‘I can’t think of a single decision where knowing what we knew at the time I’d have made it differently’
WALES’ First Minister Mark Drakeford has said a repeat of a full January lockdown is currently unlikely.
Mr Drakeford was speaking ahead of the Christmas period for an interview looking back at a tumultuous year and ahead to 2022.
For that reason this interview is not about the specifics of the lockdown rules that came into force on Boxing Day, and which were still being debated by the Cabinet when this interview was conducted.
But the Cardiff West MS did speak about his approach to the Omicron wave and why the sort of restrictions we saw in January 2021 are currently not being planned.
However, he repeated warnings that January would be tough and that restrictions on the number of people in supermarkets and in queues at the checkouts would be reinforced to help keep cases of Omicron under control in Wales.
Mr Drakeford described the “bleak” moment he knew how dangerous Omicron would be. He said there have been points in the last few weeks where the most strict restrictions for Christmas were being considered.
Can people be optimistic about 2022? There are long NHS waiting lists, school children not knowing if they’re going back to school, inflation, job concerns...
We have to have optimism about the future. Almost all the things you listed are in one way or another connected to the coronavirus experience and we’re going to have a tough start to the new year with the new variant.
The models on the whole show we will have a very sharp rise in cases in January but that the cases will come down rapidly as well and as we push past the impact of the new variant we will be able to get back on our feet across the range of those things.
We will have to go on dealing with the impact on NHS lists and on children’s education well into the future, but Wales remains a place with very significant strength and very significant levels of social solidarity and we have to be optimistic about our collective ability to shape a future beyond coronavirus that, as I’ve said many times, will be stronger, fairer and attends to the other great challenges of our time, including climate change.
What would you write in your diary to recap 2021?
I don’t keep a diary. If I was looking back at 2021 I would have recorded a year that was pretty difficult. From the Easter period onwards, we’ve had a lengthy period where the levels of protections needed has been pretty low and people have been able to go about their daily lives a lot closer to what they were used to.
Had it not been for the new Omicron variant we would have been looking at a pretty smooth passage into Christmas and the New Year. So it’s been a mixed year. The Welsh economy has rebounded from lockdowns at the start of last year remarkably strongly. There are more people in work today than were in work in the month before the pandemic started altogether.
Falling levels of unemployment and unemployment levels below those across the UK. So it’s a year with a shadow of coronavirus over it all but not without better spots as well.
On a personal level, what was the hardest point?
For me personally, I would say the hardest day was just before Christmas last year when we had to close schools a week earlier than we planned. For me, the reason it was the toughest decision was that I know for the many years I worked in Cardiff West that for some of our children, primary school-aged children, the only Christmas they get is in school. If there’s a party, it’s in school, if it’s a Christmas dinner, it’s in school. Some children if they get a present at Christmas, they get it at school.
What about the day you heard of
Omicron?
Of course, that was a very bleak moment because if it hadn’t been for that, we’d had a Cabinet meeting the week before where the advice to us and our own assessment was that we had a pathway through Christmas and into the New Year that was pretty benign, and then a week later we suddenly had to grapple with the fact there was this new and significant threat.
And that was a bleak moment and that’s for everybody because we really had hoped that was beginning to be behind us.
In January last year you couldn’t see anyone or really leave the house. Should people prepare for that again?
Our plan is to reopen the Welsh economy after Christmas, shops reopening, hospitality reopening but where the levels of protections we build in are stronger than they needed to be in recent months.
You’ll be able to go shopping in the supermarket, but the things you remember from earlier in the pandemic, the one-way systems, the limits on numbers so shops don’t get too crowded, proper arrangements at the checkout so people keep two metres apart from one another, those will need to be reinstated to deal with Omicron, but it won’t stop those things from happening.
What’s been the moment of being First Minister this year you’ve most enjoyed?
At the very start of the election campaign, at the beginning of April, at that point we weren’t able to go knocking on people’s doors. Things were getting better but not quite as good as that and I went to Porthcawl with our candidate and you know in a job I do you never know what it’s going to be like. You arrive, you get out of the car and you don’t know how people are feeling or what the reception will be like.
But actually from that very first day I felt there was a sense of people feeling their mood was lifting. It was the first weekend after you could go back to the caravans for the first time in many months, and as I went round Porthcawl I met person after person saying they were glad they lived in Wales and saying they felt they’d been kept safe and were really pleased they could be back walking on the beach being with their grandchildren and all of that.
So if there was one moment in the year where I felt that people had turned a corner and the months ahead were better than the ones behind them, that was it.
I don’t imagine you sit and trawl the comments about yourself, but there are two camps. One is those people who say you’ve done the right thing and protected the country and the others who don’t want restrictions and will come out and criticise you. Does that criticism get to you?
In a way you just can’t let it, can you? We make the decisions we do in Welsh Government not because we’re trying to please or displease people but simply on the basis of the best advice we can, and if we don’t make those decisions then the lives of everyone would be more difficult than they otherwise would be. Of course I meet people who take a different view and they’re completely entitled to do that, but we never make the decisions in the end thinking is this popular or will it be unpopular, it’s ‘will this save people’s lives?’. And I could have chosen some other difficult decisions from the last year, such as when you meet the families of people who have lost loved ones who won’t be with them this Christmas or New Year and those things leave a scar for ever. I have those people in my mind.
Have you any regrets?
What I always say is that when I look back I can’t find a decision where knowing what we knew at the time I would have made a different decision. I can always find decisions where knowing what I know now I would have done things differently.
So yesterday, when we were making really difficult decisions about major sporting events, the Cheltenham Festival was in my mind.
I’ve often been asked if we were too slow back in March 2020 and you will remember the festival went ahead and many, many people fell ill as a result of it, and had we known then what we know now, I think we would have made a different decision.
When I was thinking about the Welsh Grand National and whether it should go ahead, then trying to learn the lessons of things we’ve faced in the past and make better decisions now.