Mark Drakeford feared Welsh devolution could collapse

Martin Shipton

Mark Drakeford has revealed that he feared Welsh devolution was at risk of collapsing when he went to work for First Minister Rhodri Morgan in the year after the National Assembly was set up.

He made the comment during a speech delivered at a fundraising event to build a statue for Mr Morgan outside the Senedd in Cardiff Bay.

Mr Morgan took over as First Minister in February 2000, after the then National Assembly’s initial leader Alun Michael was ousted in a row over EU funding. He served in that role until December 2009 and died in May 2017 at the age of 77.

Perilous

Mr Drakeford told those attending the event at the Mercure Cardiff North Hotel on Friday September 13: “It is exactly 25 years this weekend that the very first National Assembly for Wales was about to embark on its first perilous autumn session. It was a perilous autumn session because we had an administration – it wasn’t a government at all, in those days – without a majority.

“We were an administration that couldn’t pass a Budget. We had an institution built on the most unstable foundations of what was called a corporate body, with no distinction between those in the parliament and those in the government. And it was already a place where one party leader had been lost [Tory Assembly leader Rod Richards]..

“We were within six months of losing the second party leader, [Alun Michael] and in 12 months three of the four party leaders who started were no longer in their jobs [Plaid Cymru’s Dafydd Wigley also stepped down in 2000]. So this was a very perilous moment indeed.

“I came to work in the Assembly as it then was in the spring of the year 2000. And as I looked around there were many people who I’d known very well indeed, and I did think to myself this was an institution that may not survive – that it was an institution on the edge, and that people who worked in it were on the edge. And maybe that great experiment that so many of us had worked so hard to bring about was about to fail in front of us.

“The reason that didn’t happen is not simply, but more than anything else due to the person that we have come together to think about here this evening. If it had not been for Rhodri, and the way in which he took that very fragile institution, then I think there is a chance that it may not have survived at all.

“Within just a few months of him becoming the First Minister, he had gone from having an administration with no majority to a government with a working majority – a government formed of a partnership between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, beginning that 25 year history of showing that progressive parties can come together. Progressive parties can work across party boundaries when there is a programme of work tio which you can be jointly committed. Coalitions at Westminster are generally regarded as a failure of the system. Here in Wales we have demonstrated time after time that working with others is a strength of our politics, not a weakness.

“We were by then as well a government that could pass a Budget. Can you believe this? The Budget was growing in cash terms by 10% every single year. Every year of that first four-year term we had more money to spend.

“Now we had a government that can put a Budget to work to use that opportunity. We were a place where a stable political leadership had arrived. But having lost all those very early people, we now had political leaders who were there for the whole of the rest of that whole decade. And we had an institution which had agreed itself that there should be the greatest possible separation between a legislature and the executive.”

Political skill

Mr Drakeford said it was “a remarkable story to have brought about in just a few short months, given the start the Assembly had had, and it absolutely did rely on the personal authority, the political skill and the deep determination that Rhodri brought to the job that he did – and 25 years later we continue to benefit from the foundations that he laid down.”

The former First Minister, who has this week been appointed Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Welsh Language, went on to set out what he considers the achievements of that early period, and how he believes they have led to where we are today.

He said: “I think Rhodri created not simply a distinctive Welsh Labour brand, but he developed a distinctive Welsh political tradition – a radical Welsh Labour tradition. It started with Rhodri. It’s continued to the present day. And not only has that been a distinctive political tradition, but in politics, just as importantly, it’s been a successful tradition as well.

“This has been a political story that started in difficulty, but has gone on to demonstrate in election after election that the recipe that Rhodri laid down goes on being a successful political recipe in our relationship with the Welsh Government. He took that fragile institution. He made it permanent, and he made it unthinkable, I think, particularly amongst younger people, that you could ever imagine Wales without a parliament of its own.

“By the time we vote in 2026 [in the next Senedd election] you would have to be nearly 50 before you participated in an election when there wasn’t a National Assembly or a Senedd here in Wales. It’s embedded in the political consciousness of the nation in a way that was hard to envisage on that night when that first referendum was won by such a knife-edge and a whisker.”

Following a second referendum in 2011, the Assembly was given primary law making powers, of the sort that Rhodri Morgan set out to create.

Bus services

Mr Drakeford said that in what remains of the current Senedd term, laws will be passed to reform bus services, putting them back in the control of the public; to introduce the visitor levy, becoming the only part of the UK to do so on a national basis; and to improve coal tip safety.

“We’re using the powers that Rhodri helped secure for us, “ he said.

“And we are taking ahead of us those great areas of policy in which he invested so much of his own personal energy. Back then, unemployment in Wales was always higher than the UK average; economic inactivity in Wales was not just higher than the UK average, but getting higher than the UK average year by year.

“As a socialist of the Welsh stripe, as he said in his “clear red water” lecture [in 2002], he really did understand that people’s opportunities in life were rooted in economic opportunities that were made available to them. Today unemployment in Wales is lower than the UK average. The people who are out of work because they don’t choose to take part in the labour market are falling, not rising. If you’d said that 25 years ago, in that first Assembly term, very few people would have believed you.

“We go on investing in those things, those renewable energy possibilities that are such an important part of our future here in Wales, as we create an economy fit not just for today but fit for those who will come after us as well – particularly children and young people. It was a passion of Rhodri, during the time that he was First Minister, to advance the rights of children here in Wales. He created the first Children’s Commissioner anywhere in the UK. He made UN Children’s Rights part of our law here in Wales. He supported the campaign that Julie [Morgan, Rhodri’s wife] led and is now successful, to abolish the defence of reasonable chastisement, so children were protected from physical punishment in Wales.”

Proud

Mr Drakeford said that earlier in the day he had visited a Welsh medium primary school in Ely, Cardiff, where he saw children learning through play as part of the Foundation Phase initiative that Mr Morgan had championed: “How proud Rhodri would have been to have seen a thriving, over-subscribed Welsh medium school on that Ely estate. And to go out and see those young children learning to love education by learning through play – to see it in front of you lifts your heart to think of the things we have managed to achieve here in Wales.

“I remember being in a school with him in Rhondda when a very powerful headmistress told him that if there was one thing he could do to improve the chances of children coming into her school, it was to stop them being hungry when they sat down to learn, because hungry children don’t learn. The idea of free breakfasts for primary school children was learnt on that day from that person.”

Mr Drakeford said he had been standing next to Mr Morgan in Ely when a formidable woman told him local people could not afford to send their children to swimming sessions in the local leisure centre: the free swimming initiative was the result.

“Today, 25 years later, we have universal free school meals in our primary schools in Wales,” he said. “We are eliminating the pursuit of private profit in services for our looked-after children. If the rights of children were at the centre of what it was for Rhodri to be the First Minister, then we can say that 25 years later, that legacy is alive, well and still being developed here in Wales.”

The event was told by Mr Morgan’s brother, Professor Prys Morgan, that a competition would be held to decide on the design of the statue, with submissions being evaluated by Studio Response, a Wales-based consultancy that specialises in public space art projects.

So far, more than £90,000 has been raised towards the cost of the statue.