Diolch, Llywydd. Thanks to Plaid Cymru for tabling today's debate and thanks also, Llywydd, for accepting amendment 1, which I hereby move. The Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party will be voting against Plaid's motion today, not because we don't agree with some of the measures that they are proposing, but rather because we disagree with the focus of their motion. Plaid propose a whole raft of actions that they want the Welsh Government to take. Our stance is that many of the problems of dealing with the pandemic have been made worse by four different Governments across the UK doing different things. This has led to massive confusion. We badly need a unified UK response, led by the UK Government.

Currently, there are different sets of rules across so-called borders, such as between Wales and England—borders that have not really existed in any meaningful sense for hundreds of years. Then, the rules change, and they are different again in different parts of the UK. Some of the rules are not really rules, they are actually only guidance, which seems to mean the Welsh Government pretending that people can be prosecuted for doing something when, really, they can't. The very real danger is that all of this confusion will actually lead to an attitude from a large proportion of the general public of contempt for the rules. I'm afraid that this may be inevitable.

Turning to the amendments, we agree with some of what the Conservatives are saying, and some of what Labour are saying. Labour are, of course, essentially telling us that they have done everything right, while the Conservatives are calling for more action from Cardiff Bay. Can I first make the point that the Conservatives are certainly right on one thing, which is that the £5 billion that Wales has received from the UK Treasury has kept us afloat, and that we would have had no chance of getting through this crisis without it? So, it is being in the UK that has helped Wales here.

Can I also observe that COVID-19 is a crisis that does not just affect Wales? It affects the whole of the UK. So, surely it would be far easier to mitigate the problems of this crisis by having one strategy implemented across the UK. It is absurd to think that it helps matters by having different sets of politicians in four different places all dreaming up their own solutions and mitigations against this horrendous crisis. The absurdity is felt most keenly in the border areas, where local residents can see the palpable nonsense of shops and bars and restaurants being able to open in one place, but having to remain closed a couple of hundred metres away. Then, the following week, we have a complete reversal of the situation. Surely, this is no way to deal in a comprehensive manner with an international crisis.

Supporters of devolution may argue that such differences are what devolution is all about. I sometimes wonder if the Welsh Government thinks that it has to do something different to the UK Government, simply to justify its own existence. The problem is that it is the people who will get confused by all these different rules, and they are the ones who will needlessly suffer. The people have become the pawns in a dangerous game being played out by the committed devolutionists in Cardiff Bay and Holyrood. We haven't had a UK-wide crisis quite like this since the start of devolution 21 years ago, so it is very interesting to see how the whole crisis has unfolded.

The problems of devolution have not just involved the Scottish and Welsh Governments; they have also involved other tiers of Government such as directly elected mayors. We had the rather unsavoury spectacle of Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of greater Manchester, openly stating that he would agree to go along with the UK Government's lockdown measures as long as his little fiefdom got a corresponding amount of compensation in the form of increased Government handouts. It becomes clear from Burnham's behaviour that we are heading towards a form of Government that is well known in the USA, which is known as pork-barrel politics: 'You'll get our vote as long as we get your money'. Unfortunately, though, more money for greater Manchester will mean less money for other places, so this kind of belligerence from local tin-pot despots like Andy Burnham doesn't do much for the UK as a whole. We had an even more absurd example of the downside of devolution with the clash between the Prime Minister and the mayor of Middlesbrough, one Andy Preston. In October, Mayor Preston disagreed with the Prime Minister over the lockdown measures and said:

'As things stand, we defy the Government.'

How can a town mayor be in any position to defy a UK Government? Andy Preston was elected mayor of Middlesbrough by getting 17,000 votes. The Prime Minister won a general election in which the Conservatives won almost 14 million votes. There is no democratic equivalence between the UK Prime Minister and the mayor of Middlesbrough. There is equally no democratic equivalence between a Welsh First Minister elected on a 45 per cent turnout of a 3 million population and a UK Prime Minister elected on a turnout of 67 per cent on a population of 65 million.

COVID-19 is a national emergency. It is becoming increasingly clear that, under devolution, the UK is unable to cope with a national emergency in a unified way. I sometimes wonder what would have happened during the second world war if we had had devolution. Just imagine: 'The First Minister leads protest against German and Italian prisoners of war coming to Wales.'