After just three months as the Welsh First Minister, Labour’s Vaughan Gething has lost a vote of confidence in the Senedd and thrown his party into turmoil. Even though the vote was not binding and Gething has pledged to stay in post, it marks a remarkable and rapid decline for Mark Drakeford’s successor. SC Cook looks at the roots of Welsh Labour’s current troubles.
By SC Cook. Cover image, Vaughan Gething takes First Ministers Questions in April, via Welsh Government on Flickr
In recent months, the sometimes benign atmosphere which surrounds Welsh politics has been blown open. A multitude of issues from poverty, corruption and disillusionment with Labour have risen to the surface.
In spring of this year the news site Nation.Cymru revealed that to fund his leadership election campaign, Gething accepted two donations of £100,000 each from a business owned by a man twice convicted of serious environmental offences.
Gething took another donation, albeit much smaller of £1,000, from a company which was awarded a £1.8million PPE contract when he was the Health Minister.
It also emerged in February that four people involved with a firm who had donated to Gething’s previous leadership campaign had been arrested as part of a £140m property fraud inquiry.
The firm, Signature Living, acquired Cardiff’s famous Coal Exchange for just £1 after a huge amount of public money had been spent on refurbishing it. The owner Laurence Kenwright credited Gething for helping him secure the deal, only for the company to go bust and the building left empty.
In May, it emerged that during the early stages of the pandemic, when Gething was Health Minister, he told colleagues in a WhatsApp group chat that he was deleting messages because they could be captured in a Freedom of Information request. Prior to this news coming out, Gething had told the Covid Inquiry that, “I understood that we’d kept and maintained all the information that we should do”. At the Covid inquiry in Wales, one bereaved family member walked out in disgust at Gething’s answers.
There are few things that unite people as much as cynicism or outright disdain towards politicians. The justified sense that they are generally out to line their own pockets and further their career is widespread, especially where Labour and the Tories are concerned.
It’s little surprise that the public reaction was damning. In polling conducted by Redfield Winton, 70% of Welsh voters thought that Vaughan Gething should return the money, 58% backed an inquiry into the donation and 38% thought he should resign.
Yet despite this, Gething acted as if nothing untoward had happened at all by insisting that he hadn’t broken any rules or laws.
His team refused to engage with journalists asking basic questions around the donations and dismissed as ‘obnoxious’ suggestions that he misled the Covid inquiry. When invited to apologise a week after losing the confidence vote Gething refused, simply saying that he was sorry for how it had been reported.
Trouble at the mill
The series of scandals surrounding Vaughan Gething and his reactions to them have opened up the kind of divisions rarely seen in Welsh Labour.
In May, Plaid Cymru dissolved the cooperation agreement with Labour which had been in place since the last Senedd election, paving the way for the no confidence motion.
Gething has alienated senior figures within Welsh Labour by sacking Hannah Blythn, a former cabinet member on the party’s soft left. Blythyn, who has a close relationship to Labour supporting trade unions, was accused of leaking Gething’s WhatsApp messages. She has denied this and no inquiry has been held into leaks.
Blythyn and another former Minister who has fallen out with Gething, Lee Waters, stayed at home with an illness during the confidence vote, clearing the way for him to lose it.
Gething’s new team has quickly set about trashing the record of the previous government led by Drakeford, first by rolling back a nationwide 20mph speed limit and delaying new farming regulations, and then all but killing off plans to change the timing of school holidays.
On the eve of the no confidence vote, former First Minister Mark Drakeford delivered an angry attack on the new Welsh Education Secretary over the u-turn in education policy. The new First Minister has also promoted figures from the right of the party into his cabinet, such as Ken Skates and Hefin David.
In November last year, Hefin David was one of just two Labour MSs who joined the Tory MS Darren Millar in tabling an amendment to a Plaid Cymru motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The amendment specifically removed the term ‘ceasefire’ and included a commitment to defend Israel’s ‘right’ to conduct its assault on the Gaza strip.
It is telling that in spats on social media, Gething has the backing of the most openly right wing and widely despised figures within the party, such as Cardiff’s Russell Goodway.
In addition to this, Starmer’s Labour, with the backing of Gething, have destroyed any remaining notion of party democracy in Wales by imposing its own candidates for the upcoming general election.
In Cardiff West, a notorious Starmer aide with no links to Wales and who has overseen Labour’s drive to purge socialists from the party has been parachuted in. In Swansea West, another Starmer loyalist – Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation – has been imposed without local members given a say.
This has inflamed tensions that were already present, leading to the resignation of one of the most prominent figures on the Labour left in Wales. Darren Williams, who was previously a member of the party’s NEC and has close ties to Drakeford, hit out at an ‘undemocratic culture’ under Keir Starmer but also how the party leadership in Wales had facilitated the stitch ups.
There is also deep anger amongst large sections of the party membership and its voter base, especially amongst Muslim communities, at Keir Starmer’s response to Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. Specifically in saying that Israel had the right to cut off food, water and energy supplies into Gaza in the aftermath of October 7th.
This has led to deep divisions within the party, mass resignations of councillors and electoral upsets. Wales is no different. Many Labour members see Gething’s role in this as being one of an enthusiastic Starmer backer who is helping to drive the party’s rightward shift into Wales, a country where the soft left has traditionally been stronger.
Taken together, Gething has done something that others before have failed to achieve – divide Welsh Labour into bitter and open factions.
And of course, all of these tensions have been made sharper by the anger over Keir Starmer’s support for Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza.
The situation has left Gething in a perilous position with relatively few political allies and a public who view him through the lens of corruption and deceit.
As the first black leader of Wales, and any European nation in recent times, Gething’s victory was rightly welcomed by anti-racist campaigners in Wales as a sign of social progress. In turn racist groups and their supporters hated the idea that a man of Zambian heritage had become First Minister.
This has led to concerns over racism being involved in the attacks on Gething, especially when the Welsh Conservatives are led by a man who has only amplified racist stereotypes about asylum seekers coming to Wales.
The potential for racist political forces to try and capitalise on the current situation should not be dismissed and unity against this is crucial. This is why it is important to not allow the right to dominate the narrative.
The scandals involving Gething and the wider malaise in Welsh politics have not come out of thin air or simply been conjured up by the Tories. His actions and that of his government deserve scrutiny and people’s concerns about corruption in politics are genuine.
To ignore what has gone on is where the real danger lies, as this would simply leave the field of opposition open to the likes of Andrew RT Davies and those on the far right of Welsh politics. We only have to look at the current general election, where there is a suppression of politics and no credible left opposition, to see how this has opened a space for Nigel Farage to operate in.
Roots of the crisis
The divisions which now exist at the top of government have not simply come from the inner wranglings of Welsh Labour and the Senedd; they are a reflection of the situation within Welsh society more widely and the failures of politics as a whole.
In the immediate run-up to Gething becoming leader, the government was under enormous pressure from farmers holding large, militant protests against a new subsidy programme.
Large swathes of the public were also angry at the introduction of 20mph speed limits in almost all built-up areas across Wales. Taken together, these represented one of the most difficult periods for Welsh Labour since the formation of the Senedd.
And whilst it may not be the main cause of Gething’s troubles, the scale of the movement in solidarity with Palestine is still important to understanding the crisis he has found himself in. Prior to becoming First Minister, his government was humiliated when a motion calling for a ceasefire passed in the Senedd despite the fact that they chose to abstain.
The genocide in Gaza is a generation defining event. The recently published UN report into war crimes committed in Gaza details just some of the horrors which are ongoing, including the sexual abuse of captive Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. Another warns of ‘high risk’ of famine due to Israel’s deliberate blockade. The scale of death and destruction is hard to comprehend.
The mass movement which has erupted in response, seen vividly on the streets of Cardiff and beyond, has not allowed politicians to escape its reach. Gething’s choice to abstain when given a chance to formally back a ceasefire cannot be undone. As more horrors are uncovered, it is a decision that will follow him forever.
But perhaps it is the overall state of Welsh society that is most important to understanding the current crisis, a reality which is often overlooked in the analysis of Welsh politics.
Travel beyond the world of the Senedd and the new high rises of Cardiff’s central square and a different Wales soon reveals itself.
New research for the End Child Poverty Coalition released earlier this month showed that across Wales, 29% of children are living in poverty. A key driver behind these high levels of child poverty is the impact of the two-child limit on benefits. This is a policy supported by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
Last summer in Ely, Cardiff – Drakeford’s constituency – riots broke out. The immediate cause was anger over the fatality of two young boys who had been chased to their deaths by police.
But like elsewhere in Wales, public services in Ely had seen their funding decimated by 14 years of cuts, facilitated by Gething and his predecessors, Drakeford and Carwyn Jones. Youth workers in Ely reported huge cuts to youth services in the area, with one centre closed completely and waves of redundancies.
When it comes to the Welsh NHS, there are thought to be 582,000 people – almost a fifth of Wales’ population – on the waiting list for treatment.
In December 2023, ambulances were forced to park outside hospitals unable to discharge patients for a combined total of 22,000 hours. These are ambulances that can’t be used for emergencies, resulting in cases like Charlotte Burston – a 40-year-old mother-of-two who recently died as she was being driven to hospital after her 15-year-old daughter couldn’t be told when an ambulance might arrive.
Many people are struggling to see their GP, with the British Medical Association reporting that 94 GP practices have closed, with a decline of 21% of full-time GPs in Wales.
School’s across Wales are also being chronically underfunded. According to chairs of school governor groups across Wales, it is highly feasible that the majority of schools will post financial deficits at the end of the current financial year. The Welsh Local Government Association has said that these combined deficits will exceed £100 million, leading to redundancies in schools.
The true extent of austerity and the deliberate raiding of the social state is being felt more widely than ever. This is playing out in the general election. One of the overriding themes playing out in the campaign is the sense that the country is broken after 14 years of Tory rule. That nothing works.
Of course, it’s right to point the finger at the Tories. But the reality is that in Wales, Labour have been responsible for implementing austerity since it began in 2008. This is why it is mistaken to draw the conclusion that Drakeford’s Labour is the antidote to Gething’s Labour.
Both men have directly contributed to the current state of affairs, and Gething has signalled that nothing on the ground will change.
During his first press conference as First Minister, Gething defended cuts that could lead to the closure of the National Museum of Wales Cardiff, one of the country’s most important cultural sites, and 90 redundancies.
What next
What will now follow is a period of turbulence in Welsh politics, which instead of being drowned out by the general election and its outcome will only be amplified by it.
A next possible step could see a binding vote of no confidence held in the Welsh Government itself, forcing the First Minister to resign and a likely election to be called.
This route is far from guaranteed, however. In order to support such a motion Plaid Cymru would need to feel confident of making significant gains in an election. Pressure on every Labour MS to back the government would be huge.
What is clear is that Vaughan Gething will not get his wish of turning over a new page, even if he is able to keep his job until the summer recess. Not only has his reputation and political stability taken a huge blow, he is set up for more turmoil in the future.
If Labour win the general election as expected, the party has made it clear that they are not moving away from the doctrine of austerity.
The Wales Governance Centre has said that a Labour victory will mean ‘serious budgetary challenges’ and deep cuts to transport, sport, the arts, housing and homelessness in Wales.
Given Gething’s record and his weakened position he is likely to act as a willing enforcer of Starmerism, and further austerity, in Wales.
This will inflame constitutional as well as social tensions but is also an opportunity for the development of a clear, left wing opposition to the Welsh Government. The first major test of this will be when the Welsh Government presents its draft budget in the autumn.
If a Starmer/Gething austerity package goes unchallenged by trade unions and others on the left in Wales, the sense of despair that is feeding the right will only grow.
Instead for those workers who face yet further real term pay cuts or the majority who rely on public services, the turmoil brought about by Gething is a chance to mount a credible opposition.
