I don’t think I shall get tempted, Llywydd, to go down the byways of Brexit in the budget debate.

I want to deal also with the point that comes out of the statement and the outline proposals in the budget about what the Cabinet Secretary says about the deal between the UK Government and Northern Ireland. It’s inevitable, in these circumstances, that a price is going to be extracted for their political support. Exactly the same thing has happened in this Chamber between Labour and Plaid Cymru. For Northern Ireland, there is an extra £1 billion a year, and good luck to them. I wish we could do that as well. If only Plaid Cymru had played the positive role at Westminster that the Democratic Unionists had played, they might be able today to crow about extra money for the Welsh Government too. I appreciate that their views on Brexit are very different from those of the Government, but I don’t think it lies in the mouths of Welsh Ministers to complain about what has happened at Westminster when they are responsible for exactly the same kind of deal here in Cardiff.

I do actually welcome the role that Plaid Cymru has played in the development of a part of this budget. I think it is a good thing that all parties of this house should work together in these ways. That, I think, is what the people of Wales expect of us as well. I know that the future is not going to be easy. The Cabinet Secretary did refer, in the course of his statement, to the prospect of unallocated cuts by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the year 2020, and we don’t know, as yet, to what extent those cuts are going to fall upon areas of devolved policy. If they fall in areas like defence, which I think is unlikely, then we will get off lightly. If they fall on health and education, or something like that, then we will suffer very substantially indeed, possibly, and I would very much regret that. But I’m afraid that the reality of the economic circumstances in which we have to live is that we’ll need to get used to this for the foreseeable future.

We can all wish that we had an unlimited bank account, but no government can possibly have that. The trajectory upon which the national debt is now set is for it to fall as a proportion of GDP, and that is actually the only way in which sustainable public finances can be preserved for the future. We could all wish that every year would be easier, but once you get debt levels down, they do become easier. The first Blair Government certainly understood this, because the national debt figure that they inherited in 1997 was preserved because they maintained Kenneth Clarke’s tight policies—fiscal policies—when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer for the first administration, in order to get themselves elected for the second time. They actually finished the first Blair period of office with a lower national debt than that with which they started, but then Gordon Brown embarked on a totally different trajectory for the next two Parliaments, with the catastrophe that we all ended up with in 2010 and the inheritance of the Conservative Government, which it’s still trying to grapple with today. I believe they could have been tougher in the way that they treated the public finances.

We have proposed cuts to the non-humanitarian part of the aid budget to help with that. We proposed, of course, getting out of the EU, which will enable us to reduce public spending. The future is bright, actually, outside the European Union. Look at the investments that have been taking place in Britain, or have been announced by big firms, such as Müller with £100 million just a couple of weeks ago, and Dyson, also, with £3 billion in its technology park, and so on, and so forth. I believe the future can be bright for Wales, but only with a Government that understands the importance of entrepreneurship, to raise the tax base in this country, by raising the economic potential and productive capacity with which the taxes that we will need to spend in the future can be raised. And I see no sign of that, sadly, from this Welsh Labour Government.

So, we will not be supporting this budget, in due course, but I very much look forward to going through it on a line-by-line basis in the Finance Committee, and, indeed, in this Chamber in the months ahead.