I'll try not to repeat the excellent points made by Helen Mary, but I do wish to be associated with them fully. I would say this though about the improvement in the coverage of devolved matters, that Mark Drakeford has become something of a cult figure throughout the United Kingdom. This is a policy-free statement on my part, but he has had a profile, he's been profiled also on Radio 4 by Nick Robinson, and we heard all about his upbringing in Carmarthenshire and his love of Glamorgan County Cricket Club and his visits to St Helen's, which, I have to say, took me back to my teenage years as well. I do think that that's really important, because that should be the standard—people should realise that we are now a decentralised state. And on some things it's crucial. For instance, the Financial Times a few months ago carried an interesting couple of articles on test and trace, and compared the Welsh approach with the approach in other parts of the UK, particularly England, and did say that the connection between public health and local authorities in Wales did seem to be the way to go. Now, the evidence is out there, and the FT has formed its own judgment, but I thought that was interesting.

Let me just make two very specific points. Earlier this autumn, the 'Global Satisfaction with Democracy' report was published, carried out by Cambridge University. It had international coverage. It's regarded, I think I can safely say, as being hugely authoritative. It warned that the effect of social media is driving people in society into silos, where there are, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, two opposing tribes, and this mirrors the two-party system. I suppose, at the UK level, we could roughly say, it still prevails in terms of choice of Government, even if it doesn't quite prevail now in Scotland and in Wales. But I do think there's a real issue with people getting a lot of their primary political information on social media. I think, as a complementary tool and giving voice to ever so many people, social media is wonderful, but as a primary source we've got to be really careful. And as we are about to start a vaccination programme, which will be open to the whole population within the next six months or so, it reminds us of how important sources of information are in the public health field, because there's a lot of fake news out there in relation to many of these issues.

My second point, I go back to the 1830s and probably the greatest theorist of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who went to America and wrote that famous book, Democracy in America. He thought one of the key things that permitted democracy, and something approaching mass democracy, in terms of male suffrage anyway, was occurring for the first time in the world—not even the Greeks got anywhere close to that—in America in the 1830s, and he thought it was a free press that was required, and competition in a free press. And if I can just quote one of the things Tocqueville said:

'The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be looked upon as correlative'.

You need both, and I think that's a very powerful insight.

And I'll end with this piece of evidence that we received; I thought it was the most powerful thing we heard from the professional journalists. We are losing professional journalists daily and it's diminishing our democracy. But it was emphasised to us that the biggest loss is that the professional journalists who used to live in the local communities they wrote about are no longer there, and that's a great worry and we've got to find a business model that can address it.