Plaid Gomiwnyddol Cymru
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The Evil of Vaughan Gething

By Chair of the Welsh Underground Network

In March of 2024 CE, our glorious new leader Vaughan Gething was selected by the divine mandate and grace of the Labour Party to lead our nation’s government. He is the latest in a 25-year-long unbroken succession of bland middle managers, uninteresting and unhelpful to the people of Wales in almost equal measure. Nevertheless, the conclave of the Welsh managerial class, composed as they are of the Labour party machine, the trade union bureaucrats, and the opportunistic politicians once again assembled to choose a new frontman, and thus Vaughan Gething was delivered to us. However, for the first time since Alun Michael (if anyone can remember who that is) it appears that there is neither unity nor consensus around this leader and that there is a genuine possibility that he may not receive the easy ride and guaranteed term or two, which labour leaders are usually entitled to in Wales.

Gething has clearly made lots of friends on his long climb up the ladder of power in Wales. One example is the now much discussed and disgraced businessman and criminal who donated £200,000 to his campaign. This is more money than entire political parties spent at the last Senedd election and is totally unheard of in the relatively low stakes politics of Wales. This donation has been the defining scandal of his short leadership but is far from the only one. With Plaid Cymru abandoning their cooperation agreement with Labour, the Tories bringing a vote of no confidence against Gething in the Senedd, and his own backbenchers unusually open about their discontent, the First Minister will surely be looking to his bases of support in order to hold on to power.

One set of supporters that Mr Gething has long been able to rely on are the senior trade union leaders of the country. This support proved controversial during the party leadership election that brought Gething to power. Since he was previously the President of the Wales TUC (which tells you everything you need to know about the radicalism of that organisation) it may seem natural that the union leadership would prefer him for the leadership of the party and country, but the problem comes with the method in which he was endorsed, with union members generally excluded from the process and, in one case (Unite), his rival being disqualified from consideration due to a quietly and hastily introduced rule. 

Keir Starmer is seemingly another friend of the First Minister, as evidenced by Gething’s invitation to a shadow cabinet meeting almost as soon as he was elected. He spent his first days as First Minister of Wales in photo ops with Starmer and in London media studios talking mostly about himself and the life or death importance of making sure Starmer becomes PM, with little mention of what he actually intends to do with the country he now leads. It has long been the preferred strategy of Labour governments in Wales to solemnly tell the public that they would love to help them but unfortunately they are unable to until there is a Labour government in Westminster. Whereas, in previous administrations this line came off like a lame excuse, this year under this new leader it seems more like our country’s government is being used as a mere campaign prop for the Labour Party in England, perhaps it always was but never so nakedly as it is now. 

Despite these powerful allies, the new first minister seems to be disliked by the Welsh political class more than any leader since Alun Michael. For those who are lucky enough not to have heard of him, he was the country’s first First Minister (technically he was the First Secretary but that’s basically an unimportant distinction). Michael was made leader of Labour party in Wales mostly off of the back of the support of the UK Labour leader Tony Blair and the support of the trade union leaders, and without much support among the party activists, the local media or among the politicians who would later make up what would be the National Assembly (now Senedd). He was Blair’s man in Wales and  humiliatingly underperformed in the 1999 election and led a minority government which was two seats short of a majority, mostly failing to cooperate with the other parties. Less than a year into his time leading the country, Michael resigned in order to try and prevent a no confidence vote in his leadership, the vote was held anyway and he lost on what was possibly the first and last interesting day in the Senedd. Rhodri Morgan, who Michael beat in the disputed leadership election, then replaced him and went on to lead Wales for almost a decade.

Why did I just spend a paragraph writing about events which occurred almost a quarter of a century ago? Well, while it is true that the situations of Michael and Gething are not identical I think there are sufficient similarities to demonstrate that there is a precedent for a labour leader and First Minister in Wales to face opposition from the Senedd, the media, and their own party. I will also address here the idea which has appeared in recent weeks that all criticism of and opposition to Mr Gething is racially motivated. While it is undeniable that the First Minister has received totally unacceptable racist abuse and stereotyping (notably from a major UK newspaper),  it is disingenuous to suggest that scrutinising the head of a nation’s government for decisions they have made is necessarily  racist. It is also not true that Mr Gething is the first or only First Minister to have ever faced this level of hostility, as we have seen in the case of Alun Michael. However, it cannot be ignored that compared to the previous three First Ministers (Morgan, Jones and Drakeford) Gething has received much more scrutiny. This is a good thing, of course, but the question that must still be asked is why? If it’s not an issue of racism, why could they get by relatively under the radar while Gething cannot? What enemies has he made?

One place where he seems to have very little support is the Welsh media. The reasons for this are not particularly hard to guess. He has stormed out of interviews and answered with contempt when asked questions he doesn’t like, and has accused journalists focusing on his donations of being unserious. As unpopular as journalists sometimes are with the public, it is generally considered a bad look for a politician to act smug and dismissive when dealing with them because our perceptions of them as individuals are shaped by what we read and see of them, and it is to be expected that he probably has very few fans among the ranks of the profession when he so openly seems to despise them. 

Next are the members of the Senedd from his own party. Gething failed to secure a majority of their endorsements and has seemingly failed to win over a lot of those who did not support him. The donations scandal has clearly embarrassed many of them, tweets and statements in the Senedd have come out from backbenchers who are at best unenthusiastic about the First Minister’s stubborn reaction to the scandal, and even his own ministers have said that they would not have accepted the money. Then came the next major scandal. WhatsApp messages from Gething emerged which said that he was going to delete messages to avoid a freedom of information request. All while he was in post as Health Minister in the middle of the COVID Pandemic.  This raised questions about his honesty during the COVID enquiry because he had claimed the phone was wiped during a security protocol, and therefore he could not provide the messages as evidence. Shortly after that a minister was sacked from the cabinet and accused of being the source of these leaked messages, which she completely denies. Given his numbers in the Senedd, Gething cannot afford a handful of disgruntled backbenchers, and it would only take one or two for him to lose control. 

This whole situation is a symptom of the great rot in Welsh politics, stagnation caused by a fundamental lack of democracy. Not once while writing have I mentioned any legislation or government policies. Vaughan Gething does not have any ideas worth talking about, the same goes for his rival for the leadership, and the same goes for the entire party. When the Labour Party talks about its achievements in Wales, it can boast of some decent stuff like devolution which was 25 years ago, and free prescriptions which was 17 years ago. Since then? Plastic bag charges, minimum alcohol pricing, lowering speed limits? This is hardly inspiring stuff. People are worried about their livelihoods and 25 years of Labour management has not made anybody any richer. When a large multinational announces huge job losses does the Welsh government take bold action to halt deindustrialisation and save people’s jobs? No, the First Minister flies to India to plead with the factory’s owners, only to come back with absolutely nothing. People are not excited about voting for parties that don’t properly represent their interests. No Senedd election has ever had a majority of the Welsh people turn out and vote in it, and the new electoral list system that will be in place for the next ones only takes more power out of the hands of local communities and gives it to the party machines.

So where does this leave us? We have a First Minister who has spent his first few months in crisis with no obvious way out, from a party which is only governing because it thinks it has a right to do so, led by Keir Starmer, a man who would have been at home in David Cameron’s cabinet a decade ago. This is not a good situation for a nation to be in and there must be an alternative. This is an opportunity for us: the apathetic, hardworking, and downtrodden people of Wales to step up and demand better. We deserve a government in Wales which isn’t led by tired stagnant crooks, which doesn’t have to answer to a neighbouring country’s government, which doesn’t just roll over for landlords and capitalists while pretending to look out for us.

We deserve a Socialist Republic of Wales and anyone who says we can’t because “we just need to elect a UK Labour government to enable the Welsh government” should ask themselves: even if that is true, why should we have to wait for a government which we don’t and can’t control, to enable one we do?

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