2. Statement by the First Minister: Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:47 pm on 29 April 2020.

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Photo of Carwyn Jones Carwyn Jones Labour 2:47, 29 April 2020

I apologise for the technical issue that prevented me from joining when I should have done. That's been resolved now, as you can see. First Minister, do you share my despair sometimes that there are still some people who think that, for Wales, we should always compare ourselves with England? Some 20 years ago, I saw correspondence from the then chief medical officer warning of the dangers of the link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy—BSE—and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—CJD—and the response from her counterpart in the UK Government was basically, 'You are in Wales; know your place'—words to that effect. How sad it is that what is born of an inferiority complex—that somehow England must be better—is still with us. We could argue, of course, that what England has done is actually diverge from Wales and not the other way around.

Could I bring you on to testing? From what I understand, then, that you're saying is that testing is of little clinical value unless people are tested on a daily basis. So, simply offering somebody a test because they're in a vulnerable group is of no use at all unless the same person is tested on a daily basis in order to see if they have the virus, if they are asymptomatic when the first test takes place.

The second point is this: there will come a time when all this is over and we hope, of course, that that time will be sooner rather than later, but for those of us who remember the banking crash in 2008, where bankers took people's hard-earned savings and took them off to, effectively, the equivalent of a banking casino and blew them all, they were bailed out by people working in the public sector—those people who are now working very hard on not much pay; those people who have given all their time—many, many hours, every single day—to save lives and look after people. They were the people through pay freezes and austerity who were made to pay for what other people had done. Can you give me an assurance, First Minister, that when this is over, the bill for the money that is being borrowed by the UK Government will not rest disproportionately on the shoulders of public sector workers who are working so hard, but instead, we will look at highly paid footballers; we will look at large businesses, many of whom—some do—but many of whom do not pay their fair share of tax, and we will take seriously the issue of tax avoidance in order to make sure that those who have the broadest shoulders are able to pay in the future and also that those who are giving so much now are not penalised, given the fact that they're saving so many lives?