You would think, from what the First Minister just said, that there hadn’t been a Labour Government from 1997 to 2008 and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was not Gordon Brown, in charge of banking regulation, whereas we know that he believed in a light-touch regulation of banking, so he was a contributor to the financial crisis, which ultimately engulfed him. Jim Callaghan knew what it was like to cope with a financial crisis. I’m sure the First Minister will remember very well that in 1976 he appeared at a rather different kind of Labour Party conference and said:

‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by…boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion…by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.’

Jeremy Corbyn, if he ever did learn that lesson, seems to have forgotten it. His role as a kind of moth-eaten Santa Claus, dipping into a bottomless bag of presents to dish out to gullible children, is not the way forward for any sensible or realistic political party that has any designs upon holding the highest offices in the land.