DWYFOR and Meirionnydd’s MP has voted against triggering Article 50, a move which would see the UK begin its divorce proceedings with the European Union.

Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts was one of 114 members of Parliament which rejected the move claiming that the current government had not represented Wales’ best interests.

However 498 MPs voted in favour of triggering the article, with 38 abstentions, which means that prime minster Theresa May now has the power to begin Britain’s EU exit by 31 March.

When the bill was under discussion in London last Wednesday, Mrs Saville Roberts was adamant that the current policy would damage her constituency and Wales at large and attacked the ‘Leave’ Campaign’s “divisive and reprehensible rhetoric”.

“Wales is a net beneficiary of the EU, receiving £245 million, or £79 per person, more than we pay in,” she said.

“In rural constituencies like mine, that funding makes an impact way beyond what this figure implies.

“For rural communities, the Common Agricultural Policy is the most important financial contribution that the EU makes, ?yet the Conservative party stands ready to switch off these vital support mechanisms that are essential to our already struggling isolated communities, with no indication of how it will make good the damage, or even whether it intends to.

“I shall spend a few sentences exploring the increasingly divisive and much-misused word ‘freedom’. It was its antonym, ‘control’, that dominated the leave campaign’s market-tested propaganda, but it was an almost messianic pursuit of this most emotive of concepts, freedom, that drove us to break free from Brussels.

“‘Freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’ are the opposing and disputed understandings of liberty that have arguably underpinned the political divide for centuries.

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