Drakeford hits out at 13 years of ‘erosion’ under Tory governments
FIRST Minister Mark Drakeford has said “13 years of erosion” under a Conservative government in Westminster created poor social conditions that formed the backdrop to last Monday’s riot in Ely.
Mr Drakeford represents the Ely area within his Cardiff West constituency as an MS and was working as a youth justice worker in the early 1990s. Meeting community leaders in Ely on Friday morning, he admitted that the Labour-led Welsh Government and Cardiff council had questions to answer about how they were supporting the area.
Mr Drakeford told the Guardian: “First of all, and foremost, of course, for those young men who lost their lives and for their families and their friends. It’s hard to imagine what they will be experiencing.
“But also I feel desperately sad for that wider community of Ely, which is full of absolutely decent hardworking people who ask nothing more than to go about their lives peacefully. And for them the reputational damage that is done to the area by these sorts of events it’s just a huge weight on their shoulders.”
He added, however, that the rioters needed to be accountable.
“There are people whose own behaviours were absolutely indefensible,” he said.
“They must be held accountable for it and there may have been some service failures on the night - we will learn about that when the independent investigation is concluded.”
Asked if his government should have been doing more for Ely, he said: “I think all layers of government and all aspects of government are right to look at themselves in the mirror and ask exactly that question. So we will certainly be doing that as a Welsh Government.”
The First Minister worked as a probation officer, youth justice worker, and Barnardo’s project leader in the Ely and Caerau areas before he entered politics. He was working in the area when the Ely bread riots of 1991 took place – unrest said to have started with a dispute between two shopkeepers – and believes he’s seen it before.
He added: “I know it just takes years to recover from these sorts of events. Fundamentally it seems to me the difficulties of 1991 happened 13 years into a Conservative government and here we are, by chance as much as anything else, 13 years into a Conservative government again. What is common between them is that it’s 13 years of the erosion, the systematic erosion, of the things that sustain community life.
“Many people in Ely will rely on social security benefits for their weekly income. They have been systematically eroded over the last 13 years.
“People have less and less to live on and they see their bills going up every day. The struggle is not theoretical for those people.
“And the public services that are there to try to help them through all of that have had 13 years of budgets reducing every single year as well.
“So I don’t think you can understand what happened in Ely without understanding that sort of fundamental background cause.”