Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:35 pm on 19 March 2019.
In the middle part of what Adam had to say—he is obsessed with people who are not in this Assembly, and who are not answerable to it. So, I will simply speak for myself and the responsibilities that I discharge here. I believe that the Welsh Government has been consistent throughout and that there is absolute clarity in our position. It may be complicated, but it is clear, and it's the one that I've set out this afternoon—that there is a deal to be done on the basis of the proposals that we have consistently supported since they were first formulated in discussions with Plaid Cymru here in the Assembly, and we continue to support those proposals. I know the Member has moved far away from them in recent times, and, of course, he's quite entitled to do that, but we have not. We continue to believe that they provide a prescription that could work for Wales and that's my position today.
It does no-one any good, when saying that they are in favour of a position, not to look at the difficulties that position might also entail. While I support—I say it again; I've said it so many times here—a second public vote as a way through a deadlocked House of Commons, it doesn't do anybody any favours not to look at the things that would have to be solved in the path of that solution, and that's what I tried to do this afternoon. And to dismiss them as though they didn't exist, as though a second referendum would not be divisive—. This issue is divisive in this Chamber, this issue is divisive in our society. If we have another vote—and if that's what we need, I will support it absolutely—then we know that there will be people who will take strongly different views on it, and to shake a head and to act as though that were not important does not do justice to the significance of that decision.
What would the Welsh Government's position be were there to be a second referendum? Well, I've said this clearly many times as well—that if there is a second referendum, and remaining in the European Union is on that ballot paper, then nothing that I have seen in the last two and a half years leads me to believe that the advice we gave people in Wales in the first referendum was the wrong advice. We advised people then that people's future in Wales was best secured through continued membership of the European Union, and that would be my honest advice to people if we had another chance to vote on that. Wales's future is best secured through membership of the European Union. Now, many people here disagree—of course, they do. That's why I said that the debate would inevitably be one that would divide us. But that is my honest view. Nothing that I have seen in the meantime has changed it. It would be a difficult view to put to many Labour voters who take a different view to that. But if we have another public vote, and remaining in the European Union is on the ballot paper, the advice of this Government will be that that is in the best interest of Wales.
Let me turn to the very final point—[Interruption.] Sorry, Dirprwy Lywydd. The very final point the Member made was about the Jonathan Portes report. It's the second report that Professor Portes has provided for the Welsh Government. I was very glad of a chance to meet him and to discuss his first report. What he does is to pinpoint two of the major flaws in the migration policy put forward by the UK Government: it's insistence on an arbitrary salary cap and it's insistence on an arbitrary division of the workforce into skilled and unskilled. Neither of those things work for Wales.
I spoke at length to the chair of the Migration Advisory Committee asking him whether he had done any analysis of those propositions on the Welsh economy. He told me that he hadn't. It's little wonder that Professor Portes—the leading expert on these matters in the UK—comes to a conclusion that says a £30,000 salary cap would be inimical to the interests of businesses, public services and universities in Wales. And describing people who work in our social care system as low skilled and, therefore, not needed to be recruited from other parts of the world flies in the face of the work that people from other parts of the European Union do every day in Wales providing services to some of the most vulnerable people in our community. We will support the conclusions of the Portes report, and when we've had a proper chance to digest it and to discuss it with the author, then we will make clear our conclusions from it.