After causing a long period of political paralysis, the body politic that is Labour in Wales has convulsed, excising the First Minister. Vaughan Gething is finally going, having lasted just four months.
However, his exit was very long overdue. After accepting a £200,000 donation from a convicted criminal, after sacking a minister for leaking a damaging text, after losing a vote of no confidence in the Welsh Parliament and ignoring it, Gething has finally admitted defeat.
Four senior Labour Cabinet ministers, including Gething’s former leadership rival, Jeremy Miles, resigned yesterday in a coordinated attempt to remove the scandal-ridden First Minister from office.
They succeeded.
But mark my words, all of those Cabinet members are culpable. Culpable for the embarrassment that was Vaughan Gething’s premiership and culpable for Wales’ political, institutional and economic decline after 25 years of Labour rule.
All four of those members of the Labour Welsh Government have sat in successive administrations that have overseen a decline in public services in Wales and outcomes for the Welsh people. That includes record high waiting lists that are still rising – unlike elsewhere in the UK.
Wales still has over 21,000 patients wating two years or more for NHS treatment. In England, despite their population being 18 times that of Wales, they have barely 200 patients waiting this long. The equivalent of 1-in-4 people in Wales are on a waiting list, compared with 1-in-9 in England, and those waits are on average well over 50% longer in Wales.
But the decline doesn’t stop with the NHS. Miles, the presumed ringleader of this coup and Wales’ former Education Minister, presided over record low PISA results, with the steepest decline in educational standards in the whole UK.
He brought in a new curriculum, loathed by teachers, that slashed GCSE science provision and failed to adopt the approach of academic rigour and high standards employed with success in then Conservative-run England. And as the outgoing Economy Cabinet Secretary, Miles has achieved nothing.
He has failed to contain record high economic inactivity, now at 28.4% in Wales, which continued to rise in practically every month of his tenure, with the brain drain of Welsh talent ever worsening.
Welsh Labour also supported the disastrous and divisive 20mph speed limit policy, despite nearly half a million Welsh signatures against it, the largest petition in the Welsh Parliament’s history.
They all backed the diversion of vital resources from our ailing Welsh NHS to fund 36 more politicians in Cardiff Bay. This vanity project epitomises the rot at the heart of the Labour Welsh Government.
They cling onto power by bolstering the size of the institution and appeasing the nationalists by edging closer to their pipe dream of Welsh independence, teasing the entertainment of such ideas with costly commissions and talking shops.
These Labour stalwarts sat idly by and accepted the ministerial pay-packet, enabling Vaughan Gething and his arrogant approach to government at every turn.
They served Gething through the ever-growing snowball of scandal for weeks and months and with the full knowledge of his political expediencies for years.
And on top of all of that, Gething has published an unredacted screenshot, the content of which drags at least two of the outgoing ministers into the mud with the First Minister who had sought to delete the Covid-era chat’s contents.
Julie James, another of the resigning Labour ministers, is implicated in these new screenshots.
James seemingly agrees with Vaughan Gething’s assessment that the messages could be captured in an FOI and that the deletion of them was the right choice, despite their potential utility to the UK Covid Inquiry, who have said that they are looking into this matter.
She said, in a previously unreleased message, in response to the now First Minister’s decision to clear the slate of these embarrassing texts: ‘Good point Vaughan’.
Time and again, the people of Wales have been let down.
And the blame for this farce goes far beyond Gething and his Labour ministers.
Don’t forget that Keir Starmer himself, knowing all of his faults, backed Vaughan Gething to the hilt. His judgement must be brought into question here.
I have no doubt that these Labour ministers were waiting for the conclusion of the general election before making their moves, extending Wales’ political paralysis for Keir Starmer’s gain.
The Prime Minister called our no confidence vote a ‘cheap political stunt‘ at the time, despite it revealing the vacuum of leadership at the heart of the Welsh Government. All of Gething’s ministers then backed him then to shield Starmer from the scandal of his administration.
They put party before country. Wales will remember.
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