The devil, the demon, Beelzebub, Lucifer, the leviathan... For the British right, Welsh Prime Minister Mark Drakeford is the worst of the worst, the unnameable. And, Wales, a laboratory of the new left, a trailer for the film of what the United Kingdom will be if Labor (as seems likely) wins the next general election.
Wales, poorer than England, a victim of deindustrialisation, with mining valleys abandoned by God since Thatcher decided to do without coal production and a large part of the population dependent on public subsidies, is considered a working class country. From here was Nye Bevan, creator of the NHS (British public health) and a minister in Clement Attlee's government after defeating Churchill in the 1945 election, when the Second World War ended. 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 general elections, the one that brings the most MPs to Westminster and – since Tony Blair granted it autonomy together with Scotland in 1998 – the one that has a majority in the Senedd (Parliament in Cardiff). The transfer of powers has allowed him to nuance the impact of Tory policies from Cameron to Sunak.
The just announced program for the legislature that has just begun has caused the English right to exclaim and denounce what The Daily Telegraph commentator Matthew Lynn has described as a "socialist experiment".
What has Mark Drakeford done to cause so much fear and animosity? A tax on wealth in the form of a penalty on homes worth more than a million euros, a tourist tax, free lunches for children in schools (low in sugar and salt to fight obesity), reform of the electoral law and the composition of the Senedd with quotas for minorities and the same number of women as men, a four-day working week for civil servants, improving the bus network to reach the most remote villages, fighting the homelessness, campaign for more people to learn Welsh and encourage diversity, rent controls, free childcare for all two-year-olds, limits on the purchase of second homes, creation of a public construction and energy company , medicines at zero cost, presupposition that everyone accepts organ donation unless explicitly stated otherwise... Wales was the first country in the world to pass a Future Generations law in 2015, which obliges state bodies to "take into account the interests" of the unborn when it comes to decision-making.
But, even if many of these things do not seem right to them or they believe that they are unnecessary or too expensive, what irritates the British conservatives the most are an economic measure and a social one. The economy is a reassessment of the council tax, the equivalent of the IBI (property tax) with a redistributive criterion, so that those with better houses pay around one hundred euros more each month and those with worse ones see the reduced bill And a social one, the reduction of the speed limit from thirty to twenty miles per hour (32 kilometers) in all residential areas, which they see as the maximum expression of the Nanny State.
Wales does have something of a nanny state, as it demonstrated during the pandemic, when it took advantage of the transfer of Health powers to impose the toughest restrictions in the whole of the United Kingdom, such as the mandatory use of masks (it was in force two months longer than in England), the prohibition to travel more than five miles (eight kilometers) or the inclusion of baby clothes in the very long list of products whose sale was no longer allowed in supermarkets.
How does Welsh Labor plan to apply the ambitious program, with a cost of 800 million euros, when it is London that collects income tax and finances the autonomy? 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, so that money from "non-essential" money would be sacrificed to dedicate it to health , education and transport.
When Great Britain was in the European Union, Wales received substantial funds from Brussels, as one of the least developed regions in Europe. Now there are no Euros, only pounds provided by Westminster, where the Tories encourage centralism. Despite this, the Welsh voted for Brexit, which is both left-wing and right-wing. The experiment did not go very well.
