Welsh Affairs — House of Commons, 2021-02-25
Topic: International Affairs
Stephen Crabb (Conservative, Centre-right): I start by putting on the record my condolences to the family of Dr Hywel Francis, one of my predecessors as Chairman of the Welsh Affairs Committee. He was a man of huge intelligence and wisdom, and a very caring man. He will be missed enormously This St David’s Day debate is happening still under the shadow of the pandemic, but with very much better days just ahead as a result of the extraordinary national vaccination effort. We had something of a slow start in Wales, but I have no hesitation whatever in saluting what has been achieved over the last three months right across Wales. There were calls from some quarters for Wales to have its own vaccine strategy. Plaid Cymru pushed the line that Wales should cut loose from the rest of the UK when it came to procuring vaccines. It and its Welsh Labour allies also wanted us to be locked into the disastrous EU vaccine programme Now, with more than a third of the adult population in Wales having received a first dose, we can see the clear value of being part of an independent, UK-led strategy. The UK Government were able to move quickly and with strength to secure those vital early vaccine supplies, to the benefit of all parts of the United Kingdom. That, for me, is the value of the Union in action. Or we could point to the sheer financial firepower that has been brought to bear during the crisis. There has been billions of pounds of additional support for Wales, and hundreds of thousands of workers across Wales have had their livelihoods protected. That was possible only because at the heart of our United Kingdom, there is a powerful redistributive fiscal union For all that, there is a concerted effort under way to use the pandemic to weaken the bonds of our United Kingdom and to argue for division and separation. The Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru spokespeople will argue for exactly that later on. The question for me today, having listened to the speech by the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), is: where exactly is Welsh Labour when it comes to the Union? There was a time when Welsh Labour was a force for Unionism in this country. However, when I hear Welsh Labour politicians talk down and devalue the efforts of the United Kingdom, when I hear them wanting to stop the UK Government actually spending money on projects in Wales, when I hear them cynically stoke up the rhetoric about the English-Welsh border—and they know exactly what they are doing when they do that—and when I hear them criticise and delegitimise the visits to Wales of the UK Prime Minister, I fear that they have turned their backs on the Union and thrown in their lot with the nationalists I believe passionately that one can be a fierce, proud Welsh man or woman and that also alongside that one can be proudly British. There is no contradiction there, and for me perhaps the most powerful and attractive thing of all about our Union is that it does not force us to choose our identities. On that note, I wish a happy St David’s Day—Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant hapus—to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to all fellow Welsh Members of the House of Commons.