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Welsh Affairs

The point is that we have continued to invest to reduce poverty and improve communities. That investment did not exist until this party came into government, and it will not exist if it were to cease to be in government. Yes, too many children still live in poverty. We can all quote figures, but what does poverty mean for children? It means that they do not have regular meals or decent clothes, and that they do not live in decent accommodation. It means that children do not have the right equipment for school, or the inclination to use it. Poverty also means that children, as they go into adulthood, expect to fail even before they get started. One aspect of poverty—the poverty of ambition—is not often reported in the newspapers. The problem is not easy to quantify but, if we do not tackle it, we will not progress and improve our society. All too often, I have heard people say, "Going to university or starting a business? Not for the likes of us." I well remember visiting a primary school in my constituency. The headmaster told me, "Do you know, Don, when I came to the village, nobody expected anything from me? No one had gone to university, or had the ambition to do so. They believed that university was not for the likes of them." He told me, "I said to a lady last week, 'If you work with me, your lad is going to university.' She said, 'You're off your b….. head!'" The headmaster added that the lad in question was inquisitive, intelligent and articulate. He said, "If they worked with me as a family, he would go to comprehensive school and be on his way to university." Poverty of ambition must be eradicated. The task that we face is to equip people of all ages with the skills that they need, and the self-confidence to say, "Yes, university is for me. Yes, I will start and invest in and build up my own business." That task will not be easy. It calls on us to have a change of mindset and be bold and radical, but it also means that we have to provide training throughout life. It is absolutely critical to our economic future that we invest in training and upskilling our people. In the US, 80 per cent. of people in work have been back in a training situation since leaving school. The figure in Germany and Japan is 56 per cent., but it is only 30 per cent. here. That is the measure of how far we still have to travel to improve training and opportunities for our people. For us to compete, we need to give our people the skills in IT and engineering that will attract investment. We must also get a head start in the coming green revolution and all the new technologies that will accompany it. We need to give our people in Wales the skills that they do not yet have in order to create the jobs that we do not yet have. I have always felt that the real challenge is not just Welsh, but global. We are part of a world where powerful new economies such as China and the Asian nations will challenge and then overtake Europe and the US. I welcome that challenge, as should we all. We cannot bury our heads in the sand: it is absolutely vital that we are ready, willing and able to meet that challenge head-on. There is no future for Wales—or, for that matter, the UK—if we try to compete for low-skilled, low-paid jobs. They will go where money and wages are cheapest. It is as simple as that. Our real competitive advantage will be our knowledge base, and our capacity for innovation. In simple terms, we have to be smarter, quicker and more adaptable than our competitors. The world is undergoing a new industrial revolution—the knowledge revolution, fuelled by the pace of technological change. Wales must be at the forefront of that change. The only way that countries such as Wales will be able to compete is by retraining and upskilling our people. We have to keep ahead with new innovative ideas, and we must exploit those ideas fully in order to improve our skills. That also means opening up the excellent research facilities at our universities, so that small and large businesses can take advantage of them. In my maiden speech, I said that my constituents and, indeed, people throughout Wales wanted work, not benefits. They wanted opportunities to enrich their lives through education, and no one will leave education today and have a job for life. Everyone will have to retrain and reskill throughout their working lives, and no one should sit at home surviving on benefits if they can work. Indeed, if we are to achieve the goal of ensuring that people throughout Wales have jobs, not benefits, we must face up to the challenge of the knowledge revolution. Even though we live in a global economy, there are those who believe that we should embrace a narrow, nationalist and separatist agenda. They claim that Wales is so different from England that we would have a better future if we were independent but in Europe. They used to cite Ireland and Iceland, but people do not do that anymore; indeed, all of us have constituents who have lost their life savings in the collapsed Icelandic banking system. All the fantasies about an independent Wales simply do not stack up, because the world economic downturn has proved that the arguments for independence are intellectually, politically and economically bankrupt, and we should have nothing whatever to do with them. There is no logic in Wales leaving a British union of 60 million people to join a European Union of 350 million.