Yes, we're calling for Welsh Government to seek the constitutional right to allow the holding of a binding referendum on independence. Now, I've been a passionate supporter of independence all my life; passion can sometimes suggest an emotional drive to this, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a very emotional attachment to my country and its future. But I consider myself to be a pretty pragmatic man: independence, to me, isn't an end in itself, but a means to allow my country to provide a better future for its children, to be able to express itself as an open, outward looking, partnership building, welcoming, go-getting country, with its restrictions removed. Challenging? Goodness me, yes, and do you know what? If we're not up to the challenge, we can just carry on as we are: dependency, stagnation, poverty, poverty of opportunity, lack of investment. None of these do it for me, but that's Wales now: bubbling with good people, full of good ideas, a real sense of self, a sense of community and common venture, but unable to use all of those to anywhere near their potential.

Now, the context now, of course, is the pandemic. The UK currently has the third-highest number of deaths in the world, behind the USA and Brazil. Combined, they've formed a sort of axis of incompetence, accounting for over 250,000 deaths, almost half the global total. I've been critical of Welsh Government for much of its response to the pandemic, but I hope Ministers consider that I've tried to do that constructively and will have noted that there is much that I've welcomed from Welsh Government's approach too. And I think it's arguably been strongest where it has been ready to diverge—by sticking to the messaging to stay at home, for example, for longer, taking a generally more cautious approach.

Now, I think Welsh Government may privately admit that the biggest mistake it made was aligning too closely with the UK four-nations strategy. It led to mistakes such as restricting testing, backing away from test-and-trace early on and, of course, failing to lock down sooner. There are also plenty of examples of where the UK Government has actually undermined Welsh efforts: the hijacking of the Roche testing deal, suppliers of PPE being told not to supply Welsh care homes or dentists, a failure to adequately communicate the differing lockdown rules in Wales, the failure, as we've heard from the First Minister, to have regular enough communication between the Prime Minister and devolved leaders. 

Now, I've no doubt that we could have done more were we in possession of the kinds of tools that independent countries have: the ability to devise and get the timing right on our own furlough scheme, allowing earlier lockdown—and, as a result, as we've seen from other countries, I think, an earlier exit, an earlier resumption of economic activity too—the ability to control borders, perhaps, to restrict transmission at key periods, as other small European nations were able to do; our own Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies would have tailored advice to Wales's needs right from the start. It's a long list. 

To those who say we couldn't afford it, only the UK had the resources, I'm sorry to break it to you, but whilst the UK has vastly increased its borrowing to respond to the crisis that's our debt too. Surely much better would have been to do our own borrowing, tailoring the size, the terms and, again, the timing of that borrowing to suit our priorities. 

In their statement on stabilisation and reconstruction in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, issued yesterday, the Counsel General and the finance Minister said:

'We...do not have enough money.... Unlike the UK Government, we do not have the flexibility to increase our borrowing at times of urgent economic need.'

Well, exactly. I say: let's seek that flexibility, the kind of flexibility that independent countries have. 

Wales hasn't performed as well as many other small independent nations. Look at Norway, Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, Lithuania, Iceland, Uruguay—they have death rates a tenth of Wales's death rates. But many will, of course, understandably and quite properly compare the Welsh and the UK approach, and, for so many people, this period has changed the way that they view Wales and the way we are governed, the way we can be governed. There's been a new realisation of the fact that we can do things differently, that there is real value in doing things differently—perhaps doing things differently can save lives, even. 

I got an e-mail from a constituent yesterday—not a lifelong independence supporter; one who has come around to it in recent years—he was pleased that we were having this debate. This is what he said: 'I suppose that this will very much mark the cards for other Members that will knee-jerk support the union. I'm surprised by Lee Waters siding with Andrew R.T. Davies', he said, 'as more and more comes out about the general incompetence and duplicity of the Westminster Government handling of the COVID response.' I looked into this. On social media—where else, of course—the former Conservative leader in Wales had rubbished Plaid Cymru's support for independence. He said that we're

'spending too much time in the Nat Twitter echo chamber'.

A bit ironic, given his regular echoing around social media himself, but he's welcome to his views. Lee Waters stepped in—Deputy Minister—to say that he agreed with him, but another individual then asked him,

'what should Wales do when Scotland votes for independence and NI reunites with rest of Ireland?'

The response Lee Waters gave was 're-assess'. Now, I think that says a lot. Should we discuss our future as a nation after other countries discuss theirs? Is that what we want: to be a nation that tries to design its own future based solely on what others decide for theirs—a nation that will only even consider what's best for us if others put us in a position where we have to? We need to have that debate now, proactively, and that's why more and more people Wales wide are joining that debate. And it's pure democratic common sense that the choice should be ours, as a nation, through our national Parliament, to put that to a vote: our future in our own hands.