The Minister will know there's no shortage of candidates for increased spending where there is a real need, whether it's the health service or reducing fuel poverty or whatever. I think most Welsh taxpayers will scratch their heads, therefore, when they discover that £1.2 million is to be spent on organisations like the Welsh Centre for International Affairs—two thirds of whose income is spent on the salaries of its staff. Of the part of its income that is not spent on staff salaries, it supports organisations like Hub Cymru Africa, which receives £640,000 a year. It provides no accounts of its own, so we've no idea how many people it employs or what they earn, and it spends the money it doesn't spend on staff salaries mostly on non-Welsh items or other entities, who themselves mainly spend the money on staff salaries, like the sub-Sahara advisory panel, whose income is £68,000 a year, and its staff costs are greater at £74,000.

The Welsh Government has no responsibility for foreign aid, foreign development or foreign policy, so why are we indulging in this taxpayer-funded merry-go-round of virtue signalling for middle-class politicians in Cardiff Bay when there are real needs outside? As the blogger Jac o' the North has perhaps more pithily described it:

'A country with homeless on the streets, where kids go to school hungry, where people die waiting for ambulances, apparently has millions of pounds to spare so that dilettante English activists and useless Welsh politicians can feel better about themselves.'