‘The tap end is getting hotter – and Welsh Labour might get burned’

The compelling TV series, Succession, is meant to be a satire. But its biting observations of how power and money are wielded are bang-on-the-nose.

In a wide-ranging interview with the New Statesman last week its star, Brian Cox, mused on the injustices in the way the UK works. 

“Wales gets the tap end of the bath every time”, the actor sagely observed.

It’s not the first time a colourful metaphor has been used to describe Welsh vulnerability in the power-stakes.

Neil Kinnock in the constitutional debates of the 1970s liked to talk about ‘sore thumb devolution’. He opposed an Assembly for Wales because he worried the extra support we needed would make us stick out like a sore thumb, and risk an ‘English backlash’. 

He didn’t think Welsh interests were best served by separating them from those of other parts of the UK. It is a view that continues to resonate at the ‘Welsh table’ in the Members’ tearoom in the House of Commons.

‘The Red Welsh Way’

The current Welsh Secretary, Jo Stevens, is an inheritor of that tradition. Brought up some ten miles from the English border in north-east Wales she has little sympathy for treating Wales differently to England. Much like Kinnock, and Nye Bevan before him, she sees these debates as a distraction from the issues facing working people in all parts of Britain.

That is not the view of the overwhelming majority of Labour politicians in the Senedd. 

In fact the Leader of Welsh Labour, Eluned Morgan, recently set out in a landmark speech a ‘Red Welsh Way’. “I’m interested in making sure I stand up for Wales on every occasion, and now and again that means that I will take a separate path from the UK Labour Party” she said in asserting her distinct mandate ‘as the leader of the nation’. 

These differences reflect different traditions in the political thinking of the Labour Party, indeed in socialism more widely. But less than a year out from the most difficult election the party has faced in 26 years of devolved power, they are not just of theoretical importance.

Two issues in particular bring these conceptual ideas into sharp focus – trains and windmills.

‘The bottom line is that Wales continues to be underfunded’

Rail infrastructure isn’t devolved to Wales (though it is to Scotland). Around 12% of all the UK’s rail network is in Wales, yet there is no proportional share of investment set aside. In fact we haven’t even been getting the 5% share of money spent on rail in England that the population-based ‘Barnett Formula’ assumes for most policy areas. For years we’d had to settle for around 1% of all rail investment in the UK. Rail expert Mark Barry reckons “conservatively, that the current constitutional arrangements have/will cost Wales at circa £2Bn”.

It is easy to get lost in the weeds of how rail funding works, the bottom line is that Wales has been – and continues to be – significantly underfunded.  This was something Labour MPs recognised when we were in opposition but clearly not something that the Treasury has been persuaded to put right.

The recent spending review allocated £445 million of funding for Welsh rail improvements over ten years. £34 billion of enhancements for England were announced at the same time. 

Treasury Chief Secretary Darren Jones unhelpfully told an opposition MP who pointed out the inequity “You might want to be a little more grateful in future”.

Not great.

Renewable energy is another glaring inequity. The seabed off the Welsh coast is the property of The Crown. But unlike in Scotland, where the Crown Estate’s revenues are devolved, the substantial fees from hosting giant offshore wind farms projects go direct to the UK Treasury.

The Welsh Labour Government has consistently argued Wales should be allowed to leverage our rich renewable energy resources, much like how the City of London and southeast of England capitalise on their financial and political strengths. 

There aren’t many economic levers Wales can pull to overcome our plight as one the UK’s poorest regions – at the wrong end of every league table. One revealing indicator is the number of people eligible to pay the additional rate of Income Tax  – the top rate paid by those earning more than £125,000. Across the UK it’s 3% of earners. In Wales it is 0.4%. Just 6,000 people in a country of 3 million are additional rate taxpayers.

We are poor.

‘Wales gets the tap end of the bath every time’

This is why First Minister Eluned Morgan has described the devolution of the Crown Estate as “an important cause for our nation”. In an overwrought section of her ‘Red Welsh Way’ speech Eluned Morgan channelled Braveheart to cry defiantly, “We saw them take our coal. We saw them take our water. We will not let them take our wind, not this time, not on my watch.”

The UK party has dismissed this out of hand. And Jo Stevens defiantly said last week that her opposition to devolving the Crown Estate has been “vindicated” by a round of private investment in the Celtic Sea off Pembrokeshire. It’s a hollow victory.

Given that Eluned Morgan has set her stall on demonstrating that two Labour Government’s working together in office will deliver for Wales, it is hard to understand why UK Ministers are standing in the way of the Welsh Labour Leader delivering one of the party’s Senedd Programme for Government commitments. And in such a defiant fashion.

Even Brian Cox can see it – Wales gets the tap end of the bath every time.

But the thing about the tap end is that the water is hotter. And in ten months time, the temperature is set to rise.

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‘Lessons of the death of Scottish Labour have not been learned’

The last YouGov MRP poll put Labour in third place in next May’s Senedd elections, squeezed by a nationalist pincer movement of Plaid Cymru and Reform UK. The number-crunchers at Cardiff University think that if Welsh Labour’s numbers drop by another 2% the party could see our Senedd Group shrink from 30 to around 12 (and that’s in a Welsh Parliament that will expand at the next election from 60 to 96). A century of Labour majority support in Wales would be over.

There are those amongst the Welsh Labour MPs who take a short-term view that this would have some advantages for the next General Election campaign. Instead of the frustration of having to contend on the doorstep with the record of a Labour-run Senedd they’d be free to run against an Opposition-led Government. A seductive, but myopic, logic. 

Put aside the fact that in the case of trains and windmills Wales is clearly being treated unfairly, the polling data should signal to orthodox Labour unionists that they are on the wrong side of history.

Plaid Cymru now has the support of the bulk of younger Welsh people. 46% of 16-24 year old voters say they’ll vote Plaid, and another 21% would back the Greens. They also hold a clear lead among 25-49 year olds, with 36% of the vote – outpolling Labour on 22%.

A year ago I warned that Welsh Labour faced its Scottish Labour moment. Since then the polls have got (a lot) worse because of decisions made in Westminster (not Cardiff).

The lessons of ‘the strange death of Labour Scotland’ have not been learned. The indifference to the reasonable claims of a devolved government, the control of the party machinery by London HQ, and the disdain of Westminster MPs towards their devolved counterparts (much on display in a recent Politico article) were features then and now.

Scottish Labour paid the price for it in 2007. The SNP seized on its chance to form a minority Government and used it to build a generation of dominance. Plaid Cymru aim to do the same. 

If that comes to pass, boasts of ‘vindication’ at beating away popular demands by Welsh Labour will be pyrrhic. 

And that’s the problem of being at the tap end of the bath, you can pull the plug out if you’re not careful.

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