Well, David, obviously I would argue the fact that it wasn’t European money: it was British money coming back to us after they took something like 50 per cent of it.

However, as we know all too well in Wales, the steel industry suffers from energy costs much higher than its competitors, exacerbated of course by the environmental levies, and these, coupled with high business rates, make our steel industry less competitive. Steel making in the UK as a whole has contracted drastically over recent years, and I will here restate some points made by Russell George with regard to employment in the steel industry. There were 68,000 employed in the industry in 1997, falling to 31,000 in 2010: a loss of 37,000 steel jobs under a Labour Government and, I shall point out, whilst we were in the European Union. Well, indeed, the very fact that we were in the EU probably contributed to such a demise. The EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, summed up the rules last year. She said,

‘EU countries and the Commission have put in place strict safeguards against state aid to rescue and restructure…companies in difficulty.’