It's a very courageous man who seeks to defend the current economic policy of the United Kingdom Government. I notice that the business Secretary on the Today programme this morning didn't even rise to the challenge. In that contribution, Joel James described a 'cold, hard reality', and cold and hard is how it feels to be at the beck and call of UK economic policy at the moment. I'm not sure there are many people in Wales who feel that we are seeing the success of neoliberalism at the moment.

And in making that argument, of course, what he also does is to misunderstand fundamentally the nature of the Welsh economy for too many people and too many businesses. One of the great advantages of a co-operative approach to business and to economic organisation, of course, is a business that is rooted in a community, that is rooted in its place, that is rooted in seeking to deliver economic benefit for people in that community and not to extract wealth from that community. Those of us who grew up in the south Wales Valleys know all about the extraction of wealth, and we know all about what was left: grinding poverty and hopelessness was left, whilst the coal owners enjoyed a life of undreamt luxury and benefits from the labour of those people. 

And let me say this, co-operatives offer us an alternative economic model that has the potential to root an economy in the creation of wealth for the first time for decades. My parents were born under a co-operative approach to healthcare. The Tredegar Medical Aid Society, the forerunner of the health service, was a co-operative. It was created by the workers of Tredegar in order to deliver healthcare when that was not provided by the state. And I believe that the Welsh Government—and this is what I'd look for in the Minister's response—has an opportunity here, within the settlement, to actually create co-operatives that can have a transformative impact, not only on the economy of Wales but on the communities of Wales as well. 

Take, for example, what we're seeking to do in terms of transport. We've had a conversation this afternoon about public transport. We know there are opportunities for people to organise transport collectives in order to deliver the sort of public transport that we all want to see. We had conversations last week about energy policy. We know that there are opportunities for people to create energy co-operatives in different communities, to ensure that we have renewables able to match our ambitions both for climate policy and for social policy and to deliver the sort of energy revolution that we want to see. But I would like to see the Government go further as well. I can see that I'm not the only former fisheries Minister in this Chamber, and one of the things that I felt that the Government could look at, which we never had an opportunity to do in the past, was, for example, to ensure a collectivisation of quotas, to ensure that the fishing industry owned the quotas that they were able to deliver.