Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:06 pm on 11 November 2020.
I've got just a few things to say in this debate. Firstly, I think it is important that Government recognises the difficulties that sometimes its policies create. I met a number of people who simply did not understand and were not prepared for the reality of the policy that had been announced a week earlier and weren't ready or prepared, in the messages they'd received from Government, to understand what this meant for them and what it meant for their own community.
Now, we know that the policy itself was actually very popular. Polling has told us that the policy of the firebreak and the policy approach, the policy framework taken by the Welsh Government, was very popular, but I think there was a feeling that people didn't understand the rationale for this particular element of it. It wasn't explained sufficiently well by Government, and the people therefore did not understand why this was happening in their local supermarket and how that then had an impact on the wider public health message. So, I think there are issues there where Government needs to learn.
But I also think we need to be very clear about this as well, because supermarkets also have a responsibility to play their part in all of this. For too long, supermarkets have exploited a near monopoly position in the marketplace. All of us know, and know of, smaller producers and suppliers who have seen supermarkets abuse their market position. And that has been a constant theme of policy, and Huw Irranca, as a former agriculture Minister, will know how, for many, many years, smaller producers and suppliers have been abused by supermarkets. And we also know that supermarkets in some ways sought to actively undermine this policy, rather than to support it. And I think we need to be very clear with supermarkets there, because they either were unable to manage a new regulation, which raises significant questions about their management, or they didn't want to. And I suspect it's the latter, and I suspect that they also—it was a case of putting their profits before the people and the customers they serve. And I think we need to be very clear about those actions of supermarkets.
Thirdly, and finally, Deputy Presiding Officer, I also echo the words of Rhun ap Iorwerth and Huw Irranca-Davies. It was refreshing to listen to Nick Ramsay, contributing to the debate this afternoon from an intelligent and rational position that puts the people that he represents in Monmouthshire first. We did not hear enough of that, and we have not heard enough of that. Whilst Conservative leaders in Wales were being abusive on social media, whipping up a storm on social media, what they were really doing was undermining a critical public health message. A week later, their policy in England collapsed. It completely collapsed, with the humiliation of the Prime Minister being forced onto television to announce a change in policy, with the timing dictated by Strictly Come Dancing and not by the needs of the people he's supposed to represent—a humiliating climbdown from a Prime Minister out of control of the situation.
And it is important that we recognise what happened there, because people were deliberately misled, were deliberately misinformed, and were deliberately driven in a direction of undermining public health by the Conservatives and their friends on the far right, all of whom contributed towards creating a situation where people that I represent, and people that Nick represents just down the road in Monmouthshire, did not and were not able to understand what the policy actually was. And I notice that those same people are today silent on the situation in England—nothing to say. All the special interest groups that Huw Irranca-Davies described from London now have nothing to say about what is happening in their own supermarkets—nothing to say about the failure of policy in England; nothing to say about their ability to drive this policy across the border. So, we need, certainly, to ensure that we're all able to learn lessons from this, but one of them has to be for Conservative politicians, whether in the Conservative Party or just fellow travellers on the far right—it's time you got out of the gutter and put people first, put public health first, and partisan advantage second. Thank you.