 Gwlad weithio. Dyma'r digwydd o'r syniadau llunion yn dda i'ch cymhagorau yn fawr. the very distinguished career in journalism, first in print journalism with the western mail, afterwards with ITV, and afterwards with the BBC Wales. He has also played a very big role in public society, especially in the area of culture in the Welsh Opera House. He He is a very important figure and national gallery in Wales and so on. He is going to talk to us about Wales and about how Europe is perceived in Wales and about the relationship perhaps between Wales and their big bear of a neighbour. It is a great pleasure to introduce a great, it would be the usual thing, but the initial presentation is on the record, chatamos rule, and then the question and answer is off the record. And I'm told that we have to finish by two o'clock so that everybody can get back to whatever business they're engaged in before the storm comes in. Please. Dai, many, many thanks to you for that and for the chance to address you today. I'm very grateful because Dai, he came to Cardiff some months ago and delivered an extremely powerful address in Cardiff on the European issue and reminded us all, I think, of a slight tendency to British amnesia about some of the difficulties we've created in this island. And I think that was a chastening address for many who were there. It's, I think, almost 20 years since I was last in this building and it's a real pleasure to be here again. I think it's true to say that Welsh people have a fellow feeling for Ireland, which is very special. And I hope I won't offend any Scottish friends when I say that it's maybe even deeper than the feeling we have for Scotland. And it's not just, I think, that you are physically closer. On a personal note, my parents spent their honeymoon in Dublin in the 1930s and were photographed on top of a column that no longer exists. And I've always taken pride in the fact that my father was the author of the first critical study in the Welsh language of James Joyce. And so I've had the privilege of having many friends here in Ireland more than south of the border, not least the late and wonderful Sean McRailman, with whom a very long lunch was always too short, but a wonderful man. And when I was at the BBC in the 90s, we had a fantastic privilege of inviting Michael D Higgins to deliver the annual BBC Wales radio lecture. So there's been a lot of sort of interplay with Ireland. And back in 99, I came here just as the National Assembly was actually being set up at the beginnings of devolution. I came here with a colleague from a Welsh think tank at the Institute of Welsh Affairs. We spent some time with Brendan Halligan, who is known to many of you. And I've never forgotten what Brendan said to us as we embarked on devolution. Well, he said, if you can't be big, you better be smart. And I'm not quite sure whether we've actually lived up to that, but maybe that's another talk. I've always thought of myself as a Welsh European, oddly, because when I was at university at Oxford and there was an undergraduate, listened to Edward Heath speaking in the mid 60s. And I think that was, I think the first time I started to be conscious of the whole European dimension. And I think the real clincher has come from me in the last few years when my eldest son married a woman from Copenhagen. And immediately after the referendum, they took their two children to Copenhagen and they became Danish citizens. So we are now a truly European family. This summer I published a book really on the Brexit issue from the Welsh angle. It's really a collection of various things I've been writing over recent years. But it also takes in, I think, the way in which Europe has impacted on me and includes such things as essays on Auschwitz and on a visit to the BMW factory in Munich on the experience of the European final in Cardiff. And indeed a chapter on the event that I had to part in in Cardiff. I don't claim to speak for Wales, but I do speak for a growing number of people across the whole of Wales who are working tirelessly to try and reverse the decision that was taken in 2016. Why? Essentially because civil society in Wales I think has really relished our membership of the European Union. It's allowed Wales room to breathe and it's also allowed us to reach out to Europe on our own terms, I think, without having everything mediated through London. And I would hope and guess that Irish people, of all people, will understand the advantages of that. Many of us during the 2016 campaign bemoaned the lack of emotion and idealism in the 2016 campaign. It was, in my view, drearily transactional and I can tell you that that was certainly something many of us regretted at the time. And I must say that as time has gone on I think some of us feel as emotional as ever on this issue. I do weep sometimes actually to see my own country being mocked in the world. I weep when I see our closest allies I think for half a century being completely bewildered by our actions. I weep too when I see British politicians being shockingly cavalier about peace in Northern Ireland and talking about the Good Friday Agreement as if it was just another piece of paper. And most of all, of course, I really feel particularly for those communities in Wales who have suffered decades of neglect. And I think that they face the prospect last not more of the same but possibly even worse and that is a cause of real concern. When I look around me at the minute I see only one silver lining, it's an important one, and I think it's a strange paradox. While I was deeply deeply depressed by the result in 2016, I have to say I am encouraged by one thing now. The truth is, and it's a great irony that I do not remember ever before in my life this much enthusiasm in Britain for the European cause. Even in the 1975 referendum, never before have so many British people been as acutely conscious of the benefits of our membership with the European Union, economic, social, cultural, even psychological. Yes, many took it granted for too long. You can argue that we woke up too late but what I will say by God we are awake now. And I hope you will see evidence of that on the streets of London a week tomorrow when there is a very major demonstration being planned. But obviously the issue is it too late and before answering that question I want to just step back to 2016 for a minute and answer that question really from a Welsh perspective. Why did Wales, the part of the UK that benefited more from EU funding than any other UK region saved for Northern Ireland? Why did it vote the same way as Scotland and Northern Ireland? Why with Welsh industrial exports to Europe being disproportionately higher than in England and Scotland did we not simply vote our pockets? I mean something like half of UK exports go to the EU in Wales the figure is two thirds. Why did Welsh farmers dependent on the EU for 80% of their income and more than 90% of their agricultural exports? Why did they frankly prefer to grumble about paperwork? And why were Welsh universities twice as dependent on EU Horizon 2020 research funding as universities in England? Why were they actually not more vocal? And a final question really was why 20 years after the advent of democratic devolution and the creation for the first time in modern history of a distinctive Welsh polity did Wales follow the English lead? Is Wales now more like England than ever? Are we reverting to that infamous 19th century encyclopedia of Britannica entry for Wales see England? I don't believe so. I think if Welsh identity survived the British Empire and a few world wars I think it will survive these disjointed times as well as some demographic challenges But first you will forgive me if I give you some hard data which may surprise. Put Scotland and Northern Ireland on one side for a minute. I know that's a fairly big exception but let's deal with England and Wales. Across England and Wales Wales scored the lowest leave vote of any region outside London and the South East. The leave vote in Wales was 52.5%. The Welsh capital Cardiff recorded a marginally higher vote for Remain than London. Across the whole of Wales a country of 3 million people the leave majority was only 82,000. And this was in circumstances where we had had elections to the National Assembly only a matter of weeks earlier. Looking back it was quite unrealistic to expect parties that had spent 18 months knocking chunks out of each other in the run up to the assembly elections to expect them to turn on a sixpence and link arms. It wasn't going to happen and I think it didn't happen. And it made the early cross party planning of a referendum campaign absolutely impossible. I mean frankly once the assembly elections were over we struggled to get party workers out onto the streets because they were tired and exhausted. And there were other problems I can recall because I was chairing the advisory group in Wales. We tried to get a cross party launch of a referendum campaign together in the week immediately following the assembly elections and we had to call it off because the First Minister had to travel to Delhi because of the crisis over the steelworks at Port Talbot, the Tata steelworks. We had other problems the lack of indigenous newspapers meant that it was a real struggle to get some of the arguments home. We also had a problem with the charity commission. The charity commission decided that if civil society organisations got involved in any way in the campaign they might jeopardise their charitable status. And this was quite unlike the referendum in 2011 on legislative powers for the National Assembly. So in effect civil society in Wales was just put in a box by the charity commission. And I think some of us are taking steps to try and ensure that if there is another referendum that actually doesn't happen again. I think this was all frankly another measure of David Cameron's carelessness because it's not just hindsight. Many of us, a lot of politicians warned him against the overlap of the referendum with the assembly elections and frankly everybody was just waved away. That was some of the background of the campaign. As for the voted Wales, a quarter of the total votes cast in Wales were accounted for by the South Wales Valleys constituencies that had been described as the largest area of multiple deprivation in Europe. If ever there was a left behind area, this is it. The per capita GBA of West Wales and the Valleys, which was in and also there's nuts one or nuts two sort of in European jargon. But the per capita GDP of West Wales and the Valleys is 64% of the UK average. The sense of deprivation is substantial and it's an unconscionably longstanding. I mean it's been there for certainly for the whole of my life and arguably you can actually trace it back over the last century really from the recession at the end of the First World War. And yet that 52% leave vote in Wales was substantially lower than in the Midlands of England which was 59% or the North East of England a comparable region to Wales was 58%. The leave vote in Wales was only 0.7% higher than the South East of England. And I do think that this result seems all the more remarkable when you take into account that of the four territories of the United Kingdom Wales is unique in the scale of change in its population base. The simple result of presenting England with our long flank and the contrast is often made that the Scots presenting England with a short neck Wales presents it with a long flank. And this is some of the data right in in Northern Ireland 91% of people were born in Northern Ireland in England 88% were born in England in Scotland. The figure is 81% the figure in Wales is 57%. It's absolutely adrift from the other nations of the UK. And despite much higher levels of immigration from outside the UK in England. Now I don't want to draw any crude or distasteful conclusions from such data. After all, walls are generally undesirable things, whether they're in Berlin or in Gaza or in Belfast. I'm glad to say is now a very, very pleasant walk. But it's rather it's to say that in terms of identity Wales is the most complex of the territories of the UK. The changes at the last centre, I think there were 507,000 people claiming to be Welsh living in England and there were 636,000 people claiming to be English living in Wales. There's a big, big swap. Something close on two thirds of Welsh population live within 25 miles of the English border. So there's a huge sort of interpenetration there. And that creates its difficulties. It doesn't help really in a situation where as one English author, David Goodhart, former editor of Prospect magazine, admitted that the English remain semi-literate in the language of modern identity. But no doubt that's something that you might want to debate. But for all these reasons, that is why in my mind, devolution is so important. And why it's so important that Brexit doesn't become a means to erode the civic advance that's actually been achieved in Wales since 1989, since the creation of the National Assembly. And I say that if Welsh national identity is to survive, it has to be in the context of citizenship that is open to all. And that threat to devolution, I think, is of real concern to a lot of people in Wales. I confess that during the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, like many people in Wales, I shudded at the thought of what the backlash might be were Scotland to leave the Union. Yes, we could have had a lot of fun contemplating a name for the Rump UK. Suggestions were made of Little Britain or Greater England. Or you could have had fun redesigning the Union Jack to take out the salt iron and insert the crosses in David's. But the truth is Wales would then have been in a union in which England comprised 92% of the population. We would have had to deal with a very large elephant on our doorstep. And one suffering, I think, had Scotland voted independent, that elephant would have been suffering, I think, an even bigger trauma than that occasioned by the loss of empire. I think traumatised elephants are unpredictable. Well, maybe not quite. Because in a way you can get more than a hint of what the consequences would have been by looking at the responses of Westminster and Whitehall to the devolution process and the consequences of Brexit for that process. I can recall a decade ago when Wales was demanding a constitutional settlement akin to that of Scotland. Just to explain the difference between Wales and Scotland. In 99, the Scots, all powers were transferred to Scotland, say for some reserved powers that were retained to Westminster. In Wales it was the other way around. We only got conferred powers and everything else, by default, remained at Westminster. So we had a system based on endless chapters of conferred powers, whereas Scotland had just a shorter list of reserved powers. The truth is, I think, that Whitehall can just about get its head around Scotland, but it seems constantly bemused by Wales, much as if it were being asked to sort of negotiate with Rutland. It's a response, I think, Whitehall's response a decade ago when the issue of legislative powers came up for the National Assembly in Wales. The Whitehall response was to publish a list of powers that it wished to reserve to London. The list ran to 146 pages and covered 200 policy areas. It was, in effect, a massive pile of do not disturb signs. Much of it, I'm glad to say, was rejected, but in a way Whitehall had given the game away. I think that's one of the reasons why many people are nervous, to say the least, fear the initial repatriation of powers from the EU to London rather than to the devolved administration, albeit for a limited period of seven years. It's also why we fear the replacement of EU funding based on an objective calculation of need rather than opaque background deals. The real difficulty we have with the devolution settlement in the UK is that most of the Whitehall departments are party-pre. For the most part, their ministers are, under the status quo, ministers for England. To give them now, post-Brexit, free reign, exercise a centralising instinct on England from Monday to Thursday, and then ask them to be enlightened decentralises in relation to Scotland, Wales and Ireland on a Friday afternoon, is really to ask the impossible. I think it's a triumph, really, of hope over experience. I'm afraid to say that in that situation my concern is that Wales is the place that might suffer most because it's been unable to develop any serious leverage for obvious historical and political reasons. Let's take public expenditure per head as a proxy measure of leverage. The per capita spend in Northern Ireland is 19% above the UK average. That's the figure before the special funding that the DUP managed to negotiate. In Scotland it is 13% above the UK average. In Wales it is 4.4% above the average. These figures bear little relationship to objective need. I hastened to say that I don't want to belittle in any way the real contribution that funding, both from the EU and the UK, has made to peace in Northern Ireland. I'll come back to the Welsh economy, maybe over questions, because I'm keeping an eye on the clock. Let me just cut to the chase. Two years on it has anything changed. Again, some statistics that may be of use. A recent EU GoPole in Wales, a sample of a thousand done in August, there has been a swing to remain, but not a large one. It's now 51.49 for remain overall. Although age is the starkest differentiator. Amongst the under 50s in Wales, it's a slam dunk for remain. 73% of Welsh 18-24 year olds and 58% of 25-49 year olds would vote remain. Labour voters in Wales break the same way, 76-24. There is a real base of support there. Beneath that 51.49, I wish it was bigger, but that's where we are. Beneath that 51.49 top line, there is a real pit of disillusion. 82% believe the Brexit process has been a mess. 73% believe that Brexit promises will be broken. 64% blame the government and twice as many believe that Brexit will make Wales economically weaker rather than stronger. That's 45% against 22%. Only 16% think we will get a good deal at the end of it all. Support for a second referendum stands at 44% with 36% opposing. My conclusion to this is what we are seeing below a carapass of nerdy fatalism is a deep pessimism. I cannot believe that that carapass will never crack. I think the issue is whether it will crack in good enough time. The most likely explanation I think for the inconsistency between the top line figure and the underlying data is that many have tuned out and who can blame them. The arguments must seem very arcane I think for the public and sometimes even for those of us who are trying to keep up. It's just not realistic to expect the mass of the public, we all have our lives to live, to ferret around to discover the difference between a customs union, the customs union or a customs arrangement. I challenge any of you succinctly and in words of no more than three syllables and without hesitation or deviation to explain the differing implications of being a member of or having access to or participating in a single market or the distinction between a transition period and an implementation period. Although I think even the British government has now stopped using the term implementation period. This must seem to a lot of people like medieval theologians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and it's no wonder that public opinion seems not to shift. Even Keir Starmer looks to me many times if he's about to burst into tears but you know with that I can simplify. So what happens next? Frankly your guess is as good as mine. There are more permutations on the table than I've had on dinners. Will both sides reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable? Will we do right by Ireland? Are the optimistic noises from Brussels grounded in substance? Or are they merely tactical setting up a stance of mystification less towards collapse? Will we end up with a blind Brexit or a stealth Brexit? If there is an agreement I've no doubt that Mrs May will extol its breadth and other virtues but it is bound to be less than the status quo. And I for one cannot see how anything can pass the six tests that Keir Starmer set out for Labour. I would have thought that Labour would have to vote against it. If the deal gets through a meaningful vote. My guess is there could soon be a degree of public incomprehension and exasperation when they realise this is actually not even the end of the beginning. And what happens if the deal is voted down? Can it really be further negotiation? Just think about it, the notion that a meaningful vote would send a PM who cannot command the house back to the negotiating table is in my view visible. Faced with the prospect of Brexit falling apart, why would the EU make further concessions to facilitate an outcome it has never desired? How could anyone on either side know what concessions would make a difference? And to whom would the EU make those concessions? Now I'm sure you will say as many have said to me, you know, turkeys don't vote for Christmas. But what then? We could be faced with a government whose authority is even more shocked than now having lost its central policy and the most important parliamentary vote in half a century and more. And you can argue that in those circumstances if a government would not resign then frankly all honour dies. And what on the labour party? Labour above all, I think it has to be prepared for that moment. And the right answer in my view is not the crab-like movement we've seen over the last two years. Let's face it, I think constructive ambiguity has not worked. If it were delivering a 20-point lead for Labour in the opinion polls, one might have to bow to the tactical genius of its leaders. But it's not. Not only did the party not win the last general election, but it's currently points behind one of the most disastrous governments. I think your phrase last night was since Lord North lost the American colonies, but perhaps you were quoting somebody else. I do wish the leaders of Labour in the party of internationalism had the courage to change the narrative and to take a much bolder stance. And I think in this context because one has this argument constantly at home. One's got to lay one canard to rest. To oppose Brexit is not to disrespect the result of the referendum either in Wales or in the UK. The greatest respect one can show to that result is to understand what lies behind it and the pain that propelled many communities towards their decision. Is to respect the suffering, I think, of those communities. Suffering that they've endured for far too long and frankly to fear its prolonging. I think that if I were advising the Labour Party, there are more than enough advising, both parties... Labour certainly needs to say, I think, we understand your pain, we are as angry as you are, but if you want us to change your lives, we're not only going to need Europe's help, we're going to need to change Europe too and not run away from it. I watched Judella Stewart's address to this institute the other week when she said to you there were unresolved issues around the Eurozone, around the UK constitution and on immigration. And I agree with her, but the answer does not lie in turning our backs on the EU. The strange thing, and I've got a lot of sympathy with the Labour manifesto, the British Labour Party's manifesto for reform. And the odd thing is that if I had to choose one word to describe that programme, it would be European. It would be a French-like approach to public utilities. It would be a German-like approach to industrial structures and to investment. So I can't understand why they do that. And my last point is this because I know that I'm keeping an eye on the time. If this year we confirm a decision to leave one of the noblest confederations in the history of the world in order to fidget on the fringes of everywhere, I think we will have betrayed the children and the grandchildren of us all. We will have shrunk the garden in which we toil and play and against the express wishes of those younger people. We will have resurrected unnecessary borders on our shores and in our minds, and I think we will have raised a tariff against neighbourliness, not least, even against our Celtic cousins. And that's why I think more and more of us are demanding a new people's vote, in which we will at least have a wholly new understanding of our real circumstances. There will certainly be risks in that course, but at present I see no alternative. And if you like, this is still, thank God, unfinished business. Thank you.