00:00Rachel Reeves' budget last week was not a positive one. She said herself that tough
00:06decisions had to be made, and she didn't want to have to give a budget in the form
00:10of the ones she did. In terms of Welsh issues, she said that they included the biggest ever
00:16real-terms increase in funding, but some Senedd members are sceptical, and wanted to see more
00:21from the UK government.
00:22And so Wales' day-to-day spending settlement is less generous than that of Scotland and
00:27Northern Ireland. There was complete silence on HS2 consequentials, with Wales' comparability
00:33factor for transport shrinking from 80.9% in 2015 to 33.5% in 2024, and calls for the
00:44devolution of the Crown Estate were ignored again. Why are we consigned to further austerity,
00:52and why did the First Minister fail her first test to fight for what is right for Wales?
00:58I'll tell you what, we fought and we won. We won £25 million for our communities, our
01:05core communities, that these guys wouldn't even ask for. And so we are very pleased with
01:12that, and the fact that we're going to get the highest uplift that we've had since devolution
01:18began, £1.7 billion, that is going to help to rebuild our public services.
01:24Specific funding for assuring safety of old coal tips was a positive, but Deleth Jewell
01:29of Plaid Cymru thinks that the scars are still there from what the coal tips represent.
01:35These coal tips stand as reminders of how Wales was exploited, how we were left with
01:40the rubbish after our wealth was taken from us. For as long as those tips exist, the
01:47shadow of that betrayal will hang over our valleys. We can't afford delays or half-measures
01:53because the risk of history repeating itself is just too awful to contemplate.
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