MORNING SERIAL
AS we went into May, five weeks after Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland went into lockdown together, Mr Drakeford was still keen, saying “a four nations approach works best for Wales” and that the four governments should “begin to lift lockdown through a set of common measures implemented to a common timetable”.
Clearly, at least publicly, both sides wanted to work together to overcome the virus in the United Kingdom. Yet despite this, the next three months would see sniping, public disagreements, a UK Government minister actively lobbying against his Welsh counterparts, a significant divergence in lockdown policy and the highest office holders in the respective administrations not speaking for two months. Yet the line still coming out of Downing Street in particular was that the UK had never been more united.
What happened and went wrong? Was the period of March to July a period of unparalleled (the word ‘unprecedented’ has been used enough for one year) co-operation between the UK nations or was it more like a dysfunctional marriage, only staying together for appearances and passive aggressively commenting on the fact that the other came home late/forgot to tell them their policy on facemasks? Actually, it was both. Relations between Westminster and Cardiff Bay were, like so much of the Covid crisis, entirely predictable – it was never going to go smoothly. To begin with there is the UK’s entirely haphazard constitutional and devolution settlement.
This will be covered in far greater detail in the next chapter ‘The State of the UK’ but suffice to say that the current arrangements were so disjointed that even if both administrations had been ideologically aligned it would have been hard to maintain constantly good relations.
Lockdown Wales by Will Hayward £9.99 www.serenbooks.com/ productdisplay/lockdown-wales ISBN 9781781726013
CONTINUES TOMORROW