I'm always grateful to Mike for his contributions to this. The worst mistake—I made many mistakes, but the worst mistake—I made as a Minister was to challenge Mike on local government financing and the intricacies of the council tax. The pain I suffered then, nearly a decade ago, stays with me every day of my life, and if I can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, Mike comes back into my dreams—or my nightmares—and reminds me of my failures. And I'm grateful to you for that, Mike. 

But, let me say this: perhaps the difference in approach that you and I take is that you think Wales is a big country with big organisations; I think Wales is a small country, and I think Wales has issues of small country governance. And that's entirely different, and I take a different view on those matters. One of the failures, if you like, of governance in Wales over the last 20 years is that we've never created a coherence in governance in Wales, and one of the reasons we've never done that is that all of us know that we've created too many organisations, too many structures, too many processes, too many committees, too many commissions but none of us are prepared to ask the difficult questions and to face up to that.

As a Minister, I asked a very senior Member of Plaid Cymru would they support the reorganisation of local government. Without taking a breath, that person said, 'Yes, absolutely, unequivocally, but you need to carve out Anglesey and you need to carve out Ceredigion.' I asked the same question of a very senior Member of the Conservative Party, 'Would you support the reorganisation of local government?' 'Yes, unequivocally, no issue at all, but you'd have to carve out Monmouthshire.' They didn't mention Aberconwy. And the Labour Government at the time, with one exception, was wholly in favour of the reorganisation of local government, and I often reflect on that. However, what I believe we need to do, and this is where I think there's a connection and I'm trying to reach out to find this connection with Mike, is that we need to create coherence in the governance of Wales, because we spend all of our time arguing about what comes up and down the M4, but we don't create coherence within the country. And for somebody like me, who wants to distribute greater powers outside of this Chamber, and outside of Cardiff, that means having the structures that can actually use and have the capacity to make the best use of those additional powers.

So, if we're serious about empowering communities up and down Wales, we have to have the structures and the means for funding those—structures that actually work for the people who live in those communities. And I don't believe we've done that. And I believe that all of us, wherever we sit in the Chamber—. I notice Jane Dodds is here, so I won't mention the embarrassment of my arguments with the Liberal Democrats on local government reorganisation where there was absolute agreement, but a wish to do it on a ward-by-ward basis. So, we would have 800 different conversations about wards that would sit in different authorities. We need to be serious about how we do that, and that means that, together, we need a coherent and an intelligent and a far-sighted and a less selfish debate.