MERRY Christmas, readers.
At the time of writing, Tiny Tim is still alive. Mrs Badger is out slaughtering a fine, fat hedgehog for Christmas lunch. Your furry chum is not usually a fan of what is laughingly called “the festive season.” But this year, he is more inclined to Yuletide jollity than usual.
The source of Badger’s good mood is not hard to find. You can read it in the opinion polls regarding next May’s Welsh Parliamentary election.
Labour in Wales (note: never “Welsh Labour”) faces a resounding defeat. Badger remains unimpressed with what the other parties have presented thus far. He deems voting for Il Duce of Dulwich College’s lot intolerable. That intolerability is alleviated only by the comic opportunity of witnessing Reform UK MSs clash with their bitterest enemies – other Reform MSs – while uttering melodramatic warnings about stopping the pedalos at Barry Island.
Badger is not intrinsically opposed to the existence of a Labour Party. Someone, somewhere, must represent the metropolitan middle class. However, when it comes to Labour in Wales, Badger has a very warm place in his hearth for the entire kit and caboodle.
A friend recently reminded Badger about a famous line from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
For over a hundred years, Labour has been the largest political party in Wales. It’s version of Kennedy’s remark is “Tell me what you can do for us and we’ll write the cheque now.”
Of course, Badger doesn’t believe that Labour politicians are any more corrupt than the Mage of Clacton on Sea (who, Badger hastens to add, is as honest as the day is long. At the North Pole on the Winter Solstice). However, Labour in Wales’s record of back-scratching favour-doing has more in common with the Mafia’s Five Families than anything like transparent government.
Almost eighty years ago, Attlee and Bevan delivered Beveridge’s idea of a National Health Service. Labour politicians in Wales have dined out on the crumbs that fell from the shoulders of giants ever since. Let’s face it, Labour’s recent achievements in Wales – things that have delivered meaningful and lasting improvements to people’s lives – are countable on the fingers of one ankle.
Let’s suppose you’re an average Joe Schmo living in rented accommodation in Freystrop. You’ve got a couple of sprogs and a missus. You work as a production operative at Gwalia Spuds and Swedes. Your wage is about £22,000 a year. The government knows that’s not enough money for a family to live on, so it bumps up your pay with tax credits and add-on benefits to enable you to have named meat once a week. Heaven forbid that people be paid their worth for working when the public teat subsidises low pay. You get free prescriptions in Wales. But so does the millionaire spending three months of the year in their second home in Newport, Pembs, while bitching about paying for using local services and a parking permit.
Before you think Badger is coming all “eat the rich and redistribute their wealth,” he adheres to the simple principle that if it’s not the state’s role to soak the comparatively well-off for money, the reverse is also true. The Labour Party opposes means testing for historical reasons connected with the folk memory of the 1930s. That position fails to account for the massive change in work, working patterns, and demographics. Badger has said it before, and he will say it over and again until he’s blue in the fur: the state pension was designed to help those with no post-retirement income. It was never intended to pay for the holidays and little luxuries of those already on generous, publicly subsidised private and public-sector pensions.
When Badger spoke about free prescriptions earlier, he found himself thinking about how that would tie in with Labour in Wales’s Mafia-like tendencies. It occurred to him that it’s rather like a protection racket.
“If you don’t vote for us, the evil Tories/Nationalists/Swivel-eyed loons will take it away from you.” That approach obscures a couple of things.
First, generic drugs are cheaper than NHS prescription charges. As an example, Badger was entertained this week by the idea that someone with a prescription for bog-standard paracetamol faces an eye-watering charge for obtaining, through the NHS, tablets that cost about 30p a packet from Home Bargains. There will be those for whom 30p is a lot of money; however, most in that position will be entitled to free prescriptions anyway.
Second, any system of exemptions and rebates for prescriptions in Wales – especially if income-based – would expose an uncomfortable truth; namely, that Wales is sicker, older, and less economically active than anywhere else in the UK. Better to obscure that behind free prescriptions for all than admit the true cost to Wales of sickness, age, poverty, and unemployment – under Labour governments in County Halls across Wales and in Cardiff Bay.
Then there are the client states – local and national – that have grown in Wales. There is, apparently, nothing that can be achieved through democratic responsibility that cannot be achieved through a network of quangos, arms’ length bodies, and special interest groups linked to the Labour Party. It’s not that Labour is any worse than any other party in this regard, but a century of one-party dominance in Wales has entrenched arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a lack of care for the voter that is, if not unique to Wales, then all but.
Challenge Labour on any issue in Wales, but especially the NHS, and the sheer scale of the defensiveness you get in response, the word count of whataboutery, and the weight of invective are extraordinary. The attitude is that Labour knows best because Labour in Wales has always known best. It’s like an abusive marriage between the elected and the electorate. Labour in Wales gaslights the Welsh public by speaking of successes that are little more than mirages.
Wales has been married to this mob for too long. It’s time for a clean break.
