Wales voted for Brexit, but Welsh socialists have a moral duty to fight it
Since the Brexit referendum, we have all discovered many more reasons why leaving the EU will be immensely damaging to Wales. With catastrophe approaching, now is the time to be brave
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Your support makes all the difference.We are now eight years into austerity and public services across the United Kingdom are slipping ever closer to crisis. In some parts of England, most notably Conservative-controlled Northamptonshire, the blades of the scissors – rapidly rising costs of social care and severe restrictions on public spending – have already closed. The structure of local government is being chopped up like so much timber to feed the bonfire of cuts.
In Wales we have, so far, avoided such a catastrophe – not least because we allocated more of our health and social care budget to social care and earned years of abuse from Tory ministers for doing so. But the crisis is coming – and it is going to be made much worse by Brexit.
It is going to be tougher for us in Welsh Labour for another reason: our duty to lead. Cardiff is now the only one of the UK’s centres of government with a Labour-led administration. Scotland was lost in 2007, Westminster in 2010. Realistically, there is no immediate prospect of any of that changing in the short term. I’d love to believe the Tories would take another gamble on an early UK general election but I think their near-death experience in the last one makes that extremely unlikely.
Welsh Labour is, in effect, going to be the main display window of the Labour superstore for some time to come. In the past, I don’t think we have taken that seriously enough or been sufficiently confident about trumpeting our achievements. The decision about health and social care spending is a good example. We were brave and took the right decisions for the long term but we were treated by too many in London as an embarrassment and we found it far too easy to hide away and not fight our corner. These attitudes need to change.
With Brexit approaching, we will have to be even more brave. In 2016 Wales voted to leave the EU. I respect that, but I still think it was wrong. In fact, since that vote we have all discovered many more reasons why leaving the EU will be immensely damaging to Wales.
Nobody discussed the prospect of food or medicine shortages back in 2016 and now the UK government is urging us to be ready for both in the event of a no-deal crash out. In 2016 we were promised we’d be getting an extra £350m a week for the NHS, while we now know we’ll be paying a divorce bill of at least £37bn between now and 2064. A hard border with the Republic of Ireland will plant its frontier posts in Swansea, Holyhead and Milford Haven, not just at Derry and Newry.
But because I respect the result of the referendum I do not think we can just halt the Brexit process. People voted to instruct the UK government to negotiate a deal on Brexit and they should be getting on with that – but they should also know that we, the people, expect to have the vote on the final deal. That’s why I’m backing the Independent’s Final Say campaign.
I know there will be voices screaming in Wales that I am betraying the decision of the Welsh people to leave in 2016. The Ukip members of the National Assembly may even interrupt their permanent civil war to join together in denouncing me.
I am backing the Final Vote on the Brexit deal not because I think it is the most popular option, but because I think it is right that something this important, that will affect generations for generations, is ultimately a decision for the people as a whole.
If I am elected leader of Welsh Labour I won’t have the power to force the Tories to concede a final vote, but I will have one of the biggest and most important platforms of any Labour politician on which to make the case.
Welsh Labour must never be afraid to offer leadership and the stakes have never been higher. Any sort of Brexit deal that takes us out of the customs union and single market will mean less trade and slower growth and so less revenue for public services. Piling that on top of the continued ideologically-driven austerity of the UK Treasury will be catastrophic, not just for the people of Cardiff and Caernarfon, but for the people of Catford and Coatbridge too. As a Welsh socialist, I believe I have a moral duty to fight back on behalf of everyone in the UK.
Vaughan Gething is the Member of the Welsh Assembly for Cardiff South and Penarth. He is running as a candidate for the Welsh Labour leadership
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