Calum Davies is a Conservative councillor in Cardiff and a candidate for the Senedd next year.
A maxim I’ve been thinking about for the last year: “when the Conservatives mess up, it’s by mistake. When Labour mess up, it’s on purpose.”
Many of us accept that the last Conservative government was a disappointment.
It conceded ground to left-wing “progressive” causes too easily when we were unwilling to go into the fray to make the Conservative case for the opposite. We were too afraid to take bolder steps to tackle existential issues like immigration due to fears that the Overton Window had not yet shifted. At the end, we spent too much time fighting and then, when we stopped, realised there was no way back. All this led to a sclerotic, unfocussed government that meant issues were allowed to become crises, and errors could not be corrected.
However, when I look at Labour, the problems are their choices: increasing taxes (see the Budget), imposing further regulations (the Employment Rights Bill), or pretending it had a plan (“smash the gangs” anyone?). A good example is the Chagos Islands debacle – of course the scale of the money we’re sending to Mauritius is truly ridiculous, but it’s the very principle that we’ve entered this non-sensical, self-defeating agreement in the first place that’s most galling.
As it is the week following the Budget, it is a good time to focus in on the money side of this dynamic. The day before, the Labour Government in Cardiff Bay published its local authority financial settlement. Cardiff Council, of which I am a member, is getting a below-inflation increase.
Never mind that inflation was falling when Rishi Sunak left office and has nearly doubled under Sir Keir Starmer, Cardiff residents have already been dealing with above-inflation council tax hikes even when the financial settlement from Welsh ministers was better. Now they’ll have even higher increases.
The reason I mention that in this article is because it articulates why it is Labour’s choices that leave the country worse off whereas, under the Conservatives, it was our mistakes.
The money lost under the Conservatives due to shoddy PPE, which does still get mentioned on the doorsteps by some, was down to sheer panic in addressing the public clamour to procure some before Covid overwhelmed hospitals in a time-pressured situation. Labour chooses to give Mauritius £35bn and the strategically important Chagos Islands for no reason. When Boris wanted to introduce the Health & Social Care Levy, it was to ensure we could make up for the furlough scheme. When Rachel Thieves hiked taxes everywhere she could, it was so she did not have to solve the issue of the increasing welfare and asylum bills.
For years we heard Labour politicians cry that Wales – and consequently its councils – don’t get enough money from the evil Tories in Westminster. Now the shoe is on the other foot, they must recalibrate the same economic environment and fiscal reality with the fact that Labour is now in charge in London too.
Incidentally, this is why Starmer and Reeves have proved to be such weak leaders despite a large majority of largely hand-picked acolytes. They’ve raised a generation of Labour activists to believe the Conservatives made an optional and political choice in their so-called austerity programme, rather than accept it was economically necessary. Throw in a decade of “progressive” corporate capture and you have a party totally unfit to govern and unable to reconcile their juvenile politics with the reality of the current state of the British economy.
It is the same on the devolved level and explains Labour’s fallen popularity in Wales. You can’t spend 14 years saying everything will be fine once the Tories are out and then, when Labour enter office, not expect a negative backlash when that lie is exposed.
And it is a lie, for Labour could fund councils to deliver local services if it chose to do so. Local authorities are buckling under increasing costs for social care, child services, temporary accommodation, and special education need requirements, with no end in sight. These are statutory staples of local government delivery, but they are being severely squeezed.
Cardiff Council is Labour-run and they should be fuming at their party colleagues in the Senedd who, instead of funding extremely important public service delivery obligations, are throwing away taxpayers money at ideological crusades, pet projects, and “progressive” shibboleths.
£400m on bailing out Cardiff Airport instead of returning it private ownership; £150m on a report that recommended the much-needed M4 relief road, which was ignore; £120m on expanding the Senedd, with no mandate for it; an extra £150m on the bloated the civil service; millions on introducing a default 20mph speed limit and then rowing back when the public backlash ensued; and, of course, £10,000 on decolonising Welsh cakes. This is abuse of taxpayer money.
There are also the areas outside of Welsh Government control, reserved for the sovereign British Parliament where they are addicted to spending to confirm their delusion of grandeur: £5m on fake embassies last year alone. At least twice that on international aid projects. £64m on the Nation of Sanctuary scheme which encourages illegal immigration. They also spent months navel-gazing on a taxpayer-funded commission on the constitution, packed with its lefty mates.
Devolved administrations are funded depending on how much is spent on devolved services in England. So, by definition, to fund something that is not devolved demands that money is taken out of devolved services. Some equate this to embezzling taxpayer money. I truly wish the Conservative Government made more of this because, if it were the other way around, you can bet the separatists, both inside and outside Welsh Labour, would be crying havoc and ensuring their allies in BBC Wales were endlessly running stories on this affront to Welsh nationalism (proudly correct) and the Welsh people (definitely incorrect).
What Labour’s long record in Wales and short one in Westminster have shown is that there is enough to money to go on the necessities but not on the “nice-to-have”, “we-definitely-do-not-need”, and “can’t-be-bothered-fixing”. However, it has consistently chosen the latter as it is in hock to intellectually moribund backbenchers and devolved parties, completely unsound philosophies and imagined priorities, and “progressive” vested interests.
When your taxes go up – or a new one is introduced like the forthcoming Tourism Tax in Cardiff – it is not because it is necessary. It is because Labour chose it.
