I'd agree wholeheartedly with what my colleague Bethan Sayed has said. Bethan and Members on all sides have spoken about the disastrous impact that Brexit could have on arts, culture and heritage.

I'd like to look at this from the opposite perspective, which is the way in which a lack of investment and attention given to arts has led in part to Brexit. In particular, I'd like to consider the declining numbers of secondary school pupils in Wales studying modern languages, although I appreciate this was out of the scope of this specific inquiry. We've seen a 29 per cent fall in language GCSE entries in Wales in five years, which is a bigger fall than the rest of the UK, and that decline will have an inevitable impact on levels of empathy and openness to understanding other cultures, because when we learn a language, we don't just learn the words, we learn to empathise, to see through the eyes of others by getting a direct outlook into how that culture views the world around them.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have written a book about this phenomenon called Metaphors We Live By, and they draw attention to how metaphors are built deep into the structures of how we phrase everyday things. My favourite example is, in Italian, the way you say 'sunset' is 'tramonto' and that literally means 'between the mountains', because Italy has, for the most part, a very mountainous terrain, and they describe it exactly as they see it. Languages are windows onto this world, and if we shutter them out, then we close out all the light. I read Lakoff first when I was in university, and when my sister Rhianedd was in university, she studied French and Italian, and she had the immense privilege of living abroad for year, and I've always been very envious of the fact that she got to do that. She made friends for life who spoke not one, not two, but three, sometimes four languages at home every day.