Want to keep up to date on Welsh politics? Sign up and get political news sent straight to your inbox Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

I want to address two of the main arguments of those who want us to walk away from the European Union.

Whenever the benefits of membership are stressed those who want us to abandon our European partners say time and again ‘this is not European money, it is our money they are giving back’.

And of course the UK makes a contribution to the EU. So we should. All clubs have membership fees, and in return we get benefits – not least tariff-free access to the single market.

And if we withdraw, we’d still have costs – we’d have to pay for access to this market, albeit without any ability to influence its rules.

But the amount we ‘hand over to Brussels’ – to us the pejorative terms we’ve become inured to after thirty years of anti-European tabloid propaganda – is relatively small. The Treasury says we make a net contribution of £8.4bn a year – which is less than 1% of all Government spending.

That’s the size of our contribution – so let’s put in proportion: it is enough to fund the NHS across the UK for 19 days a year. That’s all – the pledges of the Leave campaign of what they’d do with this supposed mountain of money are not worth the paper they are written on.

It is deeply insincere to suggest we can keep all the positive elements of EU membership while dumping the bits we don’t like.

(Image: Ben Birchall/PA Wire)

And that brings me to the second of the arguments we have heard from those who wish to Leave, that it’s not the EU that has secured peace in Europe over the last 70 years, but our membership of Nato.

Of course the promise of American military protection has been a keystone of peace on our continent. But peace is more than just the absence of war.

Three generations of peace are built upon layers of confidence and understanding between peoples. And crucially - the institutions to resolve differences. As Christopher Clark notes in his book The Sleepwalkers, one of the reasons the economic turmoil of the Eurozone crisis did not result in fighting, while the events of 1914 did, was the existence of powerful supranational institutions.

I am proud that by being in the EU we have played a leading role in an alliance that has brought stability and prosperity to a continent with a history of instability.

Think of how fragile Spain was when it joined in 1986, just five years earlier it had weathered an attempted coup.

Still in the shadow of fascism, one of the poorest part of Europe when it joined, has been transformed by being part of the EU.

It is now a modern, prosperous, stable democracy. And the same process is underway in those countries who slipped under the Iron Curtain to join just over a decade ago.

None of this is an accident. It is the result of patient, and painful, integration: Economic, democratic, bureaucratic. But give me directives over demagoguery any day.

We’ve seen from the events in the Ukraine that stability cannot be taken for granted. Peace and democracy are fragile.

Modern Europe has been patiently created, we will regret its undoing.