Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:24 pm on 3 October 2017.
Yes, it has. I’m glad to have that reinforcement of the point that I am making. It’s as a result of profligacy in recent years that the Government has lost its AAA rating. I gave the figures in my questions earlier on to the First Minister. We now have a national debt of £2 trillion a year. It’s costing us nearly £60 billion a year to finance it. The money that we are spending on debt interest is money that would otherwise have been available to spend upon real, front-line public services. So, the idea that you can borrow forever and never have to worry about how to finance it is fantasy economics, as the people of Venezuela, Zimbabwe and many other countries know to their cost. And therefore, it’s perhaps fortunate that the Welsh Government doesn’t really have any extensive borrowing powers, and that they don’t have full responsibility for the budgets over which they preside, because if they were able to do that, then they might replicate some of the worst examples in the British Government since the war. So, all talk of austerity actually is very misplaced. We’ve had the opposite of austerity for the last seven years, it’s just that we are paying the price, for years and years before that, of massive overspending on the basis that tomorrow never comes. So, that is the reality of life. We have to pay eventually for overspending. We cannot go on overspending forever. I give way.