I'm not speaking this afternoon to be an apologist for the UK Government. However, I do take issue with Plaid's motion this afternoon and the stance of their puppet masters in the Welsh Government. Wales will not be £1 billion worse off in unreplaced funding over the next three years, nor has the UK Government undermined the Welsh Government's ability to strategically plan spending for the benefit of Wales and its communities. This blatant Welsh nationalist propaganda has to be treated with the contempt it deserves. The double accounting, fanciful figures and the revisionist history that has been used to come up with Wales's imaginary losses—it would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous. Its only purpose is to undermine the United Kingdom and further a nationalist agenda of dragging a so-called independent Wales kicking and screaming back into the European Union.

Plaid and, for some unknown reason, the Labour Party want to take us back to the halcyon days of EU membership, when the handouts were large and the gravy train was at full throttle. But, in their rush to paint a rose-tinted epitaph to the past, they fail to mention all the times that they themselves hit out at the useless bureaucratic EU funding schemes—schemes that were designed to bring Wales out of poverty, yet utterly failed to do anything other than create more bureaucrats and a few vanity projects. Objective 1 funding was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve Wales's economic prosperity—