There can be few more difficult jobs at the moment in politics than being a finance Minister, in any Government in the world, so I do think that Rebecca Evans deserves our understanding in that regard. Because she, like every finance Minister, is facing complex, difficult challenges, trade-offs, which are really at the heart of any budget-setting process, made more difficult of course at the current time because of the global context. We face the horrendous trinity, don't we, of the war in Ukraine and its impact, the energy crisis, and, of course, the aftermath of the pandemic. And that comes, in the UK and in the Welsh context, of course, on the back of the lost decade, and more, of austerity. And as a result of that, our society, our public services, every part of our nation, really, are dealing with a situation where we have the opposite of resilience—we have fragility, we have brittleness. There's a sense in which things are breaking apart—systems, services, et cetera—because of the sustained and cumulative pressure on people who work in those services and on the people who rely on them.

And of course, there is a global context there as well, but politicians can make difficult situations better by the choices that they make, or they can make difficult situations even worse, and, unfortunately, we've had the latter time after time after time from the Conservative Government—most graphically of all recently in the mini-budget from hell, which drove an already parlous situation in terms of public finances almost through the floor, or literally through the floor at one point. There is the legacy that we have and that we have to deal with, and the crisis that we're facing, in many ways, is a crisis of Westminster's making—it is a Westminster crisis. I think that is absolutely true, and we should hold them to account for that.

We are to a great extent, of course, boxed in, aren't we, in this financial and political straightjacket that we are as a devolved institution within this very unequal state. It's almost ironically called the 'United Kingdom' because it's certainly not united or equal in any political or economic sense. And we face an inability—constraints—in terms of our sphere of autonomy in the financial realm as well: the ability to borrow flexibly. We don't even have the same powers as Scotland, do we, in terms of the ability to set bands and thresholds in terms of the income tax powers. So, there are many, many reasons why we should hold Westminster to account for the terrible situation that we find ourselves in, but the fact that we are limited in our power doesn't mean that we are completely powerless, of course. We do now have this institution—the Senedd, as our elected parliament—and we have a Government of our own, and we have to be as creative and agile as we can be within the constraints I've referred to.