Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:07 pm on 10 May 2017.
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. As a strong and reasonably stable Member of this Assembly, I’m delighted to take part in this debate. It was fair enough for the leader of the Welsh Conservatives to focus upon the Labour Party’s proposal to increase borrowing by £500 billion. Of course, the shadow Chancellor is an avowed Marxist, but I think this policy owes more to Groucho than to Karl. I remember Groucho Marx said politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and then applying the wrong remedy. And that is exactly what the Labour Party’s economic policy amounts to. However, Andrew R.T. Davies’s point might have had more force if it wasn’t for the record of George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he borrowed even more than the £500 billion that Labour now proposes to spend. In fact, he doubled the national debt in the years since 2010, and he borrowed £850 billion, and last year—2016—the national debt rose by £91.5 billion. That is £250 million a day and it amounts to £26,000 now for every single person in the United Kingdom. The interest that we pay on the national debt now amounts to £40 billion a year, which is almost as big as the entire defence budget. This is what the Labour Party always forgets, of course, that the national debt has to be financed and eventually it has to be paid back. Yes, I’ll give way to the Member.