So, after months of will he/won’t he?, now we know the calibre of our Prime Minister, and I do not say it with admiration. Boris Johnson is a man who is without any sense of shame or, indeed, any care for the weight of history and how wanting it will find him. When Johnson was elected, he was commonly considered to be an experiment, a, 'Once more unto the EU, dear friends', a last-chance, throw-the-busted-kitchen-sink-at-em car crash waiting to happen. And, my, hasn’t that crash happened now? As Robert Peston has said, the events in Westminster—the botched proroguing, the enforced deselections, the unveiled threats—are not a constitutional crisis; no, they are a constitutional failure. There is a rot that has set into the system in Westminster that is so deep it cannot be repaired. It will continue to eat away at that institution just as the building around it crumbles to dust, and in the midst of it all, Boris Johnson, our Ozymandias, urging potential trading partners to, 'Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair', whilst nothing beside him remains.

So, we have come to this moment when the Government in Westminster is exposed for the sham that it is and all to deliver a lie scrawled on the side of a bus. Johnson only has himself to blame for the early onset failure of his Government. May had set down her own blood red lines. She enveloped herself in them and they boxed her in, but Johnson, ever the maverick, took a different tack. He wrote his red lines in invisible ink, so that they could be rubbed out whenever that version of events became inconvenient. Only, he didn’t realise that that vile spot of ink had stained his hands and that he was now a marked man, marked just as are his days in office.

So, as with one hand he wrote instructions for his negotiators, with the other, he erased them, and showed that they were designed to fail. A sleight of hand, a trick, a game. Only, in this particular parlour game, the lives of my constituents are on the line, the lives of people who rely on medicines and are scared of whether they will have access to them. Boris Johnson is also willing to cause misery to the lives of EU nationals who have made their homes in our communities. Well, I am not, and neither is my party. Llywydd, I'm glad that we have been recalled today, because what is happening in Westminster this week will affect the lives of our constituents profoundly. And I do not share the lack of ambition for this place put forward by Members of some of the regressive benches, who could barely be bothered to be here at all. We have to step up to the mark.

Plaid Cymru’s amendment 4 calls on the Government to establish a Welsh constitutional convention. Recently, at the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, I listened to the former First Minister, Carwyn Jones, explaining that he could foresee independence coming about whether we like it or not. I do like it, by the way, even though he may not. There’s a 'no deal' Brexit; Scotland gains its independence; a successful border poll is held. What then? Does anybody in this Chamber truly believe that a United Kingdom of England and Wales would be workable, let alone desirable? It is, therefore, imperative on this Welsh Government to start doing the groundwork now: establish a Welsh constitutional convention or a commission, give it the remit of setting out the options and challenges to be met under different future scenarios, get the people involved via citizens assemblies, set the democratic pathways for each choice, a choice that will ultimately be made by the people of Wales. There is no reason not to do this, save an ideological attachment to a union that is dying in front of our eyes. If you fail to do this, it could come to be seen as the worst dereliction of duty in the history of devolution. You will think of these words as Wales is cast adrift without a compass. Because I believe that the day is coming, and soon, when we will need to leave Westminster behind.

A few months ago, Donald Tusk remarked that there is 'a special place in hell' reserved for those who propagated Brexit without the first idea of how it would work. Well, just as at the start of Dante’s Inferno, we find ourselves

'within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.'

We need to change course.  There is nothing gallant or heroic in pursuing a Brexit that would cause untold chaos for our communities. If there is no referendum, and none currently seems forthcoming, then article 50 should be revoked. But the sunlit glade that will get us out of that forest is wide open ahead of us, and that is an independent Wales.