Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I was going to say it's a pleasure to rise to introduce this debate, but, actually, if we look at the substance of what we're discussing, then pleasure is anything but what one must feel. I was struck when I took part in the Wales Live debate on the budget that the BBC held, and they did a montage, actually, of television reports from BBC Wales news going back over decades in response to the budget, and vox pops all over Wales. And, you know, you could see the historical continuity, the contours of Welsh economic history, opening up in front of you, because 'nothing in it for Wales' was basically on the lips of people in sepia-tinted pictures from the 1960s right through to today: 'nothing in it for Wales'. And that's not a kind of neat Plaid Cymru press release headline; I think that is the lived experience, actually, of most of our people going back over generations. Because of the centripetal nature of the political forces in these islands, that is reproduced time after time after time in the economic priorities—there is nothing in it for Wales. And so, yes, it can't have come as a surprise. It came as a huge disappointment.

Now, this golden opportunity with the tidal lagoon—we have to be there: we were at the birthplace of a few industries a couple of hundred years ago in the industrial revolution. Well, here's a chance for us to have our time to be at the birthplace of a new industrial revolution, and that's an opportunity that we cannot afford to lose. We're not asking for charity as a country, we're asking for help to help ourselves. That's what you're asking for: the opportunity to actually marshal the skills and the natural resources that we have to the benefit of our society, and yet, that opportunity is yet again denied us.

So, that continuity was there. The other continuity, which again was no surprise, but was certainly a disappointment, was the continuity of the austerian economics, I suppose we could call it. We could call it that, but there are few economists of any repute who actually would support it now—even the Austrian School actually wouldn't support the kind of austerian economics we're seeing from this Government. And there's a very, very good reason why. It's because we are entering, I think, some of the most troubling and worrying economic times that we have faced for many a generation, and the bit that was new, of course, in the budget was the downgrading of the growth forecasts. The Office for Budget Responsibility—which, actually, it's fair to say, over many years has constantly had to revise downwards its forecasts on productivity—finally came up front with a revised growth forecast, which was very, very significant, actually, because Members should know that only two years ago, the OBR was forecasting 2.5 per cent growth. So, it's actually almost close to halved that forecast. 

There was a bit of hyperbole, maybe, in Larry Elliott calling this the Suez of British economics, in that the budget was the time when we realised we were no longer the force in the world that we once thought we were. But the Chancellor himself did admit, of course, that the UK is now no longer in the top five economies; it's probably going to be overtaken by India and, I suspect, certainly by the end of the decade. And if you step back and look at the broader picture, this is a very, very pessimistic scenario. You could say that this is the equivalent of our lost decade—that phrase that, of course, came to describe the particular circumstances of Japan, following their property crash in the early 1990s. We've had a lost decade in Britain. We had the Resolution Foundation pointing out that this is, depending on how you measure it, the longest period of falling living standards, certainly for 60 years—some would argue that you can go back even further than that.

We've had an average of 1 per cent growth in growth value added terms over the last decade. You've got to remember that the long-run trend of the British economy is around 2 per cent. This is as significant as it gets. In social terms, obviously, if you're bumping along at about 2 per cent and 2.5 per cent, actually that leads to rising living standards. At 1 per cent, it leads to the kind of fall in real living standards that the Resolution Foundation is pointing out.