00:00David Chadwick Thank you Mr Chairman, it's a pleasure to
00:07serve under your chairmanship and I'd like to thank the honourable member for Colne Valley
00:11and for tabling this debate and to everybody who signed it. We all know by now that thanks
00:17to the Conservatives and their allies in reform, the relationship between the UK, Wales and
00:22the EU has been severely damaged. Falling out with our neighbours is particularly self-defeating
00:29during this fracturing era of global politics and Wales is paying a particularly heavy price
00:34for that fraying relationship. We are a nation of manufacturers, a nation of small businesses,
00:41a nation of farmers and those three sectors have been throttled by red tape, hindering
00:47our trade with the European Union. In my constituency, a small local business in Radnorshire that
00:53makes parts for classic motorcycles is heavily reliant on EU trade and yet over Christmas,
01:00with no warning or communication from the Department for Business and Trade, they were
01:04just told that they were now incompatible with EU directives and that's just one example
01:09of how Brexit-related bureaucracy is harming businesses and damaging trade with our neighbours.
01:16Farmers and the food and drink industry across Wales are also waiting for the long-promised
01:21UK veterinary agreement. Studies show that such an agreement could boost UK agri-food
01:28exports to the EU by at least 22%, providing a vital boost to rural areas like mine. Yet
01:35we've still received no timeline from the current Labour government on when that is
01:39likely to happen. It's not just the economic impact though, it's the cultural and social
01:45loss for young people too. I thank my good fortune that I had the opportunity to live
01:50and study at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Those sort of opportunities broaden horizons
01:57and contribute to growth. One of the cruelest and most short-sighted decisions by the previous
02:02government was pulling us out of the Erasmus programme. In Wales, the Liberal Democrats
02:08stepped up to reverse the damage. Former Education Minister Kirsty Williams introduced the Tithe
02:14Exchange programme, which unlike its English counterpart, has been praised for ensuring
02:18accessibility for students from less privileged backgrounds. Ultimately, the Liberal Democrats
02:24want to see the UK back at the heart of Europe, rejoining Erasmus, tearing down trade barriers
02:31and signing a youth mobility scheme with our EU counterparts, something the Labour government
02:35has so far refused to do. The arc of human progress should ensure that older generations
02:42pass on more opportunities to younger generations than the ones that they have themselves enjoyed.
02:47We are living in a time when that arc of progress has gone into reverse, and us pro-Europeans
02:53must now win the argument for a stronger EU with Great Britain at its heart. On that point,
02:58I'm concerned to hear the word pragmatic used several times in this debate, because it sounds
03:03like pragmatic reasons are being given as excuses for not making more progress in terms
03:08of rebuilding our relationship with the EU. We should be concerned, I think, about talking
03:13about pragmatism and solely in rational language, because we know that those arguments failed
03:19miserably in 2016, when arguments were built as to why we should stay in the European Union
03:25just based on solely rational economic language. The EU is a pragmatic project, but at its
03:32core it's also an idealistic one. It's a project grounded in ideals, grounded in the idea that
03:38the nations of Central Europe should never go to war again, and it succeeded in that
03:43mission, making it one of the most successful political projects ever in mankind's history.
03:49So when we're making the argument of why we should be rejoining the European Union, let's
03:53use the language of idealism, not just rationalism, because unless we build a case for the UK
03:59to rejoin the EU based on idealist languages and get people to buy into the ideals on which
04:05the European Union was founded, we won't have a long-term buy-in to the project from
04:11the people we need to convince.
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