Not yet; I’ve only been going for less than a minute. A Government that has had one of the largest budget deficits ever, apart from Napoleonic wars and the second world war, for the last 10 years—this includes the Labour Government that preceded this one—can hardly be described as carrying on a policy of austerity. Today, we have a Government deficit of £52 billion a year—3 per cent to 4 per cent of GDP—and it has been up as far as 10 per cent of GDP in 2010. A national debt that stood at £1 trillion in 2010 is £1.8 trillion today. Spending money of that order can certainly not be regarded as austerity. I think it’s an insult to the Greeks and the Spaniards and the Portuguese, who really are suffering an economic contraction unprecedented since the great depression of the 1930s, to call what has happened in Britain following the financial crisis of 2008 ‘a policy of austerity’. We can certainly criticise. We can certainly criticise the UK Government for the priorities that it has within its spending plans, but I don’t think we can criticise the overall scale of spending as anything to do with the cause of the problems that the Valleys of south Wales suffer from today.

That’s what brings me, I think, to the main point of my speech, which is that we’ve had endless Government intervention in the Valleys over my lifetime, and what has it achieved—the point that Russell George made a moment ago. Yes, we’ve improved the infrastructure, we’ve done lots of good things, but it has not actually transformed the life chances and hopes of the peoples of the Valleys. EU funding is about £300 million a year. It’s a drop in the ocean. It’s peanuts compared with the amount of money that the private sector should spend in order to create the kinds of jobs that we need in the numbers that we need. That’s exactly what the Circuit of Wales project, of course, would do—a transformative project if ever I saw one. And it is very disappointing that the Government has been so timid and so dilatory—