What comes to mind when you think of Wales? You might think of men’s choirs, daffodils or warm pints of Brains Bitter. What you probably don’t associate with the land of the red dragon is the scourge of racist buildings. You bigot.
This is a serious problem. An issue of such importance in fact that the Welsh Government has splashed £130,000 on training to educate local librarians about phenomena such as ‘the dominant paradigm of whiteness’. Perhaps the most puzzling detail of the initiative is that librarians are being encouraged not to hold meetings in so-called ‘racist buildings’.
Damn those inanimate masses of bricks and mortar and their prejudices. In all seriousness, while the sum of money involved isn’t enormous and the topic is laughable, it says a lot that Welsh Labour are choosing to invest any amount of cash or time in this nonsense when their country is in such a dire state.
Although the administration is keen on lecturing the public on the virtues of fringe theories about race, they haven’t done a particularly good job of teaching them to count or read. Education in Wales has been in a state of decline for years. While England came out very well in the latest Programme for Independent Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, the same cannot be said for Wales. While pupils in England outperformed the international average for maths, their Welsh counterparts are performing worse across the board.
In their plan for Wales, Labour laid out their steps for reversing this trend. It included recruiting new teachers, ensuring free school meals and expanding childcare. Much like the scheme to re-educate librarians, while these plans might use all the necessary left-wing buzzwords and sound very ‘mission-led’, it is likely to be ineffective. According to the IFS, systemic reforms like a shift to a knowledge-rich curriculum and improving the way data on educational inequality is collected are what will improve Wales’ situation.
With poor educational outcomes often comes high unemployment. Wales is no exception. Coming in at 68.9%, the nation has the worst employment rate in the UK. Economic inactivity also blights Wales’ labour market, with 28.3% of unemployed working age people not actively seeking work – that’s 541,000 people. This could fill Cardiff’s Principality Stadium seven times over.
But the decline doesn’t stop there. As leader of the Welsh Conservatives Andrew RT Davies has pointed out in CapX:
‘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.’
Instead of taking the tough decisions needed to address these myriad problems, Welsh Labour have allowed themselves to become overwhelmed by internal chaos. After refusing to quit following a vote of no confidence and then being mired in a number of scandals, Vaughan Gething resigned as First Minister, triggering yet more political turmoil. Now Eluned Morgan has been elected as the new First Minister, you might expect matters to calm themselves down. I wouldn’t hold your breath.
The problems Wales faces are numerous and go far beyond the scope of this piece. Rather than focus their efforts on confecting culture wars against buildings, the Welsh government must come together and actually have a go at proper governance. If this is what a Labour administration looks like in Wales, then we in England had better watch out.
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