The proposal straddles the boundary of my constituency and that of my friend and colleague David Rees. I think that Dai Lloyd did mention the anger and the betrayal, and there's been a tremendous feeling amongst people of anger and betrayal. I went out last night and people wanted to come and tell me how angry and betrayed they were. But that wasn't what hurt—the bit that hurt was those who said, 'Well, we were never going to get it. We never get anything in Swansea. We're always left behind', and this feeling, really, of a lack of hope. I think that that is the bit that I found most hurtful—that people saw the lack of hope, that we were on the periphery of the Westminster Government's radar and we were very much left behind.

I think that you've got to remember that prototypes cost more—they always cost more. Can I take people back to wind and solar, when they first came out and they were incredibly expensive? Do you remember those people were saying, 'Gas is cheaper. Why are you doing this? We could be using gas. There's plenty of gas around. We can be using gas turbines; it would save lots of money'? Do you remember that?

Also, can I mention nuclear? Calder Hall, created in 1956—they've had 62 years to bring down the cost of nuclear and still they have failed, with what we're paying now for the electricity that's going to be generated in Hinkley Point. That is an example of something that hasn't come down in price to the level we expected, but we would never have built Calder Hall if it had been done on a price comparison against coal—coal was a lot cheaper. In fact, every power station in Britain would be coal, because coal was cheaper than any other method at the time the new methods came in.

Can I just use two historical examples? Because I know that Suzy Davies did that in her IWA article, which I pay credit to, but also two that she didn't use: Stephenson's Rocket—I can just imagine now these people saying, 'Rail? I can get faster from Stockton to Darlington on horseback than I can by rail. What a stupid idea to bring in rail. It's much cheaper and quicker on horseback'. And the other one is, of course—let's talk about steamboats, because steamboats were small, weren't very successful. Sail was so much better. But they developed the technology and it created steamships, which made the world a much smaller place in terms of the time it took to move around.

I have no doubt that Swansea will have a tidal lagoon. My concern, and I ask the Cabinet Secretary if he shares it, is that we'll be the ninth or tenth in the world to have it, we won't have the design capacity, we won't have developed all the skills in the area; we'll be buying in the technology like we do now for solar and like we do now for wind. Wind was mainly developed in Denmark and Germany, and that's where the design is, that's where things are made. Those people who live in Swansea will know that we've had a lot of transport activity taking devices, because they've come in by boat and they've been taken because they aren't ours, built by us. Does the Cabinet Secretary agree with me again that we've lost the chance to be the first in the world to start creating tidal energy? We will have it, but we'll be buying in the technology from abroad, rather than developing it.