Thank you, temporary Presiding Officer. Well, I'm very surprised to hear Darren Millar agreeing with what Carwyn Jones said to me the last time we debated these matters, that devolution was the settled will of the Welsh people. Because, of course, if the 1975 referendum on membership of the EU had been the settled will of the British people, Darren Millar would not have been campaigning to have another referendum in 2016. And the truth of the matter is that, in a democracy, nothing can ever be the settled will of a people, because one generation can't be bound by its predecessors, and it would be quite wrong to attempt to constrain it.

So, to that extent, I'm in favour of Plaid Cymru's approach that, if there are a large number of people in Wales who want to vote for independence, why should they not be allowed to express that in the democratic way, by having a referendum upon it? So, I've no objection to that happening. I've no doubt that it would be rejected by the overwhelming majority of the people. But what we have seen in recent years is that, after 20 years of Labour and Plaid Government in Wales, there is no great affection for the devolution settlement that we've currently got. The Assembly never actually reached 50 per cent turnout in an Assembly election, and I doubt very much whether it will get to that level in the election next year if it takes place. So, there is no such thing as the settled will of the Welsh people, because the Welsh people themselves change, generation upon generation.

The most extraordinary thing about Plaid bringing this motion forward today is that, although they call themselves a nationalist party, they don't actually want an independent Wales at all, as Darren Millar pointed out. They're against the devolution of powers over agriculture, fisheries and environment, et cetera, to Cardiff, because they still strive to constrain Wales within membership of the European Union. Their idea of independence is that the major political decisions that Wales has to observe are made in Brussels; that our laws' final arbiters are based in Luxembourg; and our monetary policy and interest rates should be determined in Frankfurt. So, the idea that Rhun ap Iorwerth would have infinite borrowing powers in an independent Wales is absurd unless Wales were to have its own independent currency. So, is that now the policy of Plaid Cymru? I doubt it very much indeed. That was the hurdle over which Nicola Sturgeon couldn't jump in the Scottish referendum on independence.

And, of course, if Wales were to be politically independent from England, it would mean a hard border with England, because Plaid Cymru believes in open borders, immigration and making Wales into a nation of sanctuary, accepting all comers, which would certainly not be acceptable to the majority of the people of England. So, I'm not quite sure how that would play out with the Welsh people, either.

And as Sir Darren Millar pointed out effectively, the fiscal gap in Wales is vast; it amounts to nearly a third of Wales's GDP. The taxpayer subsidy from London and the south-east and eastern England to all parts of the UK, apart from those three, is huge and amounts in Wales to £4,289 per annum, per person. So, the idea that there would be infinite largesse that a Plaid Cymru Government of an independent Wales could dispense is absurd. Actually, what you would see is a massive contraction of the Welsh economy and all the poverty and deprivation that that would imply.

But I think what we have seen in the last 20 years is the comprehensive failure of devolution to deliver on the promises that were made for it at the time. Wales is the poorest nation in the United Kingdom, with an average income of 75 per cent of the UK average. We've got three quarters of the population covered by health boards that are either in special measures or targeted intervention. We've got the worst education results in the United Kingdom, according to the PISA tables. Devolution powers have been used by the Welsh Government in the last 20 years, but not in the direction that could have made devolution a success.

They haven't used these powers to try to secure some kind of competitive advantage over other parts of the United Kingdom; quite the reverse—they've added a ball and chain to the legs of the Welsh people. Over-regulation, the nanny state, we've seen it again this week in the Welsh Government's responses on coronavirus and the slowness of relaxation of the lockdown. The nanny-state attitudes of Labour and Plaid are there for all to see in trying to ban people from smoking outside restaurants and pubs now. Their virtue-signalling woke agenda is all they're interested in. Meanwhile, the interests of the Welsh people have stagnated, and relative to the rest of the United Kingdom, have actually declined over the last 20 years. Northern Ireland was at the bottom of the heap 20 years ago; today, it's Wales.

Now, that's not to say that a small country like—