On leaving the UK Government in 2010, Labour bequeathed an economy on the brink of collapse, with the highest budget deficit in Europe, excepting only Ireland. But Conservatives delivered the fastest-growing G7 economy in 2016. In contrast, those countries that rejected austerity got it in full measure.

In championing Keynesian economics as an alternative, Labour fails to acknowledge—and Plaid Cymru—that although Keynes advocated deficit spending when an economy is suffering, he also advocated cutting back on Government outlay in the boom times. But Gordon Brown broke the economic cycle by pretending there was an end to boom and bust. As any debtor knows, you can’t start reducing debt until expenditure falls below income. If the Treasury had pursued faster deficit reduction, cuts would have been higher. In the real financial world, borrowers borrow, but lenders set the terms. If the Treasury had followed lower deficit reduction, higher cuts would have been imposed.

Labour Members here sneered when I warned, 13 years ago, that Gordon Brown’s borrowing would lead to a day of reckoning. They sneered when I said, 12 years ago, that the International Monetary Fund had warned that the UK banking system was more exposed to sub-prime debt than anywhere else in the world. They sneered when I said that the National Audit Office warned Mr Brown’s Treasury, three years before Northern Rock nearly went bust, that it needed to set up emergency plans to handle a banking crisis, but Labour did nothing about it. They sneered when I said that the Financial Services Authority had reported sustained political emphasis by the Labour Government on the need for them to be light-touch in their approach to banking regulation. No doubt they will sneer now, when I say that in endorsing Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to borrow an extra £500 billion, Carwyn Jones is failing to tell the people of Wales that bigger cuts will be the consequence.

Of course, Carwyn Jones is not a modest man, but he has a lot to be modest about. He keeps stating that Wales has the lowest unemployment in the UK, but the latest published figures show unemployment in Wales above England, Scotland and UK levels. He keeps taking the credit for inward investment into Wales, when the UK Department for International Trade played a part in 97 of 101 foreign direct investments into Wales last year, with the UK continuing to be the third largest recipient globally.

It is in the interests of Wales and the UK to have a strong, stable and prosperous European Union as our immediate neighbour. Although we do not enter Brexit negotiations as supplicants, he preaches Brexit doom, as we heard from our Plaid Cymru friends also. Well, there will be no winner and loser, only two winners or two losers. Any new impediments to trade and investment in Europe would not only be politically irresponsible, but economically dangerous, not just for Europe, but for the wider global economy, too. Throughout 18 years of Labour Welsh Government, they’ve presented themselves as the guardians of social justice. But the more they talked about it, the worse it has got. After spending £0.5 billion pounds on their lead tackling poverty programme, Communities First, they’re now phasing it out after, as the Bevan Foundation said, failing to reduce the headline rates of poverty in Wales.

Labour has given Wales the highest percentage of employees not on permanent contracts; the highest levels of underemployment across the 12 UK nations and regions; the lowest prosperity levels per head in the UK; the highest percentage of employees not on permanent contracts—I’ve said it again; rates of low pay, poverty, child poverty and children living in long-term workless households above UK levels; an increased percentage of children living in workless households in Wales’s most deprived communities and a housing supply crisis with the lowest proportional level of housing expenditure of any of the four UK countries from 1999, and therefore, the biggest cuts in new, social and affordable housing since 1999. UK Labour, meanwhile, is in the hands of a Trotskyist tribute act—fundamentalist followers of a discredited and dangerous nineteenth-century ideology. But Wales has been a pilot for them and a warning to people across our islands. Labour think they’re entitled to rule and tell the people what they is good for them. In contrast, Welsh Conservatives seek to empower people and communities, doing things with them rather than to them. Instead of the coalition of chaos offered by Corbyn and Carwyn, the people need the strong and stable leadership of Theresa May.