It’s the misfortunate of somebody who comes this low in the proceedings that most of the intelligent questions have been asked already, but I’ll try and till a new furrow. I broadly welcome the statement from the Cabinet Secretary, although I must say some of the language doesn’t seem to bear the normal professorial detachment with which the Cabinet Secretary has added so much lustre to the various offices that he has held. I don’t know whether, in particular, the bottom line on page 1, which refers to the

‘dog-eat-dog economy of the neo-liberal imagination’ was specifically directed at me, but I’d like to assure him that there is nothing ‘neo’ about me—[Interruption.]—nothing ‘neo’ about me at all. As my exact contemporary, Jeremy Corbyn—we were elected to Parliament on the same day, the same age—[Interruption.] I, at least, have advanced in my station to the Welsh Assembly, to respond to the interruption by David Rees. Just as he is a paleosocialist, I suppose I’m a paleoliberal conservative, in financial and economic terms at least.

But I’d like to raise what I think is going to be a growingly important issue in Wales. I’ve just read an HMRC publication called ‘A disaggregation of HMRC tax receipts between England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland’. Table 4 of that provides statistics for what I think is a very disturbing trend—that, since the year 2003-04, in almost every year, the proportion of income tax receipts as a proportion of the total UK tax receipts has declined, year in and year out, which seems to imply that Wales is falling backwards in terms of income, nationally, relative to other parts of the United Kingdom. Therefore, although I am strongly in favour, personally, of the devolution of income tax and other taxes as well, given that we also have a reduction in the block grant from Whitehall as a consequence, there is a danger, unless we reverse this trend, that we are going to find that we are squeezed more and more, year in, year out, and, therefore, to develop a theme that Adam Price very often raises in this Chamber, what can we do to raise GVA relative to other parts of the UK in Wales?

It seems to me that giving us the opportunity to compete in terms of taxation with other parts of the national jurisdiction is one means by which we can do that—by attracting more business into Wales to produce more wealth that can then be taxed. As has been pointed out in the statement, paying taxes is of course a badge of admission to a civilised society, although I’d be far from implying a direct relationship, and certainly I don’t take the opposite view that a high-tax jurisdiction is a more civilised society by definition. There are plenty of examples that we could cite to disprove that hypothesis. But taxes do affect behaviour. That is indisputable, and indeed is referred to in the framework document published by the Welsh Government itself.

I don’t think that it actually adds to a sober analysis of the impact of taxation upon income and the generation of wealth to use the kind of ‘Tom and Jerry’ language of ‘dog-eat-dog’ that the Cabinet Secretary has used in this statement. In fact, although Mike Hedges referred in the course of his contribution to the United States, the United States is a relatively high-tax jurisdiction, especially if you take into account the combination of federal, state and local taxes. Ernst and Young have done a very interesting analysis of the American tax system in relation to the tax systems elsewhere, and the macro-economic effects of these high tax rates. They say, for example, that the high US corporation tax rate is beginning to have significant adverse economic consequences for the US economy and American workers, and suggest that the reform of the US corporation tax that includes a significant reduction of the rate would likely provide important economic benefits to the United States. Well, I would say that that's true in spades of Wales.

Of course, corporation tax is not a devolved tax, and I think it would be a very good thing if, as the Holtham commission recommended, it were devolved to Wales, because it would give us the opportunity to attract more private investment into Wales, on the back of which we could then have, not just a higher GVA for the whole country, but a bigger tax base for the Welsh Government, which we could spend on all the things that we would like to spend money on but which we can't now afford.

I know that the Cabinet Secretary has disparaged what he thinks are my views in relation to what he described in our last exchange as the Laffer curve, but, when we consider the experience of the Irish Republic, and in particular in relation to corporation tax, they have a corporation tax rate of 12.5 per cent, but they have a special 6.25 per cent corporation tax rate in relation to what they call the knowledge development box, that is, for genuine innovators employing highly skilled people. It seems to me that Wales has a far too high proportion of income created by the public sector. We need to increase the proportion that is generated by private enterprise, and if we deny ourselves the opportunity to use the tax system in order to encourage that then I think we're stabbing ourselves in the back.

If we take the party political badinage out of this, there is a mass of empirical evidence to show that, whilst there isn't a direct relationship, obviously, between particular tax rates and economic growth or wealth in a society, there is, as the Cabinet Secretary will readily admit, a connection of some kind between the two, and lower taxes generally tend to produce higher GVA. After all, take the logical extreme of this, Singapore: it’s one of the wealthiest countries in the world with almost no natural resources and the lowest tax rates. So, that says nothing, of course, about the distribution of income in Singapore, but, nevertheless, the economy of the country and the wealth that it now enjoys, compared with the situation 20 to 30 years ago, speaks for itself. So, I would just like to make that plea to the Cabinet Secondary to be perhaps a little more flexible in his thinking about this issue.