UKIP will be supporting the Plaid Cymru motion this afternoon, although I think it was a mistake to base it upon this UN report by Philip Alston. He's very far from what John Griffiths has just said, politically neutral, he's in fact an extreme left-wing anti-Trump zealot professor of law at New York University with a political axe to grind. His measure of poverty—[Interruption.] His measure of poverty is anybody earning less than 60 per cent of median household income. That's not a measure of poverty, but a measure of inequality, and the two things are quite distinct. A society without any inequality, no matter how low income levels, if everybody was desperately poor, living in wooden shacks and eating sand, would actually be a place with no poverty, according to his definition.

He has written reports about other countries. He has written a report about Mauritania, for example, and has praised President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz for the significant progress he's made in tackling poverty, and this is a country in which 42 per cent live in absolute poverty, with an average yearly wage of less than £1,000, where the life expectancy of the people is 20 years less than in this country and where the state murders its political opponents and subjects them to torture, none of which excited his animosity. So, let's put this in perspective. [Interruption.] It's not disgraceful; I'm merely reporting the facts. If Members can't cope with them, that must be a matter for them rather than for me. 

The other absurdity about this measure of poverty is that recessions, of course, are great for reducing poverty, because in recessions there tends to be generally a fall in income from capital, dividends and so on, and so if the rich get less rich relative to the poor it doesn't matter that the poor are actually no richer in reality, poverty is reduced. That's an absurdity.

And if we look at the experience in other countries, it puts the British position into perspective as well. I've got the Office for National Statistics report on persistent poverty in the UK and the EU in 2015 here in my hand, and 7.3 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom in 2015 were living in persistent poverty. That compares with 10.9 per cent as the average in the EU. Eleven point three per cent of the population of Germany lives in persistent poverty on the same measure; 8.5 per cent in France; 14.5 per cent in Italy. So, in fact, in many ways, there is less poverty in Britain, defined in relative terms, than there is in other parts of the EU and in other parts of the world.  

The problem in Wales is not so much relative poverty. I want to see the incomes of the people generally in Wales raised relative to the rest of the United Kingdom, of course, because Wales is at the bottom of the heap. That's a great tragedy, and I think an indictment of 20 years of Welsh Labour Government. But what amazes me is that the parties of the left are so enthusiastic normally to soak the poor. The many tax proposals that they have are designed, actually, to make life more difficult for those on the lowest incomes. Green taxes, as I raise frequently in this Chamber—now, 20 per cent of people's electricity bills are accounted for by green taxes, and it's the poor who are most hard hit by these taxes. In the winter, people do have to make a choice, sadly, between heating and eating very often. Sugar taxes, minimum prices for alcohol—these are all taxes that are going to disproportionately hit the poor hardest. 

The parties of the left are also very, very keen, of course, on continuing our membership of the European Union, but the European Union is a protectionist racket, the worst victims of which are those on the lowest incomes. Value added tax, for example—we can't get rid of VAT on domestic heating fuel, for example, we can't get rid of VAT on shoes and clothing, and the tariff regime within the EU subjects all these things as well to crippling tariffs, so that we can't take advantage of the lower prices for all these basic items and necessities that would be brought about as a result of Brexit if we negotiated free trade agreements with the rest of the world. The common agricultural policy makes food in this country massively more expensive than it need be. Look at the tariffs of these, which are often 40 per cent or 50 per cent. I know that we need to keep farmers on the land, and we need to subsidise them in order to do that in certain areas, but that can be done in ways other than hitting the poor through high food prices.

So, what we need to do is to have a proper analysis of poverty and its causes, and how to alleviate it and, indeed, the key role of Government in perpetuating it and making it, in fact, worse. Universal credit was a good idea but has actually been botched in the way in which it's been introduced and implemented. So, we have no problem in supporting the general tenor of the Plaid Cymru motion but, unfortunately, they're not living in the real world if they base it upon a political diatribe from Philip Alston.