Last month, Mark Drakeford announced his intention to step down as First Minister of Wales. This column looked at how he had combined indisputable political success (Labour remains Wales’ dominant party) with a deeply unimpressive record in government. The big question was this:
“Day to day, it is much more congenial to be a “steady hand on the tiller”, even if this is a terrible quality in the captain of a ship going in the wrong direction. It tends to be only when the (political) consequences of the accumulating failure start to bite that there is any pressure to change course, and Wales does not seem to be there yet. If you’ve managed to maintain a “distinctive, winning brand” without any of that work, why do it?
“So why would any of Drakeford’s potential successors change course?”
Well, we now have the date at which Wales will get its next first minister: March 16. And as we mournfully predicted in December, there’s thus far little evidence that the upcoming leadership contest will feature any sort of reckoning with Labour’s record at Cardiff Bay.
For starters, so far the only two contenders to succeed Drakeford are both serving ministers in his government: Vaughan Gething, the economy minister, and Jeremy Miles, the education minister. Nominations will officially close on January 29, when constituency Labour parties and affiliates nominations are in.
Both Eluned Morgan (health) and Hannah Blythyn (deputy minister for social partnership), the only women who had to date been tipped to stand, have both ruled themselves out. Wales Online reports that Morgan, who is backing Gething, admits that “there is very little between the two contenders” – hardly inspiring stuff.
(Blythyn, meanwhile, was the only potential contender from North Wales. The path remains open for the Conservatives to take up the cause of a North Wales Assembly!)
Perhaps conscious of this unhappy pattern for a self-consciously progressive party, Miles has committed to appointing a government “where at least half of all ministers are women” as one of his five campaign pledges.
The other four exhibit a truly woeful lack of ambition. The only one even vaguely resembling an actual policy commitment is a plan review the decision to impose a uniform 20mph speed limit across Wales. Beyond that, there’s these:
All of these are about process: two focus on setting up new bodies, one is literally just a pledge of more talk. Not a single one involves a commitment for improved outcomes, despite the ongoing problems with the Welsh NHS and the recent publication of the principality’s terrible results in the international PISA rankings on school performance.
In fact, given that the PISA scores only came out last month, the fact that education doesn’t feature in the five key pledges of the current education minister is at once mind-boggling and, on the base political level, unsurprising. Nothing to see here!
Meanwhile Gething, described by the Guardian as “Labour’s resilient optimist”, doesn’t seem to have much to say on schools either. He’s been busy this week defending the Welsh Government’s plans to hike council tax. According to Wales Online, Labour is considering “higher charges for university, dentistry and care for the elderly”;
Elsewhere this week, it reports on a vacant factory. That wouldn’t normally be political news… except “the Welsh Government bought the site for £4.75m and spent another £7m fitting it out.” This is part of a bigger failure: plans for a £325m Circuit of Wales racetrack nearby seem to have been abandoned, despite Cardiff Bay stumping up a £7.35m loan to the company developing the proposal.
All in all, it makes sense that Gething might be as shy about talking matters economic as Miles of matters educational. But it paints a bleak picture of Wales’ near future – and is a damning result for over 25 years of devolved government in Cardiff.
Probably a good thing for both candidates, then, that polling suggests about half of voters have never heard of either.