Quote Originally Posted by Feedback View Post
Wales has a population of 3m, England has a population of 55m. Why do you think things should be equal?
Equal as in sequential spending, England is clearly going to have the lion share as it's bigger as that is basic numbers, I meant as (E.g) if England pays 100 Billion pounds on HS2, Wales should be given the 5 billion that it rightly deserves and not have the project labelled a England and Wales project when not 1 metre of it is in Wales and it's been projected to damage the Welsh economy by 100s of millions of pounds.

given England (London) is paying for furlough, you can understand them wanting a say in when and where it is put nto place. Furthermore, the reason Wales needed earlier furlough was the disastrous start to the pandemic we had due to Drakeford and some of his policies.
I'm not aware of there being a money tree in London that they generously give Wales a slice of every year, I was under the impression that there was millions of Welsh people paying taxes every day (in one form or another) that they should rightly be able to call on when people's livelihoods are at risk.

Wales may have had those resources but they did not have the manpower or the capital to exploit them. The labour came from the midlands and Ireland, the capital from Scotland and Yorkshire.
Australia seems able to get people to provide manpower half way across the world and hundreds of miles in the middle of the driest areas of the country (and the world) to work the mines, I'm sure the trek up to the valleys wasn't too difficult for people. In addition to this London doesn't happen to magically work up enough man power to run all the offices in London, people move for employment, it's not a new thing.

As for renewable energy, we aren't going to create a sustainable economy from this alone. Wales currently has a fiscal deficit of £15bn per annum, and if we taxed all economic activity at 40% of GDP in the way the UK does, we would need to increase our GDP by £37.5bn just to cover existing public spending. Our current GDP is £70bn so we'd have to increase economic activity by over 50% overnight.
Wales is already a net exporter of renewable energy with extremely little investment or effort, with the move to electric cars alone this is going to have to come from somewhere. Also a strong economy isn't centred on 1 industry alone, it is only an example of 1 strong pillar.

Wales also has around 1 in 4 workers in the public sector compared to 1 in 5 for the UK. If we have the same amount of funding then around 75k public sector jobs will be lost as we won't have the money to pay for them. That's 5% of the workforce. If we don't want to lose these jobs then we have to increase taxation, on one of the already poorest regions. Inward investment would dry up and would simply locate over the border.
Wales has a higher GDP than a lot of European countries e.g Portugal. A lot of companies announced financial results from their HQs regardless of where the money is generated, unsurprisingly these are all in London so that severely hides the financial potential.

Plaid only care about making Wales Welsh speaking, they really don't care about much else.
This is clearly untrue and misleading, the fact they want free at point social care for everyone shows this so try not to be as narrow minded.