Welsh Labour will fight Senedd election on pandemic record
WELSH Labour will fight the Senedd election on what it sees as its record of handling the pandemic effectively, Mark Drakeford has confirmed.
The First Minister made the commitment during an online speech to his party’s virtual spring conference.
Mr Drakeford said: “This election comes at a point when the coronavirus crisis is far from over.
“The government elected will have to go on making deeply challenging decisions which make the difference to our lives and our livelihoods.
“The team of Welsh Labour Ministers I lead is the only team with the experience to bring this awful period in our history to an end.
“The only team with the determination and the ambition to build something fairer and stronger in its place.
“I see our future built through the very practical socialism that has helped us through this crisis.
“A grounded set of values weaved into the very fabric of Wales. Into our history, our geography and our landscape.”
Mr Drakeford said the “practical socialism” which created the National Health Service had, in the last five years alone, allowed the Welsh Labour government to keep 10 significant promises:
■ reduce the time for new treatments from 90 days to 13;
■ delivered, ahead of time, the most generous offer of childcare anywhere in the UK;
■ made sure that members of the older generation can keep £50,000 of their hard earned savings when they go into residential care;
■ abolish the right to buy to save our council houses for those in greatest need;
■ repealed oppressive anti-trade union legislation;
■ extended the smoking ban to school, hospital and children’s playgrounds;
■ created the Development Bank of Wales;
■ exempted care leavers in Wales from the payment of council tax;
■ opened the Grange University Hospital, on budget and ahead of time; and
■ guaranteed free school meals during the holidays right through to Easter 2022.
He told party members: “That’s only a quick top ten of more than 250 promises made and kept by Labour this Senedd term.
“That’s why, when we go into this year’s election, Welsh Labour will once again be the most forward-looking party in the United Kingdom: a party tested in the fire of experience; a party with a plan that listens and learns from the evidence; a party ready to build the outward looking, successful and fair Wales we all want to see; a party ready to move Wales forward.”
As we reported yesterday, Mr Drakeford also pledged to campaign for “home rule” for Wales within the UK, with an extension of devolved powers and a new UK based on equality and respect between all four of its constituent nations.
Responding to Mr Drakeford’s speech, Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies said: “We are in the grip of a pandemic and Labour’s priorities are all wrong.
“The First Minister is a man without a plan and at a time when families, workers and businesses are crying out for a roadmap out of lockdown, his priority is pandering to the separatists and undermining Britain.
“Labour’s sole focus should be on protecting people’s jobs and rebuilding the Welsh economy but as we have seen so many times over the past 20 years all they will do is take Wales backwards.”