Yesterday, I appeared before the Welsh Affairs Select Committee to criticise the performance of the Welsh Labour Government. Within minutes, the First Minister, Mark Drakeford, had resigned. I’ll take that as a win.
For as much as one must acknowledge a life devoted to public service, I can only applaud the decision of the First Minister to step aside. Whether pushed out by Starmer in another purge of the left or not, there will only be a devoted few who will miss him. There is no metric on which Mark Drakeford was a success during his tenure in charge.
Under Labour in Wales, public services have been failing for decades. That’s despite the UK Treasury offering Welsh Ministers a generous funding settlement. Known as the Barnett Formula, Wales receives £1.20 for every pound of public spending in England.
On education, Welsh children have lagged behind their counter parts in England for years. Standards of reading, writing and maths have been consistently weaker and most recently dipped to their lowest ever level. It’s scarily ironic that one of the front runners to replace Professor Drakeford is the man in charge of Welsh education.
Welsh healthcare has been on life support since long before Covid. North Wales’s health board has been in special measures for eight long years with no signs of improvement. In the life of the Welsh Parliament — which has been run by the Labour Party for all of its 24 years — NHS targets have been missed consistently. The First Minister has said himself that ours is an "older, sicker and poorer" population; one in 4 people who live in Wales are on a waiting list.
More widely, Wales under Welsh Labour has become the graveyard of prosperity. Alienated by the daily gridlock on the M4 after Transport Minister and Drakeford disciple Lee Waters banned all road building in Wales, the business community finds Wales to be a hostile environment with business rates higher than England and an off-putting tourism tax set to be introduced next year. The statistics make for grim reading: in 2022, the UK economy grew by 4 per cent. In Wales that figure was 1.9 per cent.
Drakeford’s finger prints are all over Wales’s state of managed decline
It’s important to remember that Drakeford may only have led the Welsh Government for five years but he is the thread which runs through these decades of failure. Way back in 2000, he served as the Special Adviser to Rhodri Morgan, Wales’s second First Minister. When he replaced Morgan as the Assembly Member for Cardiff West in 2011, he was quickly appointed as Health minister and later Finance Minister before assuming the top job in 2018.
Drakeford’s finger prints are all over Wales’s state of managed decline. He is the architect of packing the Welsh Parliament with yet more politicians at a cost of £100million. He is bailing out an airport with public money while simultaneously declaring a "climate emergency." It was his idea to trial a universal minimum income —paying care leavers £1600 a month for two years, for nothing in return. And most notably, he is the arch-proponent behind the Wales-wide 20 mph zone — slowing down an arthritic Welsh economy even further.
Where I can give Professor Drakeford credit is for his mastery of political deflection. He is allergic to responsibility for the problems his governments have created. He is adamant that the Conservative government in Westminster is responsible for his failings. His answer is always more money — more UK taxpayer funding to mask his grotesque leadership mistakes. His is a socialism which burns hot; his hostility towards those who disagree with him is real as recent exchanges in the Welsh Parliament have shown.
With a general election looming next year, Drakeford’s popularity has been bleeding out. It was the platform given to him by the Covid pandemic which did for him in the end; elevating him to such a height that ordinary voters in Wales finally noticed he was running the country into the ground.
There are many within Welsh Labour who feel Drakeford, the tee-totaller, quickly became drunk on his own power — choosing to spend his final year in office ramming through his personal policy objectives, no matter the political cost.
Anyone prepared to put themselves through the washing-machine of elected politics deserves respect. But it’s fair to say that Mark Drakeford relinquishing his chokehold on Wales is Christmas come early.
