the last few years. Three were found hanging, and with one, there was a message daubed on a nearby wall—translated, it read, 'The dead cannot testify'.

These were by no means the only deaths amongst the local east European community. The remains of a 17-year-old Lithuanian girl were found five months after her disappearance. A Lithuanian courier had been burnt to death as he slept in his van, and all this in an area where murder had been virtually unknown a decade ago.

Most of us are unaware of this brutal parallel universe that often underpins our mainstream economy, but there are areas of the country where it is highly visible. The parliamentary constituency where the scene described above took place voted overwhelmingly in a 2017 survey to reaffirm their desire to leave the EU, recognising that mass immigration from eastern Europe was fundamentally changing their community.

So, if the police are aware of these operations, why are we not seeing large-scale prosecutions? Well, there are two main reasons: the sophistication of the gangland operations and the sheer scale of the problem. The police simply do not have the manpower to cope with a huge explosion in the exploitation of mainly migrant workers that has occurred over the last decade, due almost exclusively to the policy of open borders.