Harold Macmillan was a Conservative Prime Minister who, Neil Kinnock once said, represented a generation of Tories who recognised duty and pursued the objective of one nation. The current Tory Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is on course to have the shortest stay in 10 Downing Street of any of its incumbents, and he has no intention of governing in the interests of one nation. So, I welcome hugely—unlike others—this opportunity, as the elected Welsh Labour Assembly Member for Islwyn, to sit in this Chamber today, in this sitting Welsh Parliament, to debate the current aberrations of the Tory so-called Government and their magnitudinal consequences for the people that I represent. 

Harold Macmillan, when asked what was most likely to knock Governments off course, famously stated, 'Events, dear boy, events.' Since the National Assembly for Wales has been rightly recalled, we have seen unprecedented events and attacks upon our parliamentary democracy from a calamitous Conservative cabal. And a week indeed might have been a long time in politics, but the last 24 hours have shown that a day is a pretty lengthy period as well. So, I support fully the substantive joint motion before us today. It is indeed a constitutional outrage for the Prime Minister to attempt to close down Parliament for more than five weeks at a time of the largest national crisis since world war two. And we saw the same Boris Johnson on the doorstep of No. 10 mere days ago stating clearly that he did not want a general election—he did not want a general election. Yesterday, he told the House of Commons he wanted one. So, this is a puppet, a poodle Prime Minister being manipulated by Dominic Cummings, a maverick political adviser, playing dangerous kinds of games without any care for the real and dire consequences for our nation or our citizens. And, in representing my constituents in Islwyn, it is my job also to ensure that they and their families do not suffer from the dramatic, cataclysmic negative consequences of a 'no deal' Brexit and its longer term fallout.

My Labour colleague the Member of Parliament for Islwyn, Chris Evans, should and must have the opportunity to hold the Executive of this United Kingdom to account, and attempts by the UK Government to both silence and ostracise our mother legislature are sinister, and, in my view, at all costs have to be resisted. The sacking, unprecedently, of dissenting Conservative MPs is further evidence of sinister action from a tinpot dictator Prime Minister. Democracy demands and requires that decision making is exposed to sunlight, and, with the acquiescence of the House of Lords, legislation will make the statute book that ensures the UK does not automatically default into a cataclysmic Brexit.

This current crisis in our body politic and in our national life can now only be determined, in my opinion, by the ultimate and timely calling of a general election, which is in our national interest at a time of crisis, national and constitutional. A referendum to ensure that the decision of whether the UK should leave the EU in the light of all that has become known since 2016 should be determined by the British electorate, with the full facts in front of them. No democrat can or should fear the final say being made by the British public via a general election and a referendum once and for all. We serve, all of us, as representatives of the people, and I am hugely conscious that the people that I represent want resolution, a final say for themselves, for the future of their families, their jobs, their well-being, and, finally, national unity and national cohesion.