<p>Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders</p>

Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 3 October 2017.

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Photo of Mr Neil Hamilton Mr Neil Hamilton UKIP 1:51, 3 October 2017

I don’t want to debate economic history with the First Minister, but, immediately after the war, we did, of course, have the Marshall aid programme and actually there was a very substantial reduction in the proportion of debt to GDP during the course of the Attlee Government from 1945 to 1951. When Tony Blair came to office in 1997, the national debt stood at £359 billion and, in his first term of office, he actually reduced it further. In 2001, that was reduced to £317 billion. Then Gordon Brown turned on the spending taps, and we all know what happened with the financial crisis in 2008. The national debt—[Interruption.] The national debt now stands—[Interruption.] The national debt now stands at nearly £2 trillion and we’re spending, every single year, £56 billion on debt interest alone. If the Welsh portion of that debt interest, which would be one twentieth—that’s about £2 billion a year—was available to the Welsh Government to spend on the health service, social care, education, whatever, Wales would be very much better off than it is now.