Next week Wales will have a new First Minister when the result of the ballot to select Mark Drakeford’s successor as leader of Welsh Labour is announced. Before I come to the two candidates, Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles, I think it’s important to assess the record of Mr Drakeford.

In December 2018 he became the 4th First Minister of Wales (following Alun Michael, Rhodri Morgan and Carwyn Jones). His five years in the job have been extremely demanding because, unlike his predecessors, he has had to deal with a destructive, chaotic, extremist UK government grimly hostile to the very idea of Wales. Labour were in power in Westminster during the Alun Michael and Rhodri Morgan eras, while Carwyn Jones only had to deal with the comparatively benign Tory/Lib Dem coalition government of David Cameron followed by the gone AWOL pre- and post-Brexit Tory governments of first Cameron and then Theresa May, both fully preoccupied with the internecine warfare that ended with the Tory Party being taken over by the far-right. By comparison, poor Mark Drakeford pulled out the short straw: he has had the impossible task of building civilised working relations with the three worst Prime Minister’s in the entire history of the UK. Johnson, Truss and Sunak are quite different characters but what they have in common is contempt for the law, contempt for international norms, contempt for negotiation, contempt for alternative perspectives, contempt for opposition, contempt for decency, contempt for fairness, contempt for the truth, contempt for democracy, contempt for plurality, contempt for ordinary people and contempt for Wales. There is no politician on Earth who could deal with these terrible people.

14 years of Tory rule have brought catastrophe and immense suffering to the UK. They have wreaked havoc on the NHS, the judicial system, international agreements, media impartiality, scientific expertise, local government, public services, schools, cultural institutions, the environment and the foundations of a civilised society. They have presided over 14 years of severe ‘austerity’ that delivered food banks, record levels of poverty, destitution, homelessness and inequality, bankrupt local councils and a shattered public realm. Meanwhile the Tory mismanagement of the economy has led to crisis after crisis and staggeringly bad outcomes: the highest level of national debt in modern times, the lowest level of economic growth for a century, the worst levels of investment of all the major economies, the biggest fall in output and productivity in a century, the biggest fall in average earnings since the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, a post-war high in tax-levels on all but the super-rich, a never-ending recession, a low-wage, deskilled ‘gig’ economy of insecurity, transience and exploitation, and a broken social contract that has created a basket-case UK of ever-widening divisions, from south-east England versus the rest of the UK through to urban versus rural, homeowners versus renters, old versus young, motorists versus greens and so on, to the greatest division of all: the super-rich 1% versus everybody else.

The results of Tory stupidity, malevolence, incompetence and criminality are everywhere one looks: the endless scandals from the Grenfell fire and the Windrush betrayal to the rotten Met Police and the Post Office; the crumbling schools, hospitals and infrastructure; the insane housing market unaffordable to all but the very rich; the profiteering privatised energy market leaving people unable to heat their homes; the closed-down theatres, art galleries, libraries and music venues; the record numbers of people with long term ill-health; the obscene levels of destitution; the collapsed welfare state; the NHS being destroyed; the overwhelmed and dysfunctional immigration system; the rivers, beaches, lakes and seas awash with human excrement and toxic pollutants while the privatised water companies pay out huge bonuses to their millionaire executives and unearned dividends to their fat-cat shareholders; the £300 million and counting so far handed over to the corrupt and murderous Rwandan regime in the hope that asylum seekers can one day be dumped there in breach of international law; and the brazen theft of public money looted from PPE contracts, stuffed into the off-shore accounts of their pals, asset-stripped from bankrupted public bodies or as pin-money for Tory cronies packed into the House of Lords.

And then there’s the host of ghastly characters who fill the modern Tory Party. Quite apart from the unprecedented nine Tories who have been kicked out of parliament in the last three years for various serious offences, there have been countless other examples across these 14 years. Just picking some recent, high-profile figures: people like defence secretary Grant Shapps who created false identities online to promote a dodgy get-rich-quick scheme; or ex-cabinet member Robert Jenrick who unlawfully approved a Tory donor’s development plans when secretary of state for housing in 2020, was convicted for driving a shocking 28mph above the speed limit last year, and unsurprisingly holds the opinion that “the law is our servant not our master”; or just this week science minister Michelle Donelan, a sinister repressor of legitimate debate fond of policing social media for any expression of leftwing ideas, was forced into a humiliating retraction after having recklessly hurled completely false allegations at two distinguished academics on X and then had the gall to get the resulting £15,000 bill for damages paid by her department – and of course Sunak hasn’t sacked her for the online bullying, for the McCarthyite attacks on free speech, for behaving in a manner unworthy of a government minister or for using public funds to pay her legal costs; then there’s ex-PM David ‘call me Dave’ Cameron himself, disgraced by his catastrophic Brexit misjudgements and then further disgraced by the Greensill scandal revelations that exposed his intense lobbying during the pandemic on behalf of a bank (which collapsed soon afterwards) in which he had a personal financial interest – none of which stopped Rishi Sunak appointing him as Foreign Secretary in yet another Tory reshuffle last year, giving the old Etonian a peerage as Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton in the process. On planet Sunak, where leadership consists of jumping on whatever far-right bandwagon the Daily Mail happens to be peddling that day, the introduction of Cameron to his team of oafs, charlatans, scoundrels and scum-bags is presumably intended to bring a touch of much-needed gravitas to the cabinet table – but that could just as well have been achieved with a cardboard cut-out of Peppa Pig…

If just a tiny fraction of the ruination the Tories have heaped on the UK had happened under a Labour government the Tory press and the growing number of Tory TV and radio stations would be shrieking for blood. But the Tory media, controlled neck and crop by billionaire rightwingers, simply don’t report any of it while the supposed protector of impartiality Ofcom, stuffed with Tory placemen, just refuses to acknowledge the naked bias. The Conservative Party is now totally reliant on the Tory mass media to even continue to exist let alone win elections. The Sunak government staggers through each farcical shambles by utilising a disreputable dependence on fear-mongering fascist tropes and dog-whistle politics in the hope of shit-stirring the knee-jerk bigotry, ignorance and sheer nastiness of the ever-shrinking Tory base. Sunak’s family wealth is valued at £530million, meaning he is the richest PM in history, and he is likely to get even richer so long as public sector contracts somehow keep being awarded to Infosys, the company his wife part-owns. It is now explicit Tory policy to “facilitate a bigger Infosys presence in the UK”, meaning this vile unelected slime-ball intends to openly ransack the public purse for his own personal gain before his administration is evicted from office. Little wonder he is delaying the election he must call this year to the last possible moment – after all, there’s plenty more millions he can feed to Tory donors as the deliberately bankrupted local councils across the UK are asset-stripped by big business and plenty more millions he can pour into his own pension pot before he fucks off to the USA. And, given the complete and shameless disregard for any law that stands in their way, is there any sentient citizen who thinks the Tories wouldn’t ‘postpone’ an election indefinitely under some cooked-up pretext like ‘national security’ or ‘mob rule’ if they could get away with it?

This is the context in which Mark Drakeford has tried to function as First Minister of Wales, already handicapped by the inadequate devolved powers which allow English Tories we have never voted for to outrageously control 90% of Welsh affairs. Despite it all he has diligently tried to further Welsh interests and protect the distinctive politics and culture of Wales while pursuing mildly progressive, egalitarian policies that could improve life for the majority of the Welsh people. And, given the circumstances, he has actually done superbly well.

Before he became an Assembly Member he was Rhodri Morgan’s close ally and special advisor; one of the principle architects of the ‘clear red water’ policy that made the Labour administration under Morgan in Wales so much better and more preferable than Blair’s Labour government in Westminster. Some of the more notable examples where Wales diverged from English/British policies in this period include:
●Introduction of a charge for plastic bags
●Paying the real living wage to care workers
●Paying a basic income for care leavers
●Banning smoking indoors in public places
●Ending the sale of Council houses
●Ending prescription charges
●Ending NHS parking charges
●Stopping NHS privatisations
●Stopping the introduction of privately-run ‘Academy’ schools

After his mentor Rhodri Morgan (1939-2017) retired at the 2011 election Mark Drakeford succeeded him as the Cardiff West AM (now MS) and became a leading proponent of Welsh Labour’s ‘soft left’ tradition. As Minister for Health & Social Services in the Carwyn Jones government he steered two more distinctive Welsh measures through the Senedd that illustrated the huge benefits of Wales running its own affairs, the Human Transplantation Act and the Nurse Staffing Levels Act, and then as Secretary for Finance & Local Government he introduced fundamental changes to public procurement rules so that the private sector can no longer cherry-pick all the public contracts via the rip-off private finance initiative (PFI) introduced by Westminster.

Having comfortably defeated Vaughan Gething in the Labour leadership election of 2018, during his time as First Minister he has over and over again shown the leadership, the decency, the intelligence and the humane, civilised values that have been so manifestly lacking in the simultaneous succession of UK Prime Ministers. In this period Wales has had to withstand perpetual hostility from a Tory party of imperialist thugs who treat Wales in exactly the same way Putin’s Russia treats Ukraine – as a country that is their possession, that should not exist in its own right and that must be wiped from the map. On top of this the UK government has delivered blow after blow to the Welsh economy and the Welsh people. The Brexit fiasco, built on lies, xenophobia and a rightwing propaganda onslaught, meant Wales lost the EU structural funds it had been entitled to for over 40 years due to the relentless impoverishment, exploitation and abuse inflicted by centuries of British rule, and then Johnson’s government callously broke its promise to replace the vital lost funds. Meanwhile continuous power-grabs by the Tories undermined the Barnett formula by savagely cutting the Welsh block grant, repeatedly broke the Sewel Convention that supposedly stopped Westminster legislating on devolved matters, and used the ‘levelling-up’ smoke screen to gatecrash Welsh affairs with unwanted and damaging interference.

All this has caused grievous damage necessitating endless mitigating efforts by the Drakeford administration, yet his government has still managed to oversee significant advances, such as:
●Axing the M4 Relief Road scheme through Newport Docks and the Gwent Levels
●Halting inessential new road building
●Nationalisation of Wales’ internal rail services
●Beginning the long-term process of major public transport expansion
●Making sustainability and environmental issues legal obligations in the Future Generations Act
●Introducing free school meals for primary school children
●Minimum pricing for alcohol
●Default 20mph speed-limit in residential areas
●Voting rights for people aged 16 and 17
●The regulation and registration of private landlords
●Local councils given the powers to use planning laws to stop second homes and the flexibility to increase council tax on second homes, empty homes and holiday lets
●Expansion of Welsh language schools and education
●A co-operation agreement with Plaid Cymru designed to prioritise social justice.
In addition, plans for much-needed future reforms have been put in motion, such as expanding the Senedd and making it entirely proportionate; altering the lop-sided structure of the school year; making the protection of wildlife, biodiversity and habitats part of the farming subsidy system; and changing council tax so that there are more bands, revaluation of properties occurs regularly and the wealthy pay a fairer proportion.

As the Tories lose by-election after by-election and as hundreds of Tory MPs resigned to defeat announce they will be standing down before the next election, the Sunak government has become ever more barbarous and nihilistic, adopting a scorched earth approach to ensure a future Labour government inherits a catastrophic mess and lurching even further to the far-right to appease billionaire donors and staunch the loss of voters to UKIP’s new guise, the fascistic rump called ‘Reform UK’. So net zero and green policies are ditched, culture wars are inflamed, any protest or dissent is outlawed as ‘extremism’ and the creed of ‘populism’ is pursued to its barrel-scraping depths. Populism has been defined as “telling people what you think they want to hear” and that is what Sunak and his cronies have been reduced to. This has increasingly involved Wales, somewhere barely ever noticed or mentioned by English Tories hitherto, but now wickedly used in an inept and tawdry way to attack Starmer’s Labour Party and distract attention from Tory failure. Usually the Tories rely on their latest deeply unpleasant Secretary of State for Wales, currently Monmouth MP David Davies, to do the dirty work. He has rewritten the job description of a post that once meant being a sympathetic, pro-Wales voice around the cabinet table so that it now means being an implacable opponent of anything and everything the Senedd does, expressing seething antagonism to the very existence of Wales and jeering and gloating at any example of Welsh problems – making false comparisons, distorting statistics and ignoring the crippling legacy of 500 years of English/British rule in the process. But Davies is such an unimpressive figure he is now often marginalised by Tory central office in London as they launch bigger weapons at Wales. This is what happened during the 20 mph debate where the Senedd online petition system was suddenly swamped with thousands of signatures opposing the change, supposedly from persecuted ‘motorists’ but actually from a co-ordinated flood of signatures created by bots – similar to the way China and Russia interfere in other country’s elections by manipulating social media (it costs about £100 in total to set up numerous ghost email accounts, use AI to harvest masses of data like, for instance, the Welsh postcodes needed to sign a Senedd petition and then saturate the internet with bot votes). Another recent example is Sunak attending a demonstration in Wales by the ‘No Farmers No Food’ campaign, a group of far-right climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists who oppose any measures to alleviate the ecological crisis – this is the same Sunak who rails against so-called ‘extremism’ and criminalises Extinction Rebellion protests for being disruptive, yet blithely panders to these authentic extremists, disruptors and enemies of science, reason and logic in the hope it might scrape together a few votes for the atrocious Tory Party. He gives the impression that there are no depths to which he wouldn’t sink and no principles he wouldn’t abandon if he calculated it might benefit the Conservatives. This is the polar opposite of the courage to do the right thing and the foresight to sometimes risk unpopularity that define true leadership.

That glaring difference between Welsh governance and UK rule was most starkly shown during the pandemic. While Mark Drakeford showed seriousness and leadership, even living in his garden shed to shield his vulnerable wife and mother-in-law during lockdown, and united Wales in the fight against Covid with modest, softly-spoken competence, Boris ‘let the bodies pile high’ Johnson and his minions were brazenly flouting the law partying in Downing Street and his fellow law-breaker, the then chancellor Rishi ‘Dr Death’ Sunak, was killing an estimated 20,000 extra people with his lethal ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme – a crazy and typical lurch for ‘popularity’ among anti-lockdown nutters.

Therefore it can be seen that Mark Drakeford has performed heroically during his years as First Minister. He has been living proof of how infinitely preferable Welsh independence would be to the appalling status quo as an irrelevant and powerless 4.5% of the failed UK state. Drakeford, a self-defined ‘unionist’ who has long opposed Welsh independence, has had the intelligence, the open mind and the wisdom to learn from experience and shift his position by calling for much more devolution and even beginning to tentatively embrace the idea of Welsh independence. He knows that nobody can any more defend the proposition that Wales should forever act as England’s whipping boy and downtrodden, violated colony. His decision to stand down after over five years in the job is understandable: he will be 70 in September and the sudden death in January of his wife Clare after 46 years of marriage has hit him hard. He will remain a Cardiff West MS until the next Senedd election in 2026 and then retreat to a well-deserved quieter life. Diolch yn fawr iawn, Mark, rhydych chi wedi ein gwneud ni’n falch.

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As for who should replace him, since I am neither a member of the Welsh Labour Party nor one of its affiliated trade unions I do not have a vote in the ballot. But I sure have an opinion, as a Welsh citizen not to mention as a constituent of one of the candidates, Cardiff South & Penarth MS Vaughan Gething. Although I have never clapped eyes on Gething in his 13 years as my MS, I have various acquaintances who over the years had interactions with him or worked in his law practice in Cardiff and not one has had a good word to say about him. The Economy Minister in the Senedd, Gething is on Labour’s right wing and is the preferred candidate of Tory tribute act Keir Starmer, the ‘British’ Labour Party and the Trade Union bosses. That alone makes Jeremy Miles infinitely preferable. To repeat the mistake of the inaugural Welsh Assembly when Tony Blair thought he could impose his placeman Alun Michael from London to stop Welsh Labour’s favoured, left-of-centre candidate Rhodri Morgan, would be disgraceful, unnecessary, ridiculous and doomed to fail (Michael lasted just nine months before Wales’ prevailed and Morgan replaced him). If you then consider the shocking revelations that have emerged about Gething during the campaign, then the contest should be a walkover for Miles. Gething has accepted a £200,000 campaign donation from a waste management company run by a man convicted of serious environmental offences. In 2013 David Neal was given a three-month suspended prison sentence and his companies fined for illegally dumping waste on the environmentally precious Gwent Levels conservation site. He was then prosecuted again four years later for not removing it. Now another of his companies has recently been investigated by Natural Resources Wales about the atrocious stink emanating from a landfill site in Pembrokeshire. And Vaughan Gething thinks accepting such a large amount of dirty (literally) money for an internal Labour election is appropriate and justifiable? How very Tory! What’s more, the Gething campaign is trying to stitch up the result by means of some very dirty (metaphorically) tricks: blocking the nomination of Jeremy Miles in cahoots with Union bosses by means of sudden rule changes while being nominated by a Union he had only joined a few months earlier. How very British!

Vaughan Gething would be a disaster as First Minister, causing real damage to the Senedd’s reputation. Perhaps that’s the intention? Meanwhile Jeremy Miles is superior in every way imaginable. He’s got values and ideals, he’s left-of-centre, he’s pro-devolution and a supporter of the Labour/Plaid co-operation pact, he’s thoroughly Welsh and he’s brainy. He is the right person to take Cymru into the future.