We totally disagree. We urge you to read the report by Melin Drafod, which was drafted by members of the Labour Party, as well as members of Plaid Cymru and people of no party, and came to the conclusion that there is no fiscal impediment to Wales actually becoming an independent nation, and that there are huge advantages in terms of the kind of fair and prosperous society that we want to see. But that is not what we're debating today, Llywydd. 

Currently, our position is this: the choice we face is whether to use the powers that we do have, or simply accept the financial envelope essentially passed to us from Westminster. The problem with the latter course is that, to all intents and purposes, we face either the worst-case scenario—austerity mark 2 under the current Conservative administration—or, at best, with a change of Government, a flatlining of public expenditure. Coming after a decade and more of austerity, when our public services are crying out for investment, Sir Keir Starmer has said, hasn't he, recently, that, apart from the admittedly ambitious capital commitments in terms of investment in the green economy, there will be no new money—not my words, his words—and that people need to think of Labour's agenda as that of a decade, because there will be no substantial additional investment in the first five years. That's a more conservative pitch even than New Labour in 1997, which promised to stick to the Tory spending plans for the first two years. Essentially, it's five years of no additional substantial money.

Labour and the Conservatives at Westminster are closer than they admit on the main fiscal challenge that we face; they just involve different kinds of wishful thinking. The Tories pretend that it's possible to cut taxes while maintaining the 'quality' of public services—I'm putting that in inverted commas. Labour says it can improve public services without spending or taxing more. Neither party is prepared to tell the difficult truth that even with reform—necessary reform—and innovation in our public services, the health and care required by a rapidly ageing population requires investment. We've had a social care system chronically underfunded, and it's been in crisis for a generation. We've managed somehow with a gradually deteriorating healthcare system up until recently. The NHS was fragile and getting worse—winter crises becoming the norm, the rise in life expectancy stalling, avoidable deaths rising, health inequalities worsening. The NHS at its core, though struggling, still was largely able to take the strain, largely because of the heroic efforts of the workforce. But the combination of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, plus 12 years of austerity, means that the entire health and care system now is buckling, and unless we do something radical, it is going to collapse. That's the stark truth.

That's the deep truth at the heart of the current pay dispute, which isn't just about pay, or even mostly about pay, if you speak to the people on the picket lines; it's about a healthcare system that is brittle and a workforce in health and care that is exhausted and is at breaking point. Twelve years of austerity have meant declining real wages for the workforce and rising illness for the patients, and now it's the NHS itself that is chronically sick. With that rapidly ageing and ailing population, with a decade of underinvestment in technology, and now ballooning waiting lists, and a workforce that feels desperately undervalued, we have created our own crisis. It was there to be seen, wasn't it? We all know this. It was there starkly in the pandemic in the lack of capacity in the NHS, the shortage of beds, the shortage of equipment, the shortage of workers that led us to scrambling to make up for these deficiencies, that surely contributed to the higher death rates that we saw here than many of our European neighbours.

Difficult as it is, we believe now is the time, Minister, to be honest with the people. Money alone, we know, is not the answer, but without it, there is no way out of this crisis. The people that will end up paying the highest price will be precisely those on the lowest incomes—it is they that are always most dependent on the quality of our public services. Look at all the evidence the Welsh Government actually produces in terms of health inequalities. Cuts in health and care affect those on lower incomes more than anyone else; they can't escape their dependency on public service, they can't go private. They will pay if we do not act now. They will pay not in money, but with shorter lives and with more painful lives. That is the stark reality, and we must invest for them.