The DUP deal keeps Theresa May in power through a confidence and supply agreement, and the size and the scope of the deal is unprecedented—£1.5 billion, including £1 billion of new cash, and flexibility of £500 million of existing funding, with no indication as to where that money is coming from. Well, perhaps it’s magic. The Barnett formula has been bypassed completely, and we estimate the cost of this to Wales as being £1.7 billion, and that is after cuts to this Assembly’s block grant of—how much? You’ve guessed it: £1.7 billion, according to the Welsh Government, as a result of austerity. This is money that Wales needs. To add insult to injury, we are told by the Tories that our funding floor and city deals are somehow comparable to this vast sum, even though the city deals include Welsh public sector money, both from the Government here and local authorities, and even though the funding floor has happened more by accident than by design.

Aside from the specific effect on Wales, we have to consider where this leaves the UK as a state in the light of the Brexit negotiations. Are the negotiators in Brussels looking at the governance of the UK and seeing a situation that is strong and stable? I’d say probably not.

But let’s turn to the position of Wales in all of this. People in Wales shouldn’t just be frustrated at this deal; they should be angry. Wales has always been third in the queue, behind Northern Ireland and Scotland, for both powers and funding. It’s not as though this country doesn’t need additional funds. This is the country that has kicked up the least fuss. We’ve been the quietest and most well-behaved of all the UK countries. We have never rocked the boat, and that has led to us being left behind, ignored. We—and I mean the Assembly as a whole, rather than any individual political party—have only decided, quite late in the day, that we should run our own police force, that we should have our own legal jurisdiction, and we’ve only got to that consensus years after Northern Ireland and Scotland have established those aspects of their democracy. We look as though we haven’t been respecting ourselves or our own national institution, so it can be no wonder that we are not respected at Westminster.

The current situation and the way that we’ve been doing things haven’t created significant leverage. Westminster Governments don’t perceive any real hunger for constitutional change from Wales. The Wales Office, now rebranded as the UK Government Wales, is doing what it says on the tin: acting as a spokesperson for Westminster in Wales, not as a voice for Wales in Westminster. That has to change, and that’s why I call upon every single Tory MP to stand with Wales to vote against this Queen’s Speech unless and until they can get extra funds for our country, too. Failure to do so will be letting Wales down, and they deserve to pay a heavy price for that.

All of the political parties here need to consider how we can change this situation. It isn’t just about our constitution. The effects of this political weakness can be seen all around us, in our infrastructure and our economy. It is an outrage that we are one of only three countries in Europe without any electrified railway, alongside Moldova and Albania. And when electrification does eventually happen it’ll be years later than in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland—a stark symbol of where we are in that pecking order.

Now, I don’t say any of this to talk Wales down. I say this because my ambition for this country knows no bounds. Our potential is vast. It has not yet been unlocked or unleashed. But while condemning this deal we must also learn the lessons.