How Wales became the testbed for Labour’s worst ideas

‘A Welsh Labour government is the living proof of what Labour looks like in power… a blueprint for what Labour could do across the United Kingdom.’ So said Keir Starmer speaking to Welsh Labour delegates back in the spring of 2022 when he was still in opposition. Now that he’s prime minister, and has just unveiled his first King’s Speech, we should probably start to ask how things are working out in Starmer’s model nation.

Not good, is the short answer. The government is in crisis. Yesterday, Vaughan Gething was forced to resign as Welsh first minister and Welsh Labour leader, having spent just four months in office. After he won a tight leadership race back in March, it emerged that he had received a £200,000 donation from David Neal, a recycling tycoon who was given a suspended prison sentence for dumping waste in 2013. Fishier still, in 2023, Neal’s firm received £400,000 from the Welsh-government owned Development Bank of Wales. And the minister overseeing the bank at the time? That was none other than Vaughan Gething.

Gething tried his best to simply ignore the scandal and hope it would go away. Matters came to a head last month when he lost a vote of no confidence in the Labour-dominated Senedd, just 77 days after he was sworn in as first minister. But he refused to step down. It took the resignation of four high-ranking ministers this week to finally force him out. Even now he still denies his ‘integrity’ has been compromised. His allies have since taken to the airwaves to paint him as a victim of a political hit-job and possibly of racism, too.

Gething’s arrogant dismissal of not only a major scandal, but even of the will of the Welsh parliament, is not an aberration. Since the dawn of devolution, Labour has run Wales like a fiefdom. It has governed with little regard for the wishes and needs of the Welsh people. Instead it has become a testing ground for some of Labour’s worst ideas.

Take the devolved regime’s obsession with racial identity politics. Its ‘Anti-racist Wales Action Plan’ aims to make Wales an ‘anti-racist’ country by 2030. To achieve this, government-funded programmes are pushing public institutions to challenge ‘the paradigm of whiteness’. Libraries are urged to promote ethnic-minority authors. Museums and galleries are expected to ‘decolonise’ their collections and push ‘the right historical narrative’ – that is, one that promotes the woke worldview. A new election law was recently passed that imposes a duty on the Senedd and local governments to promote ‘diversity’ in their ranks – this includes by providing financial support to non-white election candidates. Even democracy, it seems, is being corrupted in the name of racial identity politics.

Much like the devolved administration in Scotland, the Welsh government is also a fervent supporter of gender ideology. Welsh schools are expected to ‘affirm’ children when they say they are trans, and to allow children to change their gender without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The Welsh government promotes trans ideology to kids in sex-education classes and has even funded Drag Queen Story Hour sessions in Cardiff’s libraries. It seems Welsh Labour has learned nothing from the Cass Review, which highlighted the dangers of socially transitioning children. Nor has it learned anything from Scotland, where attempts to introduce gender self-identification helped to bring down Nicola Sturgeon. Wales’s own ‘LGBTQ+ Action Plan’ similarly envisages making it easier for people to change their legally registered gender.

The Welsh government’s environmental agenda also reveals its distance from the public. Last year, then-first minister Mark Drakeford scrapped all major road-building projects, citing their alleged environmental impact and the need to reach Net Zero by 2050. Green campaigners celebrated the move as ‘world-leading and brave’, but the hit on ordinary Welsh citizens has been huge. Many of the paused road-projects were due to be built in rural communities poorly served by public transport. Scrapping them has impacted everything from everyday commutes to access to public services.

Adding insult to injury, Welsh Labour also introduced a nationwide 20mph speed-limit a few months later, to promote road safety and reduce emissions. While the Senedd announced this week that this will be scrapped in September, admitting that ‘errors were made’, the message sent by Labour’s war on the car was clear: green ideology will always come ahead of the needs of the public.

All of these indulgences might have been a tiny bit more excusable if Welsh Labour were otherwise doing a decent job of running the country. But it isn’t. In just about every area it is responsible for, the Welsh government is failing. NHS services are on the brink of collapse. Education standards are falling. The economy is barely functioning, leaving around a third of children in poverty. It is hard not to conclude that Labour is far more committed to the fashionable ideologies of woke and environmentalism than it is to delivering for voters.

Perhaps the dire state of Welsh politics and public services explains why Starmer has been less bullish about Welsh Labour recently. Last year, the serial flip-flopper refused to echo his earlier comments about Wales being a ‘blueprint’ for Britain. However, he did say there was much that the Welsh government was doing to be ‘proud of’. And he must surely have had its wokism in mind.

Indeed, today’s King’s Speech reveals Starmer’s identitarian priorities for his first year in government. Labour’s draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill will put DEI practices on steroids. Its proposed ban on so-called conversion practices will criminalise parents and therapists who fail to affirm trans identities. The Great British Energy Bill confirms that meeting Net Zero targets will be prioritised over the nation’s need for cheap and reliable energy. None of this is a radical departure from the Welsh Labour playbook.

Still, we can’t say that Keir didn’t try to warn us.

Thomas Osborne is an editorial assistant at spiked.