Well, I’m very happy to support this motion of Plaid Cymru today, and my party will be voting for it. I hope that leads to a spontaneous outbreak of rejoicing on Plaid Cymru benches. I’m going to be consensual today in a rather different way from yesterday, as it’s our national day. Although St David’s message to us all isn’t, perhaps, entirely to our taste, because the monastic rule of St David was that monks should pull the plough without draught animals, drink only water, eat only bread with salt and herbs, and spend their evenings in prayer, reading or writing, and have no personal possessions. So, Wales would be a very ascetic place if we followed that prescription exactly.

I agree with everything that was said by Rhun ap Iorwerth in opening his debate today, and it’s right, I think, to look back to Wales’s history and what we’ve given to the world. I’m sad to say that in my lifetime the history has been rather different, at least in relative terms: we’ve been a nation in decline economically although, as I fully acknowledge and indeed glory in, it’s been a nation that has grown culturally and in terms of the feeling of nationhood. Although I am a firm believer in the United Kingdom, I feel myself also to be a proud Welshman, and I think one can have two kinds of nationhood that exist side by side with one another. I would also say that if Wales were to become an independent nation politically, there’s no reason whatever why it could not be one of the most successful nations in the world, because scale is not everything in this respect. [Interruption.] Singapore, for example, is a minute speck in the ocean, and it all depends upon—[Interruption.] It all depends upon the kind of economy that can be developed, which, of course, depends upon the political environment. I’m sad to say that, on the current manifesto of Plaid Cymru, it would be unlikely to replicate the success of Singapore.

But the Plaid Cymru motion today is quite right to point out Wales’s relative decline in recent years, economically. Wales does have only 71 per cent of the GVA of the United Kingdom. That compares with 93 per cent in Scotland, and Northern Ireland, which previously, 20 years ago, was below Wales on that table, is today above us. We are at the bottom of the table. So, we’ve had 20 years of decline, sad to say, under a Labour Government here in Cardiff and, for most of that time, a Labour Government in London as well. In my region, west Wales and the Valleys, in fact, it’s only 63.3 per cent of the GVA of the United Kingdom, which is even worse.

Although I’ve taken a lot of stick from the First Minister and others for having been a Minister in Conservative Governments in the 1980s and 1990s, actually, in 1989, Wales had 89 per cent of the GVA of the United Kingdom, and so we’ve gone back from 89 per cent to 71 per cent under the great excoriaters of Thatcherism of the 1980s. So, every year since 1996, Wales has either flat-lined or gone backwards in this table. So, it is a record of unrelieved gloom, I’m afraid, and failure.

But, looking to the future, the future doesn’t actually lie with Government. Governments can’t do more for people than they can do for themselves. They can affect the environment within which people live and work, of course. But we have been coping, for the whole of my lifetime, with the decline of major extractive and manufacturing industries, which couldn’t actually be reversed, although it could be slowed down, and today we’ve been discussing the current problems of Ford in Bridgend. Where we have large employers who dominate one particular area, we are at risk, of course, of major changes in global demand or conditions. The future must lie in the promotion of enterprise with small businesses, as Paul Davies was pointing out in his speech, and also the technologies of the future.

Today, on the front page of ‘The Times’, there’s a story about how Sir James Dyson is going to fund a new technology campus, just by junction 17 on the M4. He himself lives by junction 16 on the M4. This is less than an hour from Cardiff, and yet where are the equivalents in Wales? These are the kinds of industries of the future that the Government should be encouraging and doing its best to attract and to support. So, let’s, yes, glory in our past, but let’s have a Government that will produce a future in which future generations can glory when they look back.