I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Jane Dodds for giving us the opportunity once again to debate a basic income in this Senedd, and I'm pleased to be able to co-submit today's motion. As some of the Members will recall from the debate I led calling for Wales to lead the way and announce a trial for universal basic income here in Wales, one of the key attractions to a basic income for me is that ability to help residents manage—that safety net Jane Dodds alluded to. But it's not just a safety net there; it's the ability to allow residents to thrive, to be that springboard in a period of almost unprecedented change.

Colleagues, globally, we do face challenges that cannot be ignored—huge shifts in the way our economies and our societies will work. One of these in particular is the subject of today's debate. And that's the need to restructure our economies to meet the challenge of the climate crisis. Accept it or not, Members—and I hope Members in this Chamber, every single one of us, do accept it—the future of humanity is at risk. If we are to turn our societies carbon neutral, this will not be easy, but I am sure that it does bring great opportunity as well as challenges. Communities like mine, back in Alyn and Deeside, are built around manufacturing, and they should be at the absolute forefront of building the next generation of carbon-neutral products, the pillars of these on energy generation, sustainable transport and the retrofitting of businesses and homes.

I was proud to lead a debate calling for Wales to become the first nation in the world to disinvest in pension funds from fossil fuels, and I spoke then about the way these funds could drive investment in the types of new technologies that we need. Today's motion from Jane Dodds is about how we manage that transition. As a trained research and development engineer, which is something quite unusual for elected politics, far from a political adviser, I have the ability to recognise this huge change in our society, and the changes that we face, and the challenges that we face because of automation, digitalisation and artificial intelligence. Those jobs that we consider high skilled will be done by robots, will be done by machines. But this change is happening whether we like it or not, and whether we resist it or not. And we have to manage that transition.

One of my roles as an engineer was to manage change, and we must learn from examples where Governments have managed change catastrophically badly. And in my community of Alyn and Deeside, we've seen that first-hand. We still feel the pain of that first-hand. We were thrown to the wolves when deindustrialisation happened in the 1980s. It was an unmanaged set of changes by a Thatcherite ideology. It damaged lives and it damaged life chances. As I say, we still feel the pain in Alyn and Deeside. At the last election, the UK Tories claimed that they recognised this, and they claimed and talked about levelling up. But that just simply hasn't happened. And now—we see it, don't we—they are fast abandoning that ship and these promises, and they're even talking about a return to the Thatcherite nightmare that is associated with Alyn and Deeside—the single biggest mass redundancy in Europe. 

Acting Presiding Officer, it will fall to more bold forces to manage this change properly, to manage and explore the bold policy solutions like a universal basic income. Our Conservative Members shout, and they have shouted it before, that it can't be done. But didn't they claim that when our beloved NHS was first mooted and then delivered by Welsh Labour? So, colleagues, I do commend this motion to the Senedd today. I do hope colleagues—