Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. Well, 70 years ago, 1952 did not begin well in Wales. On 10 January, an Aer Lingus flight going from Dublin to London crashed in Snowdonia, killing its 22 passengers and all three crew. Less than a month later, King George VI was dead, and what the Prime Minister of the time, Winston Churchill, called 'a new Elizabethan age' had begun. In the intertwining of those two lives—a Prime Minister towards the end of his working life and a sovereign at the start of hers—we see a remarkable thread connecting our lives today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, right back through the whole of the twentieth century to the final quarter of the nineteenth century. By the time Prime Minister Churchill became the first of 14 Prime Ministers who have now met weekly with the Queen, he could look back to escaping from a prisoner of war camp during the Boer war in the reign of Queen Victoria. He was a member of the great reforming Liberal Government of 1906 when King Edward VII was on the throne. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer for a whole parliamentary term when George V was the monarch. He was the leader of the King's party during the brief reign of King Edward VIII, and Prime Minister to George VI, and now a second Queen Elizabeth. In that year, in 1952, he presided over the abolition of identity cards introduced during the second world war, the introduction of prescription charges—5p for every item, the ending of tea rationing, and the first performance of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap.

Now, it would have been a brave person who could look ahead with any certainty to the 70 years of continuity and change that were to follow, because the pace of change over those 70 years has quite certainly been enormous. Here in Wales, heavy industry has largely given way to financial and other services. The United Kingdom itself is very different to that of 1952. It's no longer a centralised unitary state; constitutional reforms have fostered a more plural society, where power is dispersed to other Parliaments in the four nations of the United Kingdom. Movement to and from the Commonwealth, the European Union and beyond has fashioned a more diverse and multicultural people.