I was in Barcelona on 1 October when the independence referendum was held. It was a horrific and inspiring experience by equal measure. I never thought I would see in a western democracy a position where—. I was in a polling station, and people, ordinary citizens, were forming human chains in order to prevent the Policia Nacional and the Guardia Civil from breaking into that polling station and breaking up the democratic process.

At the same time, it was incredibly, incredibly impressive to see the quiet dignity of the Catalan people, waiting for hours from the early hours of the morning, actually, to vote. Many of them—the first voters in almost every polling station were the elderly, some of them in wheelchairs, and voting was delayed for hours because of the repressive measures of the Spanish state. The tears in their eyes, and in the eyes of their families and the eyes of the citizens around them, and many of them saying they'd been waiting there in the cold for hours and, 'We have waited—we have waited our entire lives for this moment'—nobody could, I think, fail to be inspired by that commitment, a commitment born out of a commitment to democracy but carried out in a spirit of non-violence as well.

That's why this message of solidarity is so important from this institution. We do it because, as a small nation, we should never allow the illegal usurpation of power by a central state against the duly elected Parliament of a small nation. We cannot stand idly by when citizens are brutally repressed in the way that happened in that referendum and we cannot see a position where the elected members of a democratic government are actually imprisoned simply because the constitutional policy that they represent is at odds with that of the central state.

Of course, this tradition of solidarity between this nation and the Catalan nation has deep roots. There were Welsh members of the International Brigade that lost their lives at the Battle of Gandesa. Of course, that struggle, the struggle during the period of the Spanish civil war, saw the close interconnection between the universal fight for democracy and for civil and political rights and the desire for decentralisation and the desire for self-determination by the Catalan people.

There are dark and clear continuities in Catalan and Spanish history. The declaration of independence, of course, happened on 27 October—effectively, Catalonia was independent for four days until that was quashed by the Spanish constitutional court. On 6 October in 1934, an earlier President of the Generalitat declared a Catalan state that lasted for 10 hours, of course. He was subsequently forced into exile—an exact replica of what happened to Puigdemont. In fact, Lluís Companys, of course—eventually, the Generalitat was resurrected later during the course of the Spanish civil war—he ultimately was exiled again, brought back to Spain and was executed. He remains the only incumbent democratically elected head of a government in Europe that has been executed. Puigdemont is the only duly elected, democratically elected, leader of a national government that has faced a European arrest warrant. Since the recreation of the Generalitat in 1932, no less than seven—seven out of nine—of the Presidents of the Generalitat have either been imprisoned or exiled by the Spanish state. That is the sad fact of the continuity that the Catalan people have had to face throughout the course of their history to demand, actually, what is a modest and universal demand, which is the dignity that can only come with the right to exercise your own self-determination as a people and as a nation, which, of course, is written into the UN Charter.

It is incumbent upon us, I think, to send this message of solidarity to the Catalan people, as members of a small nation representing a Parliament in a small nation, but also as Europeans and as European citizens. I think I can only echo and pay tribute to the words of Companys himself, who said this:

'We will suffer again, we will fight again, and we will win again.'

I felt it on the streets there, moving from polling station to polling station—the indomitable spirit of the Catalan people, who for generations have been struggling for this basic human demand, which is the right of nations everywhere to self-determination, and I hope that this National Assembly, in sending its message of solidarity, will support that universal right for all peoples and all nations.