In 2010 David Cameron squeezed into office partly on the back of claims such as "we'll cut taxes, not the NHS".

It's now 2024 and it's hard to say that public services are better than they were 14 years ago across the UK. They're not. In Wales there has been way too much blaming the other party for our failings going on - Labour saying it's not our fault, it's the funding we get from Westminster, while the Tories say it's nothing to do with what we give you to spend, it's how you spend it. Such arguments go around this board like a loop at times.

However, 14 years of Conservative rule over the UK has seen our public services get worse and decimated. Local authorities are even going bankrupt.

I have a simple question - why do we seem hell bent on continually trying to cut the amount of tax we pay yet keep expecting good public services? 14 years of austerity and cuts, supposedly to eliminate wastage and not affect services, have had a negative effect. Every day I read someone moaning about the state of roads, waiting times in the NHS and so on, not just in Wales but elsewhere in the UK, but everyone seems to still want tax cuts. One example I have from social media comes from a local authority that reduced their black bins collection. A friend of mine working in refuse thought he'd offer black bin collections more regularly for a fixed amount. He had a lot of takers. I asked the question of those people if they would be prepared to pay that amount extra in council tax for bins to be collected in the same way and none of them would. I found that quite remarkable that they wouldn't pay the council a bit more for bins to be collected more regularly, but would happily fork out for someone to do it privately.

Go back 100 years and more and workers would happily pay a small amount in their wages that allowed libraries, workmens halls etc to be built and maintained, so are we now as a society one that isn't prepared to pay for good public services?