Andrew RT Davies MS is the Leader of the Welsh Conservatives.
The Labour Welsh Government has collapsed and the First Minister is resigning. On Wednesday, after months of damaging political paralysis to Wales’ detriment, Labour’s house of cards fell down. Gething is finally going.
This is very long overdue. After accepting a £200,000 donation from a convicted criminal, after sacking a minister who has questioned his honesty and after losing a vote of no confidence in the Welsh Parliament and ignoring it, the First Minister has finally seen the writing on the wall.
In the end, it was his colleagues that gave him the push. Four senior cabinet ministers (including Jeremy Miles, Gething’s former leadership rival) resigned in a coordinated attempt to excise their scandal-ridden leader from office.
They succeeded. But mark my words, all of those cabinet members are culpable. Culpable for the embarrassment that was 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 Welsh Government have sat in successive administrations that have overseen a decline in public services in Wales and outcomes for the Welsh people, including record high waiting lists that are still rising unlike elsewhere in the UK.
Miles, the presumed ringleader of this cabal and former Education Minister, presided over record low PISA results in Wales, with the steepest decline in educational standards in the whole UK.
As the outgoing Economy Secretary, he has achieved nothing. In fact, he has failed tackle record high economic inactivity in Wales which continued to rise in practically every month of his tenure, with the brain drain of Welsh talent ever worsening.
They all 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.
And they all supported 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, ceaselessly indulging such ideas with costly commissions and talking shops.
Whilst they moved against him in the end, these Labour stalwarts sat idly by and accepted the ministerial pay-packet, enabling Gething and his arrogant approach to government. They served for weeks and months – and with the full knowledge of his political expediencies gained over many years.
And on top of all of that, Gething has just published an unredacted screenshot 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, 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”.
An utter show of the proverbial kind is rolling through Cardiff as we speak. The people of Wales have been let down – and the blame for this farcical saga goes far beyond Gething and his Labour ministers.
Don’t forget that Sir Keir Starmer himself, knowing all of his faults, backed 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 Starmer’s gain.
The Prime Minister called our no-confidence motion 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 backed him then, to shield Starmer from this scandal, despite walking out of his government mere months later. They put party before country. Wales will remember.
