It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore), and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for working hard to secure this important debate. It has been a good week for Wales, bathed in warm sunshine and the afterglow of a stunning and historic victory on Saturday. Wales is a truly blessed and happy nation in this St David’s Day week.
I wish to use my brief remarks this afternoon not to raise concerns and problems affecting my constituency, as I have used other opportunities in the Chamber this week to do that, but to talk about things that makes Wales great in 2019. So I will be making some unalloyed positive remarks in the St David’s Day debate. Things that make Wales great No. 1: Welsh sport. I make no apologies for making this my starting point. I love sport as entertainment. Anyone who watched the game on Saturday will know that “That’s Entertainment”, in the words of the Jam. But sport in Wales is so much more than just entertainment: it is a source of employment, skills and volunteering opportunities; it is a vehicle for social cohesion and national ambition; and it is a tool for tackling poor mental health and for leveraging inward investment. I truly believe in the power of sport to transform lives and boost our economy. This is really important for us in Wales, as a smaller nation, where our victories really matter to us. Whether we are talking about the Welsh football success at Euro 2016, Newport knocking Leicester out of the FA cup, the victory on Saturday or Geraint Thomas winning the Tour de France in 2018, these are things that really matter to us. It is not just about making us feel good; one of the keys to Welsh success in the years ahead is investing in sport, for all the reasons I set out, and using sport to help make Wales a stronger nation. In Wales, we are also closer to our sporting heroes than people in England perhaps are, and I sometimes try to explain this to my English colleagues. We see our sporting heroes in Wales
in the street. We sometimes see them in the pub or at motorway service stations. They live among us in Wales. That is really important, and it brings me to my second point.
Things that make Wales great No.2: community. The spirit of community in Wales is very strong and positive. It is a bit of a cliché to say it, and we sometimes hear people from the north of England say similar, but Wales is a friendlier place—I genuinely believe that. In 2019, it feels as though we have shaken off some of the stuffy insularity or curtain-twitching judgmentalism that Dylan Thomas used to rage about and hate, writing about it in “Under Milk Wood”. In 2019, Wales is an open, tolerant, caring, welcoming place.