I am sick of Wales being an afterthought and a joke

Plus how much of Vaughan Gething’s donations from a criminal went to the Labour Party?

Hi all,

I want to start with a thank you. There are now over 1,250 subscribers to the newsletter. A massive reason for the quick growth recently is that readers are sharing and gifting it to other people. I genuinely can’t express how grateful I am to you all for the support. 

One thing I can express however is my ongoing exasperation and disappointment with how Wales is treated by London based media organisations. This is where we will start this week, followed by a look at how much of Vaughan Gething’s donations went to the Labour Party and analysis of exclusive polling.

Wales - the joke, the afterthought, the “other”

I have a rule which I have, to my knowledge, never broken. I never publicly criticise any other journalists. This doesn't mean that I agree or like everything I read, just that Jesus Christ they get enough abuse anyway.

But there was an article in The Telegraph on March 23 which I think sums up many of the issues in how Wales is covered by the UK media outside of Cymru. I want to break down what these issues are because I think it underscores both how Wales is viewed in the wider UK and why our decision makers are able to get away with making poor decisions with little to no scrutiny. 

I want to stress I am not having a go at the individual journalists who wrote this. I don’t know them or their other work. But the piece itself is incredibly similar to many others I have seen from this publication over the years and it warrants assessment. 

Much needed scrutiny, done in entirely the wrong way

Anyone who has read any of my newsletters will know that I am not a Welsh Government apologist. Wales has a myriad of really serious challenges and successive Welsh Labour Government’s have failed to get a grip on them and have often ducked scrutiny on their record. A key part of getting a more competent and a transparent government is by having sustained diligent reporting of Welsh issues and the Welsh Gov’s record. Therefore, when you see that a UK-wide newspaper like the Telegraph are looking at Wales you could be forgiven for thinking that this could be the real scrutiny we are crying out for. 

However by the time you have finished reading the headline your hopes will be dashed: “Mark Drakeford’s Wales: How to ruin a country”.

The article concludes that the nation is "badly in need of a leader that can steer the country out of the slow lane" It says he leaves an "insidious legacy" of pitting urban areas against rural ones, has failed to understand the importance of the tourism industry at a time manufacturing is in decline and left hospitals and schools in a pitiful state. While no one is denying that Wales schools and hospitals are not where we would want them and that there aren't economic shortcomings, this article is the archetypal coverage that Wales endures from a “UK” media. It absolutely isn’t what could be considered objective analysis and it certainly isn’t real scrutiny.

Wales’ problems are entrenched and multifaceted while their solutions require long term strategic thinking underpinned by sustained funding from both Cardiff Bay and Westminster. But this article doesn’t even attempt to really dig down into the issues in a meaningful way.

A good example of where this piece falls down is when it looks at the economic data. The writer's point out how the Welsh economy has shrunk since 2018 (when Drakeford took over) compared to England. While it is fair enough to look at economic performance in Wales and wonder if the Mark Drakeford-led Welsh Government had a role in this, to compare England (56m people) with Wales (3.2m people) is to compare apples and leeks.

If we dig deeper into the data we can see how useless their assessment ultimately is. If we look at gross value added (GVA) broken down by economic area from 2018 to the most recent annual data we can see that north Wales has the second biggest percentage increase of any areas of England or Wales (there are 42). South east Wales is in the top half.

The biggest falls come in the middle parts of both Wales and England with Greater Birmingham, Solihull, the Black Country, Coventry, Warwickshire and Mid Wales all seeing more than five percentage point falls over the period. Mark Drakeford was only in charge in one of those places, but the Telegraph fails to question whether deeper issues are at play here than one man's time as First Minister.

Given its ability to borrow and wide-ranging revenue raising powers, the UK Government is far better positioned than the Welsh Government to actually tackle the issues that these areas face. The overwhelming consensus of experts agree that Wales on its own doesn’t have the ability to truly tackle its entrenched issues of poverty without support from Westminster.

But the Telegraph article makes no mention of deliberate political decisions that have had devastating impacts on Wales’ ability to make its own decisions like the £4bn Wales has been denied to invest in its infrastructure by classing HS2 as an “England and Wales” project.

This is journalism about Wales, not for Wales

What makes the hit-piece Telegraph article all the more frustrating is that while Cymru is crying out for better governance (of which media coverage is a vital ingredient) the only attention it receives from the majority of UK media is to be used as a straw man to make a wider political point. Wales is their stick to beat UK Labour.

If the Telegraph et al really have a meaningful desire to hold the Welsh Government to account rather than Googling “Mark Drakeford failings” and then regurgitating the results as an article they could have, for example, attended any of the Welsh Government’s press conferences and directed their “cutting” analysis and questions straight at Mr Drakeford.

I have never EVER seen journalists from the Telegraph, Times or Express at a Welsh Government press conference. 

Beyond the demonstrable shortcomings in the piece when it came to analysis of Welsh issues and their causes there was a continuous undercurrent of hostility to Wales which demonstrated, perhaps more than anything else, that the London based publication considers Wales to be “other”.

Little asides such as when they mention Welsh speakers but have to add, as every single England based article seems to need to, that speakers of Cymraeg are “estimated to be less than 30% of the population.” The insinuation that this is an irrelevant small minority rather than a miracle of history that Wales has managed to keep over a quarter of its population speaking Welsh despite centuries of enforced repression hardly speaks to the publication really caring about Wales.

Add to that the clumsy attempt to shoehorn Wales’ “Wooden Spoon in this year’s Six Nations Championship” into a metaphor about the 20mph limit and you have an article that clearly has no real desire to have a meaningful discussion about how Wales can do things better but rather quietly revel in the fact that it seemingly endorses its own political leanings.

Wales has undergone a seismic shift under Mark Drakeford and no one beyond Offa’s Dyke seems to have noticed

Any genuine assessment of Mark Drakeford's tenure in charge of Wales can't simply be a competition of "war on motorists" and "farmers are angry". There were seismic changes over his five years at the helm with the largest perhaps being that there is now a far wider awareness of devolution among the wider Welsh public. For the first time in living memory the people of Wales have realised that we can do things differently in Cymru beyond simply charging for a carrier bag. This doesn't mean everyone likes what they see but Mark Drakeford has been at the centre of this shift. You simply can't see this shift if your view is obscured by 100 miles of motorway.

Ultimately, Wales’ issues are complex and our tools to tackle them are lacking. This absolutely does not mean that the Welsh Government deserves a free pass. The fact that all health consequentials are not passed on to the Welsh NHS, the fact our largest health board is endlessly in special measures and huge issues on how the pandemic was handled are perfectly legitimate reasons to criticise the Mark Drakeford’s leadership.

But instead what people in Wales are left with is a media beyond our borders which sees our problems as an expedient to be mocked, brushed over and then discarded until another slow news day.

Where has the money from a criminal ended up?

Last weeks newsletter revealed that our new First Minister Vaughan Gething has received over a quarter of a million pounds in donations and that £200,000 of that was from a company run by a convicted criminal. 

The rules state that any leftover money will go to the Labour Party. Given that many Labour politicians are concerned about this (as should most people IMO), it is worth asking how much, if any, they will get? 

Well I would love to be able to tell you. I have asked Welsh Labour repeatedly what the figure is. They have ignored all my correspondence. 

When WalesOnline interviewed Mr Gething, he just said: “I'm not sure, I need to go through that with my agent and as per the rules, any money that isn't spent will be returned to Welsh Labour because that's what the rules of the contests require.”

After being pushed he said he will know “in a few weeks”. This is a great example of Welsh Labour being averse to real scrutiny. This sort of issue would have been pursued with great zeal if it was in Westminster or even Scotland by much of the UK media but in Wales it simply isn’t. This is why politicians of all stripes in Cymru are able to get away with more than in other parts of the UK. It is simply deemed uninteresting and not to matter because it is Wales.

The latest polling for Wales

Polling company Redfield and Wilton Strategies recently carried out several polls in Wales including one exclusively for WalesOnline. There were a huge range of results so I am going to give you four of the most interesting:

1. The Tories are facing a total wipeout in Wales

The poll put the Tories on just 16% when it came to voting intention at the next General Election. To put this into context they got 36% in 2019. They are only a single percentage point ahead of Reform. 

It is hard to make seat predictions because of the boundary changes, but if these figures were seen in the General Election at most the Conservatives would be holding onto Montgomeryshire in mid Wales. They would also likely lose Monmouth, the seat of current Secretary of State for Wales David TC Davies.

2. Plaid have a decent chance of being the largest opposition party in the Senedd in 2026

In a newsletter two weeks ago I predicted that Plaid Cymru could make really significant gains in the Senedd elections in two years. 

This latest poll seems to suggest the same. In the constituency vote above Plaid and the Tories are neck. In the regional vote Plaid actually have a 2 percentage point lead.

3. Vaughan Gething is both lucky, and unlucky that many people have no idea who he is

The good news is he has an approval rating of +4 which is much higher than Mark Drakeford. It is also much higher than Andrew RT Davies who is -12%.

The bad news for Mr Gething is that part of the reason for this is that the majority of people in Wales don't seem to have a clue who he is.

Unfortunately for him a majority of 54% are undecided. They either say they neither approve nor disapprove (36%) or don’t know (18%).

This is often a sign of a lack of recognition (though not always).

4. When presented with the facts of Welsh politics, the Welsh public speak sense

Another reason that Mr Gething may be counting his blessings that the Welsh public are, generally, quite disengaged from Welsh politics is that when they actually look at what is happening - they don’t approve. 

Though recently enduring a torrid time at the UK Covid Inquiry, 30% thought the Welsh Government had handled the pandemic better than the UK Government (20% believing the UK Government handled it better) while there was still a majority of 56% to 29% who thought Wales should have its own inquiry into Covid. Something that the Welsh Government have repeatedly rejected. 

As reported in last week's newsletter, polling also suggested that, when presented with who had donated to Mr Gething’s campaign, most thought he should return the money (63% to 11%). 

That is all for now. 

Thanks again everyone for your support. 

Take care 

Will