Welsh Labour’s unpardonable folly

He had reason to cry foul - does the Welsh centre-left?

INFAMY, Infamy. They’ve all got into for me…

Anyone reading any blog or utterance from a centre left Welsh politician in the past few weeks would have imagined this most famous one-liner from 1964’s Carry On Cleo sums up the UK coalition’s dealings with poor old Wales. For some, every announcement is deliberately targeted at the land of our fathers. Have the Tories and their Liberal Democrats partners taken a leaf out of the Noel Murphy school of politics and grabbed Wales by the cajones?

To work out if it’s true that we now face the greatest threat since Edward I took his holidays in North Wales, let’s put ourselves in the position of a neutral jury and weigh up the “anti Welsh” case advanced by the likes of Alun Davies AM.

Exhibit A – the proposed closure of the Passport Office in Newport.  Jurors might understand the anger prompted by losing 300 well-paid government positions.  There was no consultation.  Wales may become something unique in Europe, a country without a passport office. But before we cement the idea that Wales is being singled out, consider the following. The two local MPs had asked questions of previous Labour government ministers about the future of the office, suggesting that closure was probably on the cards before May 6. No decision was probably taken on the office’s future because of the close proximity to the General Election, making it a managerial decision, not anti-Welsh. One passport office was to close and it just happened to be in Wales.

Next is the cancellation of the Metrix Project in the Vale of Glamorgan, a project claimed to bring 5,000 well-paid jobs, at the same time as green-lighting the construction of two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers in Scotland. But look at the details – particularly the letter from the Chair of BAE Systems to David Cameron. It is clear that the decision to go ahead with the carriers had less to do with Scottish political clout and more to do with a contract signed by the previous government. Any incoming government that cancelled the second carrier would have to had honoured the BAE contract.

Serious questions were being asked about the academy’s value for money, questions that would have been asked wherever the project was based. In a defence review where the Harrier is being taken out of service and active RAF bases are being closed in Scotland, the decision not to proceed makes sense. While defence analysts have questioned a number of aspects of the Strategic Defence Review, none has argued that the decision to cancel Metrix scheme is wrong. So why didn’t Welsh politicians persuade the MoD to sign an agreement with Metrix similar to the one signed with BAE systems before May 6?

The rest of the anti-Welsh indictment is based on decisions in the Comprehensive Spending Review. These include policy decisions like the size of the Welsh block, where it is argued that Wales has come off worse than either Scotland or Northern Ireland, S4/C, the decision not to go ahead with the Severn barrage, the exclusion of Wales from the grant for off shore wind development, deferring rail electrification to Swansea, and – worst of all – the failure to reform the Barnett formula.

On the capital issue, Northern Ireland benefits from the agreements reached to deliver the Good Friday Agreement and the decision of the coalition to honour those agreements. Gerry Holtham argues that the differences in revenue are due to Non-Domestic Rates, caused by technical aspects of the Barnett formula. Leading Plaid Cymru members have argued that the cut in capital spending is less under the coalition than it would have been under their One Wales partners. As for the failure to reform Barnett, the obstacle is less an anti-Welsh attitude and more the potential loss of income to Scotland. Given the role played by Scottish politicians in both the coalition and in the Labour opposition, anyone who believes there is the will for Barnett reform is not living in the real world. The best that Wales can expect is a version of Calman after the 2015 Assembly election. No extra money in the short term but the ability to raise more revenue via tax varying powers in the medium term. Again, the anti-Welsh charge just doesn’t stand up.

A jury would definitely appreciate how emotive S4/C is for any Welsh speaker, and those who claim the BBC’s involvement was anti-Welsh point to what they see as a lack of consultation with the Assembly. But how would the Assembly reacted had the DCMS asked it to take over S4/C with reduced funding? And why didn’t the Assembly consider policy alternatives once Alistair Darling made it clear in the autumn of 2009 that the DCMS’ budget would be a hammered by whichever party formed the UK government, as indeed it did in the Comprehensive Spending Review? Guaranteeing increases in S4/C funding in line with inflation was just not a realistic option for any UK politician. DCMS officials also argue that if the Assembly had offered to take over S4/C they would probably have considered it. With no offer forthcoming, they produced – as Glyn Davies, a Welsh politician sympathetic to S4/C, has argued – the best solution in the circumstances.

Despite the sincere and genuine enthusiasm for the Severn Barrage scheme from some Welsh politicians, how much of it was pre-election spin? How far had the previous government committed itself when the project called for a huge investment at a time when both major parties were committed to cutting capital projects? The scheme would probably not have gone ahead wherever it was situated in the UK. Therefore, it is only anti-Welsh because geography has placed the Severn between Wales and England – and reaction to the scheme’s mothballing has been much more muted at the English end of the proposed construction. As for the offshore wind grant, Darling made it obvious when he announced the scheme in March that it was targeted at England.

The final piece of evidence is the failure to announce a start to the electrification of the GWR line to Swansea, a development some politicians – in a phrase that could have come out of the Marx Brothers’ famous film Duck Soup – have described as an “insult to Wales”. How has electrification has become such a political issue when all but a few enthusiasts have shown little interest in the issue in the last 50 years since the technology became available? And what preparatory work has been carried out since the 2009 Labour announcement that the line would be built by 2017? How close was it to the pre-qualification stage in the DfT by May 6, particularly when CrossRail, which will be electrified, is not due to come into operation until 2018?

And why are Welsh politicians making a fuss about a project when the order for diesel 125 replacements has not even been placed?  It will probably still take at least eight years for the new units to come into service. The obvious solution is to announce the purchase of new units for Thameslink, which will then free up electric trains for the GWR to Reading. This could lead to the start of electrification, reaching Reading – and possibly Swindon – by 2015. The start to electrification will please Welsh politicians, who will argue that a government  U-turn came about through their pressure.  More importantly, it will play well with voters in the marginal seats in areas such as Reading where the possibility of 20 minutes less on the commute into London might make a difference to how they would vote in 2015. In fact, the UK Coalition has more to gain from announcing the start of electrification than cancelling the project.

There are clear political reasons for this anti-Welsh argument in the run up to the Assembly election. For some in Labour it is all part of a strategy based on a rerun of the successful 1980s anti-Tory approach which saw thousands turn out to vote for the party in Wales even when it was unsuccessful in the rest of the UK. It is classic negative “dog whistle” politics designed to bring home the thousands of core voters who have deserted the party since 1997. For Plaid, like all nationalist parties, the tactic is part of the old argument of “What have the Romans ever done for us?” All nationalists need an oppressor, and Plaid would have adopted the same arguments if a UK Labour government were introducing the cuts. Will anyone in the UK government take any notice? Doubtful. Any reaction is likely to echo Holtham’s observations on “whinging” made at the end of his lecture on November 2 to the Cardiff Business School.

Member of the British Labour Party will most likely be very uneasy with the thrust of anti-Welsh criticism of the UK coalition policies. Labour Party members should follow the lead of Alan Johnson and Douglas Alexander, one an Englishmen and the other a Scot, who are arguing that policies announced in the last month by the UK coalition are wrong for the whole of the UK.  You don’t see Labour MPs from Yorkshire, who might form the backbone of the next Labour government, arguing that somehow UK Coalition policies are anti-Yorkshire. In 1944, when Nye Bevan wrote his famous little book Why not Trust the Tories?, his intended audience was British and not just Welsh. He knew that those who oppose Tory policies have always been stronger when they work with other British democratic socialists to produce Labour and not nationalist (nor even pseudo-nationalist) solutions. We need to concentrate more on producing credible UK policy alternatives to Tory-Liberal Democrat policies. Leave the anti-Welsh rhetoric to the real nationalists in Plaid.