The devil, the devil, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, the leviathan... For the British right, Welsh Prime Minister Mark Drakeford is the worst of the worst, the unspeakable. And Wales, a laboratory of the new left, a trailer for the film of what the United Kingdom will be like if Labor (as seems likely) wins the next general election.
Wales, poorer than England, a victim of deindustrialisation, with mining valleys abandoned by the hand of God since Thatcher decided to do without coal production and a large part of the population dependent on public subsidies, is considered a country of class worker Nye Bevan, creator of the NHS (British public health) and minister in Clement Atlee's government after defeating Churchill in the 1945 elections, at the end of World War II, was from there. And also Jim Griffiths, another key figure in the development of the welfare state.
In the United Kingdom as a whole, the Conservatives have been in power for thirteen consecutive years and are the alpha party. But in Wales Labor has been the dominant force for a hundred years, the most voted in the general elections, the one that contributes the most deputies to Westminster and - since Tony Blair granted it autonomy along with Scotland in 1998 - the one that has a majority in the Senedd (Cardiff parliament). The transfer of powers has allowed him to qualify the impact of the Tories' policies from Cameron to Sunak.
The newly announced program for the legislature that has just begun has caused the English right to raise their hands and denounce what Daily Telegraph commentator Matthew Lynn has described as a “socialist experiment.”
What has Mark Drakeford done to be so scary and generate such animosity? A wealth tax in the form of a penalty for homes worth more than one million euros, a tourist tax, free meals for children in schools (low in sugar and salt to combat obesity), reform of the electoral law and of the composition of the Senedd with quotas for minorities and the same number of women as men, a four-day work week for civil servants, improvement of the bus network to reach the most remote towns, fight against homelessness, campaign for more people learn Welsh and encourage diversity, rent controls, free childcare for all infants under two years old, limits on the purchase of second homes, creation of a public construction and energy company, zero-cost medicines, presupposition of that everyone accepts the donation of their organs if they do not explicitly provide otherwise... Wales was the first country in the world to approve a Future Generations Act in 2015, which obliges state entities to “take into account the interests” of those who have not yet been born in their decision-making.
But, although many of these things do not seem right to them or they believe that they are unnecessary or too costly, what irritates British conservatives the most is an economic measure and a social one. The economic one is a reevaluation of the council tax, the equivalent of the IBI (real estate tax) with a redistributive criterion, so that those who have better houses pay around one hundred euros more per month, and those who have worse ones see the bill reduced. And a social one, the reduction of the maximum speed limit from thirty to twenty miles per hour (32 kilometers) in all residential areas, something they consider as the maximum expression of the nanny state.
Wales does have something of a nanny state, as it demonstrated during the pandemic, taking advantage of the transfer of powers related to Health to impose the most severe restrictions in the entire United Kingdom, such as the mandatory use of masks (it remained in force two months longer than in England), the prohibition of traveling more than five miles (eight kilometers), or the inclusion of baby clothes in the very long list of products whose sale is no longer allowed in supermarkets.
How does Welsh Labor plan to implement its ambitious program, with a cost of 800 million euros, when it is London that collects income tax and finances the autonomies? Cardiff has asked the Treasury for permission to withdraw funds from its reserve capital and transfer them to the current budget, as well as a change in the distribution of items, sacrificing money from "non-essential" to dedicate it to health, education and transport.
When Britain was in the EU, Wales received substantial funding from Brussels, as one of the least developed regions in Europe. Now there are no euros, only the pounds provided by Westminster, where the Tories promote centralism. Even so, the Welsh voted in favor of Brexit, which is as left-wing as it is right-wing. That experiment didn't go very well.
