Socialist Party Wales Socialism In Wales
By Dave Reid
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Eluned Morgan has taken over as leader of Welsh Labour, the third First Minister of Wales in five months. She was nominated unopposed and will be crowned First Minister on August 6th.
But the more the personnel at the top of Welsh government changes the more things stay the same. Under Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething Welsh Labour has presided over a steady decline in public services in Wales even steeper than in Tory England. NHS waiting lists have grown and grown, teachers in schools are under greater pressure than ever before and council services are a shadow of what they were when Labour first took over in the Welsh Assembly government in 1999.
Each of the last three First Ministers had previously been health minister overseeing the steady decline in the NHS. Drakeford re-organised hospitals, closing A&Es allegedly to concentrate resources on primary care, but with the implementation of further cuts new GPs were not trained to replace retiring GPs and primary care is crumbling too. Gething continued the policy through the Covid pandemic when the Welsh NHS had been so run down to be woefully unprepared.
Under Morgan the decline in NHS services accelerated, so that the Welsh NHS is in an even greater mess than it was in Tory England. The week before she became Welsh Labour leader it was announced that in a population of just over three million over 600,000 people languish on NHS waiting lists – over one fifth of the population – and 155,000 are waiting longer than a year.
Morgan will attempt to calm the turmoil in Welsh Labour. The coup against Gething following his dismissal of Hannah Blythyn as a minister created different factions of the 30 Labour Members of the Senedd (MS). These are largely personal factions, there is no discernible political difference between the warring groups, they all support the failed strategy of the government, but they reflect the tension at the blind alley the Welsh government has found itself in.
Labour in Wales has wielded the Tory axe to public spending. The government budget is mainly determined by the level of spending determined by the UK government, which under the Tories has been cut in real terms by austerity for the last 14 years. In terms of the social needs of Wales, the government is underfunded even relative to England. Rather than fighting these cuts the Welsh government has tailored its budget to the cuts the UK Tories have made and carried through the cuts, acting as the axemen and axewomen to the NHS and other public services. Earlier reforms carried out under previous Labour governments in Wales have been undermined by the cuts carried out since 2010.
So now Welsh Labour has nowhere to go, unable to carry out any significant reforms to differentiate itself from the UK government. As the agent of austerity in Wales, it is more unpopular than any time since the beginning of devolution in 1999. The decision to create 36 extra MSs in the next parliament at the same time that the NHS cannot recruit enough doctors and nurses has only deepened its unpopularity.
Labour’s share of the vote dropped to just 34% in Wales in the general election and that was with the lowest turnout ever, especially in the most working-class constituencies. In what was a rock-solid bastion for Labour when it partially represented working people, less than 20% of the electorate voted for this version this year. Welsh Labour’s only hope is that the Starmer government will open the purse strings to try and salvage NHS and other services, but chancellor Reeves has made it clear that that is very unlikely.
Morgan will hope to salvage something from the wreckage of the past few months, but most workers in Wales would be wide open to the prospect of change. The vote for Reform (17%) in the general election is a warning to the trade union movement – we need a new party of the working class, to give a positive alternative to the failed strategy of Welsh Labour.
Socialist Party Wales will be working with the active layers of the trade union movement in the branches to propose workers’ lists for the Senedd elections in 2026.
