By Gruffudd ab Owain
March
Prior to the election of Vaughan Gething as new First Minister in March, the first black leader of any country in Europe, the political sphere in Wales has been hit by a turbulent period, with two major issues regarding climate change.
The first was the fierce opposition to the Welsh government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS). Its parliament, the Senedd in Cardiff Bay, saw the biggest turnout to a protest on its steps since its inauguration in 1999 on Feb. 28, 2024. The devolved parliament holds powers over a select number of policies, including agriculture, while the UK Government in London reserves responsibility over policy areas such as justice, policing, and defense. The Labour Party has been in government for the entirety of the Welsh parliament’s 25-year existence.
The Senedd didn’t garner law-making powers until 2011, owing to a referendum in which 63.49% voted in favor, yet only reached the height of public awareness following its Covid lockdown policies, which differed significantly from those of the Johnson administration in London.
In another referendum, the Brexit referendum, Wales voted with England to leave, in contrast to Scotland and Northern Ireland, by a margin of 52% to 48%. Oxford University research attests that this swing towards leaving was due to retired people who moved over the border from England. ‘Genuinely Welsh’ areas, as described by the researcher Daniel Dorling, voted firmly to remain; areas where agriculture is prominent, albeit not exclusively.
It is worth noting that Wales benefitted hugely from the EU’s Rural Development Funding, and the SFS is partly a replacement for that scheme and partly a response to the fact that agriculture accounts for 12-14% of overall emissions in Wales. It requires farmers to plant trees on 10% of their land, a policy which the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) claims will cost 5,000 jobs nationally. The thousands present were also voicing concerns regarding the spread of bovine TB in cattle, and policies pertaining to preventing river pollution.
The situation has prompted a rare and unexpected, if modest, boost to the Conservative Party’s fortunes in the country, a party who hasn't been at the top of the political tree there since the 19th century. They have been accused of hypocrisy, however, in claiming to be the voice of farmers after leading Wales out of the EU and its funding scheme.
Their young Welsh-speaking MS Samuel Kurtz led the party’s presence in what he described as ‘the proudest moment of my life’, later quoting from the patriotic song ‘Safwn yn y Bwlch’ and its lyrics “together we will stand” on his X account. The Tories’ leader in Wales, Andrew R.T. Davies, who doesn’t speak Welsh, proudly shared a video of himself shaking hands with protesters while ‘Yma o Hyd’ was playing in the background, a song which, ironically, has explicitly anti-Tory lyrics.
A recent poll projected that the Tories would only hold on to two border constituencies at the next General Election, after winning an historic 14 Welsh seats at the 2019 General Election. It must be said that changes to constituency boundaries will see Wales lose 8 of its 40 MPs at Westminster; nevertheless, this collapse in support is certainly reflective of a broader UK-wide mood.
After months taking up the mantle of criticizing the Welsh government’s 20mph rollout, they have finally been handed a different policy to attack. They have been more vocal on the issue than the third biggest party, the left-leaning nationalist Plaid Cymru, who find themselves in a somewhat awkward position, rather clumsily described by previous leader Adam Price as ‘co-opposition’, of cooperating with the government on a select number of policy areas, nonetheless excluding the SFS.
This will come as a partial relief for the Tory Party, amid turmoil in the rest of the UK in an election year, not least due to a series of historic by-election defeats. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak finds himself grappling with challenge after challenge, attempting to appease the right of the party to avoid losing votes to the resurgent Reform Party, without facing backlash from those to the center. He was forced to remove the whip of MP Lee Anderson in February, who said that “Islamists” have “control” over London and its mayor Sadiq Khan, calling his comments “wrong” but not Islamophobic nor racist.
Sunak himself was seen posing with some farmers and Welsh farming personality Gareth Wyn Jones on a rare visit to the north, alongside protesters holding bright yellow ‘No Farmers No Food’ placards. These posters have appeared widely in the country, even in schools, with their simple message. Less well-known, however, is the NFNF campaign’s connections with anti-net zero stances, including extreme conspiracy theories. Wyn Jones compared the potential job losses to those of the miners under Margaret Thatcher exactly 40 years ago, comments that Plaid Cymru’s Llŷr Gruffudd later echoed at the protest.
That said, some sympathize with farmers and are indeed disgruntled by climate change policies, with comments appearing on social media platforms along the lines of ‘Wales is too small a country, it cannot make a difference in tackling climate change’. One protestor told The Guardian that “a more pressing thing than climate change is Mr Putin. We’re teetering on the edge of world war three. This is about food security. We should be self-sufficient.”
The quality of political debate in Wales is often poor, succumbing to simplicity. Some farmers have even demanded to eradicate the Welsh parliament altogether, with graphics saying ‘we can live without politicians, we can’t live without farmers’ doing the rounds on Facebook. However, farmers risk losing broader public support in Wales for cozying up to unpopular anti-net zero and anti-Senedd stances, along with the equally unpopular Conservative Party.
It seems all rationality has been too easily lost in the debate regarding the SFS. Anthony Slaughter, leader of the Wales Green Party, who have no representation in parliament, implied on the Sunday Supplement radio programme that the government’s demands were not unreasonable, given that trees already cover 6-7% of Welsh farmland. He sympathized with farmers, however, for the policy’s ‘top-down’ implementation and lack of consultation, echoing similar comments by fellow independence-supporting Plaid Cymru.
Consultation was open up to March 7, 2024, with the government pledging to seek compromise. A consultative vote in the Senedd on scrapping the SFS saw 26 votes in favor by Labour MSs and 26 votes against by opposition parties. This triggered a rule forcing the deputy presiding officer to vote, and his vote with the government meant that the proposal didn’t pass.
As this saga rolled on, so did the election for the leadership of the Welsh Labour Party, and thus of the next First Minister. Incumbent Mark Drakeford announced in December that he would step down after the election of a new leader in March.
Only two candidates, Vaughan Gething (Minister for Economy, was Minister of Health during the pandemic) and Jeremy Miles (Minister for Education and the Welsh language), were up for election. The former, who succeeded with 51.7% of the vote, became the first First Minister from an ethnic minority, while the latter would have been the first openly gay First Minister. The election was criticized for lacking a female candidate, given that the Welsh parliament became the world’s first legislative body to achieve 50:50 gender parity in 2003.
Miles is the only Welsh speaker among the two, and his firm pro-devolution stance and willingness to “always fight Wales’ corner” [my translation] would have made him a headache for Plaid Cymru in opposition. Gething was seen as the candidate closest to UK party leader Keir Starmer. He also garnered support from prominent members skeptical of devolution, such as Neil Kinnock.
The election, which balances members’ votes and trade union nominations, was hit by turmoil in this sense as an unknown rule change by the influential trade union Unite, deemed Miles ineligible for the union’s nomination. Furthermore, it became obvious that there was no mechanism within the party’s One Member One Vote system to prevent members from voting more than once.
It then emanated that Gething’s campaign for election had received an unprecedented and eye-watering £200,000 donation by the Dauson Environmental Group; for context, Mark Drakeford only raised £25,000 for his successful campaign for election in 2018. It arose later that the group was awaiting Welsh government approval for a solar farm on a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Likewise in 2018, Dauson Environmental Group’s director, David Neal, received a suspended prison sentence for illegally dumping waste on a conservation site.
Wales is already significantly behind its climate targets, and with February bringing criticisms of Welsh Labour’s nevertheless flawed SFS and UK Labour reversing their £28bn green investment pledge if they were elected to Westminster, the obstacles to climate policy are surmounting.
And for as long as the almost proverbial phrase that you could stick a red Labour rosette on a donkey in Wales and it would still win, it seems that the pace required for meaningful, lasting change is rapidly becoming unmatchable.