Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Our motion today seeks to ensure that we in Wales have the power to set bands for income tax as well as rates. Now, it sounds like a fairly dry and technical debate, but actually it goes really to some pretty fundamental questions—two fundamental questions that every nation needs to answer through its democratic process. The first is: what should the size of the state be, i.e. what proportion of GDP should be alloted to public expenditure? And the second is how progressive the tax system we use to fund that public expenditure should be. And the question for us in this debate is where those powers should lie. Are we content for those decisions to be made in Westminster, or should we take them for ourselves here in Wales?

Now, clearly, as a party that has as its central goal Wales becoming an independent nation, we clearly want those powers here and want those decisions made by the democratically elected representatives of the people of Wales. But, we would argue that progressives who support the principle of Welsh democratic self-government, even in the context of a continuing UK, should support the devolution of income tax bands, and I hope, in the course of my remarks, Dirprwy Lywydd, to outline why.