How Wales got left in the slow lane

In the week that a new first minister of Wales was announced, attention is turning to the state in which Labour’s outgoing Mark Drakeford has left the country.

Motorists in Wales often feel like they’re going nowhere, very slowly. And they certainly know who to blame. The five-year tenure of Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford, whose successor Vaughan Gething was confirmed this week, was bookended by anti-car policies.

One of the first decisions the former youth worker and sociology lecturer made was to cancel the M4 relief road designed to free up horrendous congestion around Newport, despite planning inspectors saying the case in favour of a new six-lane highway was “compelling”. One of his last was the introduction of a much-derided 20mph speed limit in residential areas.

Many feel the difficulty in getting anywhere on Welsh roads has become a metaphor for a country that has struggled to shift out of first gear during Drakeford’s tenure (and received the Wooden Spoon in this year’s Six Nations Championship). His own net approval rating plunged by 11 percentage points soon after the introduction of the 20mph speed limit. The Conservative shadow first minister Andrew RT Davies said it “crystallised in people’s minds how much they dislike this and other policies of Drakeford”.

It’s not even clear whether the new rule has had the desired effect. Stuart Walker, a driving consultant at SWT Training, in Wrexham, says: “In my 30-year career as an instructor, I have never seen the roads so dangerous. The speed limit is inappropriate in many areas.

There is road rage, aggression, tailgating and overtaking because people are so frustrated.”

And yet Drakeford, a lifelong socialist and Jeremy Corbyn supporter, enjoyed evident political success – increasing Labour’s control of the devolved Welsh parliament, or

Senedd, in 2021. Standing down at a time of his own choosing is a rare riposte to the truism that all political careers end in failure.

But it is a long time since his approval ratings peaked – during the Covid pandemic, when a calm manner and obvious command of detail struck a stark contrast to Boris Johnson’s eccentric behaviour at the other end of the M4. “It’s fair to say, people warmed to him much more in the pandemic,” says Davies. “He became the Covid first minister and people felt he was a safe hand at the tiller.”

Yet when Tories in Westminster today say Labour would have gone further on lockdown during the pandemic it is partly because the

Welsh Government did. This included limiting outdoor exercise to once a day, with a maximum fine of £1,920, double that in England; a two-week “firebreak” in October 2020; and banning supermarkets from selling “non-essential” items.

Drakeford was nothing if not a contradictory figure, at various times described as the most loved and most hated man in Wales. A thoughtful and avuncular character (the unkind might add “dull”), he could at times let intellectual superiority get the better of him, becoming dismissive of criticism and scornful of legitimate scrutiny. More recently he veered towards dogmatism, appearing to impose unpopular policies from on high for a sceptical public’s own good. His anti-business, anti-farming, anti-tourism agenda has stymied investment his country so clearly needs.

But then, the Welsh Government is a fairly contradictory executive. Though Labour runs a minority government in partnership with Plaid Cymru, Wales increasingly gives the impression of being a one-party state. Labour has been in power continuously since devolution just over 25 years ago, with the Conservatives unable to escape the

Drakeford was variously described as the most loved and most hated man in Wales

The question is whether Vaughan Gething represents continuity or a clean break

long shadow of Margaret Thatcher and the miners’ strikes and Plaid perceived as being the party of Welsh speakers (estimated to be less than 30 per cent of the population).

Few question Drakeford’s good intentions. During his final speech to the Senedd earlier this week, he fought back tears when mentioning his wife Clare, who died suddenly in January last year. Last August, his son

Jonathan, who is now known as Jay Humphries, was sent back to prison for breaching a sex offender order. He was previously jailed for rape in 2018.

“The last 12 months have been the hardest and the saddest of my life,” said Drakeford.

However, those looking for clear-cut policy success during the past five years will be hard-pushed to find it. Opponents of devolution claim that as soon as local politicians are given an inch they’ll instantly start demanding a mile, taking credit for the good and blaming Westminster for the bad. Drakeford certainly operated in that tradition.

He recently endorsed the recommendations of an official commission, which suggested greater Welsh control over justice and policing, rail services, and Welsh broadcaster S4C. However, in an interview with the Financial Times he described himself as not being an “expansionist on fiscal devolution”, arguing that being part of a bigger UK was “a great engine for redistribution”. It sounded a lot like Boris Johnson’s own policy vis-a-vis cake.

Wales lags behind the rest of the UK on a whole range of metrics. This sorry situation long predates Drakeford’s tenure and is a hangover from the decline of heavy industry in the 1970s, a dearth of decent infrastructure and a lack of 20th-century skills. But little has improved in the past five years while much has gone backwards.

The Welsh economy has shrunk by 1 per cent since 2018, while England’s has grown by 2 per cent. Gross value per head in Wales – a measurement of how much money is generated through the production of goods and provision of services – comes in at under three-quarters the UK average. And, while poor productivity is a UK-wide malaise, Wales nevertheless contrives to bring up the rear behind most other regions.

The county borough of Blaenau Gwent, dotted by the old pits of South East Wales, suffers from the highest rate of economic inactivity caused by long-term illness in the whole UK. This blight is inextricably linked to long NHS waiting times (4.5 per cent of Welsh patients have to twiddle their thumbs for more than two years before receiving treatment. That compares with 0.01 per cent of English patients).

But it is on education that Drakeford’s record is arguably most damning. In the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) since the Covid pandemic, most countries suffered a fall but Wales’s slide was particularly shocking. The decline in maths equated to the loss of an entire year of study, according to the OECD, which runs the tests.

On reading and science, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland all achieved results that were above the OECD average. Wales alone within the UK failed to make the grade. Andreas Schleicher, who runs the PISA test at the OECD, said: “It’s not just that Wales is the lowest performing region in the UK but it’s also the one with the steepest decline.” He said he hoped the results would give Welsh policy makers “food for thought about what to do differently”.

It did. The Welsh Government is rolling out a new curriculum and looking at reforms to the school year. Nevertheless, more young people living in rural Wales want to leave the country than are planning to stay, according to a recent study conducted by Aberystwyth University. A majority of respondents said their prospects for both education and work would be improved by heading east across Offa’s Dyke.

Meanwhile, the Welsh Government appears hell-bent on actively discouraging people from travelling to Wales in the other direction. Following the long-term decline of heavy industry, manufacturing and agriculture, Wales is increasingly reliant on the revenues generated from tourism. Yet, confoundingly, Wales has introduced a council tax surcharge on holiday homes and is planning to bring in a new tourism levy by 2026.

Perhaps Drakeford’s most insidious legacy is that he is leaving Wales a nation increasingly divided between the densely populated urban conurbations in the south and the wide-open rural areas that constitute the vast majority of the country.

Almost all the members of his cabinet represent urban seats and the Senedd has long given the impression of being deaf to the concerns of farmers whose anger is reaching boiling point.

His government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme has brought matters to a head. Designed to replace preBrexit European Union subsidies and address the “climate and nature emergency”, the scheme will be phased in from next year and will require farmers to plant trees on 10 per cent of their land and turn a further 10 per cent over to nature.

Farmers are distraught at the idea of sacrificing a fifth of their acreage in order to qualify for subsidies. EU plans for European farmers to set aside between 4 per cent and 7 per cent of their land triggered Continent-wide protests earlier this year, with farmers blocking city centres and spraying police with manure. Welsh farmers, in contrast, left 5,500 wellington boots on the steps of the Senedd to symbolise the roughly one in nine agricultural jobs that, according to its own impact assessment, are set to be lost if the Welsh Government continues with its policies.

A recent poll showed that only

3 per cent of Welsh farmers – already struggling with high costs and pricing pressure from supermarkets – trust the Government. “I’ve been farming my whole life, and never known anger and upset and confusion like it,” says Steve Evans, a dairy farmer from Pembrokeshire who attended the Cardiff protests. “We have to hope Vaughan Gething will grasp the nettle and take time to understand our anguish.”

So bitter is the feeling that

Drakeford has had to cancel a string of engagements on his farewell tour because of security concerns.

Such fears erupted after a trip last month to the northern town of Rhyl, the most deprived in Wales and second most crime-ridden in the UK, where he was opening a new wing to a sixthform college, only to be met by around 200 farmers jeering and booing, and honking the horns of their tractors as his diesel motorcade swept past.

Police detained one protester who stepped in front of the car, while a second was led away after a minor scuffle with an official.

Asked about the incident back in Cardiff, the First Minister managed to fan the flames yet further by claiming farmers only had themselves to blame for the Sustainable Farming Scheme because they “voted to leave the European Union”. Surveys show farmers actually voted in similar proportions to the rest of the Welsh population in the referendum. Certainly they don’t seem likely to vote Labour – just 3 per cent of Welsh farmers now “trust” the Government, according to one recent poll.

Critics of the plan also point out that it will mean Wales either has to eat far less food or import far more. Jeremy Clarkson recently took to social media to support Welsh farmers: “I’m trying to see the Welsh farming policy from the Government’s point of view. And I just can’t. It’s completely daft… I look at [Drakeford] and plainly he’s a man who likes a pie. And you don’t get those from trees.”

The question now being asked is whether Gething represents continuity from Drakeford or a clean break from the recent past. “The lack of anything new in the recent leadership contest shows that nothing much will change,” says Andrew RT Davies.

“I’ve studied the manifesto and with regards to health, education and the economy, it is the same story of continuing to fail to live up to aspirations. [Gething] will just shuffle the same old people around and continue to manage the decline.”

Aled Jones, an eighth-generation farmer who is president of the National Farmers’ Union of Wales, is more hopeful – but not much. “I hope [Drakeford’s legacy] isn’t that he destroyed the rural community of Wales, but that is now down to Vaughan Gething. I believe his father was a vet, and that his mother was a chicken farmer from Zambia, so I sincerely hope that he understands our work and rethinks this [Sustainable Farming] Scheme.”

One thing’s for sure, after 25 years of devolution and Labour control, Wales is badly in need of a leader that can steer the country out of the slow lane.