Now, there is one item in this course called 'ethnocentrism': 'Ethnocentrism is where a person sees a grouping which they identify with to be superior to other groupings.' It goes on to say that this is because they judge another culture solely by the values and standards of their own culture. Of course, seeing other cultures as different doesn't necessarily mean that we see them as superior. The example that was given in this course document of ethnocentrism, bizarrely, is in relation to Cuba and the American invasion of Cuba in 1960, following the Cuban revolution, which brought Fidel Castro to power. Now, it's news to me that the Americans aided Cuban exiles in the invasion of Cuba in 1960 because they regarded America as superior to Cuban people. It was, of course, a geopolitical event at the height of the cold war, and there's a historical context that seems to be wholly missing from the text that describes what happened in Cuba all those years ago. There doesn't appear to be any mention whatsoever of the nature of the Castro regime, which was imposed upon Cuba following the ejection of the equally awful person Fulgencio Batista, who was the dictator of Cuba before Castro succeeded.

This, I think, is deplorable, because if a generation of children is brought up with misconceptions being taught at school in this way, then that is undoubtedly going to bias their view of the subject that that is an example of. Now, of course, the Castro regime has been condemned by human rights organisations roundly over many, many years. Human Rights Watch has said that, under Fidel Castro, the Cuban Government refused to recognise the legitimacy of Cuban human rights organisations, alternative political parties, independent labour unions or a free press. He also denied international monitors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and international non-governmental organisations like Human Rights Watch, access to the island to investigate human rights conditions. One of the reasons why the Americans supported the invasion of Cuba in 1960 was because they thought that capitalism, free enterprise and democratic societies were superior to communist society. Surely we've enough experience of communism in the last 100 years, perhaps, not to think that that is a challengeable proposition. So, to describe that as an example of ethnocentrism is actually a total misleading of the children who were being taught it. Now, if that is happening in that one area, it can be happening in others as well. This is a very important element of education that is perhaps not being well taught.

There are many other controversial topics where there is another side to the case as well, and I'm not sure that that is taught in school. Just take poverty, for example, and famine. What's the cause of poverty and famine, by and large? Why is it that some countries succeed in creating wealth and others don't, and that some countries have actually gone backwards in the last century, compared with where they were in the early part of the twentieth century? If you look at the richest countries in the world, they're countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, which were nowhere 50 years ago in the tables of wealth creation, whereas Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Argentina have all gone the other way. In the 1920s, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, and thanks to decades of misgovernment by leftist and quasi-fascistic political parties and kleptocratic leaders, Argentina's economy was ruined. So, there are many reasons why wealth is created, but generally speaking, state control isn't one of them.

In relation to poverty in developing countries, the intellectual infrastructure of wealth creation is simply not there. Is 'trade not aid' taught in schools, for example? Professor Peter Bauer, who was a professor of international development economics when I was a student back in the 1960s, said that aid, generally, is taxpayers' money that is collected from poor people in rich countries to give to rich people in poor countries, and we've seen many examples of that demonstrated over the years. Now, I'm not suggesting that overseas aid is always bad, of course—lots of aid projects are good—but if you convey the impression that the only way in which poor countries can become rich countries is by a transfer of wealth from richer countries, then that is, again, a misunderstanding of the nature of the economic process. Competition is a discovery process: bad ideas don't succeed, good ideas do. So, these are issues that ought to be properly factored into the curriculum. We have issues such as intergenerational wealth transfer, as well, in relation to poverty. In this generation, we frequently hear people talking about austerity, but what is austerity? Austerity is our experience of the last seven years of Conservative Government where the national debt has doubled. Now, that is an intergenerational wealth transfer; we are spending today money that will have to be paid back by generations of tomorrow. Are these issues properly dealt with in the Welsh bac course? I've seen no evidence of that whatsoever.

There is a course called 'consumerism'. Now, there's a loaded term, if ever there was one. I looked up the definition of this in a dictionary and it was described as 'the belief that increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable'. Well, there are not many people, I think, who would regard the increasing consumption of goods as being a bad thing, and generally speaking, the poorer you are, the more goods you want to consume. This is a good thing. So, why are we teaching something called consumerism to children in schools? It all goes back, I suppose, to the Rousseauian idea of the noble savage—back to nature, the simple life where we scratch a living from the soil—but this isn't the kind of lifestyle that normal people want to pursue.