Yesterday, I was with members of Swansea City of Sanctuary and the people who they are supporting who are seeking asylum. It was at a wonderful event at the Hoogah restaurant, who have recently pledged to support Swansea City of Sanctuary in their aim of promoting a culture of welcome for asylum seekers and refugees, and to be a safe space for those seeking a new home in the city.

The people Swansea City of Sanctuary are supporting are just that: people. People who are fleeing persecution, danger, war, hunger, despair. People who want their children to live in peace, to have every opportunity to be able to take their place in the world without fear. People. The sentiments expressed towards the people I met yesterday, those of compassion and understanding, couldn't be more different than those promoted by this Bill. Yesterday, there was fear, despair, anger that the UK Government, through this Bill, would fundamentally and grotesquely undermine Wales's history of welcome and our aspiration to be a nation of sanctuary. And the way it disregards children's rights, again so central to our national vision here in Wales, is nothing less than stomach-churning.

Tory UK Government Ministers have asserted that the measures within the Bill are aimed at cutting costs to the public purse, breaking people-smuggling gangs, and protecting people seeking asylum. Experts in the field, however, profoundly disagree. Amnesty is one of the many organisations that has argued that the Nationality and Borders Bill will worsen the UK's asylum system. The model of asylum being proposed is, according to the United Nations, one which

'would penalise most refugees seeking asylum' and therefore

'undermines established international refugee protection rules and practices.'

The Good Law Project has gone as far as saying that the Bill will embed racism in UK legislation by means of the draconian clause 9, which would enable a Secretary of State to unilaterally strip British nationals of their citizenship without notice.

And even if we look at this from a financial point of view, the UK Government's argument that the changes it is proposing are based on saving money spent on the perceived high cost of supporting refugees and asylum seekers makes no sense. A report published yesterday by the Together With Refugees coalition found that the Bill would double these costs to £2.7 billion. We must do everything we can to stop this inhumane Bill, everything we can to protect those who would be welcomed and treasured as new citizens of Wales from these racist, dangerous and dehumanising provisions within the Bill.

As a member of the Children, Young People, and Education Committee, I read the responses of the organisations who operate in Wales in the field of children's health and social care, children's rights and those working with refugees and asylum seekers, to this legislative consent memorandum before us today. The concerns about the impact of this Bill on Wales as regards the clauses relating to age assessment of children, contained in Part 4 of the Bill, were overwhelming. The consensus that the Bill impacts on the devolved areas of social care and confers powers on the Secretary of State to make regulations on devolved Welsh authorities was crystal clear.

The adjectives used to describe the proposals, which involved intrusive, medical and so-called scientific age-assessment methods in relation to unaccompanied asylum seekers who do not have documentation to prove their age, included the words 'insufficient', 'inappropriate' and 'traumatic'. And the children's commissioner told us that, as the Bill stands, it'll be detrimental to children's fundamental rights, set out within the UNCRC.

We wholeheartedly endorse the Minister's analysis of these clauses, and the Government's view that consent should be withheld. We in Plaid Cymru fundamentally oppose any attempt to undermine the right and power of this Senedd to legislate in devolved policy areas, particularly in the face of this Westminster Government's unprecedented desire to undermine our devolved authority, our national identity and our democratic right to decide what benefits our own communities. And a Bill such as this foregrounds our reasons for opposition.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt said that the loss of citizenship is the loss, in her famous phrase, of 'the right to have rights'. She was reflecting on the totalitarianism that forced her to flee from her homeland, Germany, stripped of her citizenship, on to France, to Portugal, eventually settling in the United States. As she and millions of other people found in 1940s Europe, the world, in her words,

'found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.'

What Arendt realised was that citizenship is necessary for human rights to be enacted. To deny a person's citizenship, a place to belong, is to deny them their fundamental rights.

The nation we are building in Wales should give rights to its citizens. What this UK Nationality and Borders Bill does is take rights away. The values of contemporary Welsh nationalism as manifested in the politics of Plaid Cymru are fundamentally opposed to the xenophobic British nationalism embodied in this Bill. We must send the strongest possible message today from this place, from the nation of sanctuary we aspire to be, that we will not stand by, that we will not consent.