Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:38 pm on 29 April 2020.
Well, let me begin, Llywydd, by agreeing with what Neil Hamilton said about the significance of the restrictions that we are asking everybody to abide by. I absolutely do not underestimate at all what we are asking of people. Where I disagree with him is I think he wants to counterpoise what we do for people's health and what we do for the economy, and wants us to put the economy ahead of health as though these things were in competition with one another. I think there is nothing worse that we could do for the economy than to lift restrictions that lead to another significant peak of coronavirus later in the year, in which the current draconian measures might have to be reintroduced. I think that would be economically more damaging than regarding health and economy measures as hand in hand rather than in opposition with one another, and doing the right thing by people's health is to do the right thing by the economy. And that does mean doing these things in a way that puts the public health lens first, that is careful, that is cautious, that looks always at the evidence of the impact of any steps we are taking, and making sure that, as we move out of lockdown—and I want to move out of lockdown; I agree with him there that we have to find a path out of this—we do so in a way that doesn't further damage our economy by allowing the virus to circulate rapidly around the community again.
I understand the point Mr Hamilton makes about things being different in rural and urban Wales, but all the messages that I get from rural Wales are messages of anxiety about doing things too quickly there, including allowing a lot of visitors from other parts of the country where the virus has been in more rapid circulation, to come to those parts of Wales. And if we're talking about opening up the economy of rural Wales, then tourism at this time of the year would be inevitably a very serious contender in that regard, and the level of local anxiety that might be created by doing so I think outweighs some of the arguments that can be made about differentiating between urban and rural contexts. People would be fearful that what we are doing is undermining the very conditions that Mr Hamilton pointed to, in which the virus is not in circulation in rural communities. And while I don't dismiss the argument—I think he points to a proper argument—I come to probably a different conclusion about how we should respond to it.