Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m pleased to participate in this debate. May I thank the Conservatives for bringing this topic forward today? Given that I have the job of trying to persuade the Conservatives to support our amendment 4, I’m sure I shouldn’t say anything too negative about the Conservatives, but I’m afraid that I do have to start by pointing out the irony that the Conservatives have brought a motion forward criticising the Welsh Government for its failure in creating equality and regional balance in Wales, when the Conservatives’ own record, like the Labour Party, one has to say, at the UK level, is one of having created an unprecedented level of inequality.

In a way, what the Conservatives are saying today is that Wales is unique within the UK in terms of the kind of inequality that exists. But if you look at the inequalities within Britain as compared to many of our European partners, Britain, or the United Kingdom, is far more unequal, economically speaking, than Italy, although Italy is known as a state where inequality is rife, with a traditional difference between the prosperous north and the poorer south. Britain is less equal than Germany, where still, after a quarter of a century or more, there is great inequality between the old east and the west, where the gross domestic product of the east is still only around two thirds of the GDP of the west. But the UK is still not achieving the same levels of equality.

If we look at the reality within the UK, at the sub-regional level, the per capita output is eight times greater in the west of London than in the west of Wales and the Valleys. There is no similar difference anywhere else in the European Union, so, I’m sorry, the Conservatives can’t argue that in some way they are a party that promotes economic equality, because the Conservatives, as a British party, and Labour, as a British party, have failed to secure that kind of equality that I want to see in Wales in the future. I am confident in Wales’s ability of being a nation state that can aim towards that sort of equality that is only a pipe dream at a UK level. The last thing I want to see is Wales in some way becoming a nation where we have inequality within our own nation that would be similar to what exists within the UK more widely. I don't—[Interruption.] Yes, of course.