Labour’s spending plans – just like the Tories' - represent a real and imminent threat to Welsh public services

Rhun ap Iorwerth, leader of Plaid Cymru

Between Brexit lies on buses and Downing Street parties during lockdown, it is little wonder that trust in politics is at an all-time low.

That’s why honesty is so critical in this General Election campaign, and that’s why Labour and the Tories’ conspiracy of silence on public sector cuts is so deeply disappointing.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that whoever seizes the keys to Number 10 in two weeks’ time, at least £18 billion of cuts are coming down the line.

With Labour wedded to austerity masquerading as a cautious approach, it appears that the most vulnerable in society will yet again be at the mercy of decisions taken in Westminster having already endured 14 years of Tory rule.

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Fiscal straitjacket

The SNP warned this week that Labour’s decision to don the Tories’ fiscal straitjacket would amount to £1.45 billion of cuts to Scotland’s public services.

Based on our population share, the equivalent cut to Wales’s public services implied by Labour’s spending plans is a staggering £935 million.

Figures like this are difficult to comprehend so it’s worth examining some equivalent spending. A third of Wales’s total annual schools budget, the annual salaries of more than 25,000 nurses, funding for ten years’ worth of universal free primary school meals, almost the entire level of Welsh NHS spending on mental health, or more than twice the annual revenue funding for the entire Economy portfolio.

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Imminent threat

Labour’s spending plans – just like the Tories' - represent a real and imminent threat to Welsh public services, yet anyone offering a fair challenge to their manifesto is dismissed as promoting ‘fantasy economics’.

In reality, both Westminster parties’ austerity pledges represent nightmare economics for millions of families throughout the UK already struggling with the cost of living.

This is compounded by their refusal to even entertain the notion of rejoining the European single market and customs union, despite a report published earlier this year indicating that the UK economy is almost £140 billion smaller because of Brexit.

Plaid Cymru believed then as we believe now that Wales’s interests are best served by having the closest possible ties with the world’s largest trading bloc.

There are 13 mentions of poverty in Labour’s manifesto, yet seemingly not one policy devised to alleviate a problem which continues to cripple far too many communities.

Not even a commitment to scrap the pernicious two-child benefit cap which the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned this week will hit another 670,000 children throughout the UK by 2029.

Hope

The spectre of an end to 14 years of Tory rule should inspire at least some hope in people longing for a fairer future, but that is regrettably not the case. By prioritising caution over compassion, Labour is promising more of the same and threatening to wipe almost a billion pounds from the Welsh budget in the process.

This is no time for ambition in half measures. It was Labour’s own Aneurin Bevan who said that people who stand in the middle of the road get run over.

The challenges are too great and the stakes are too high for a change of government to represent little more than a change of furniture in Downing Street.

We in Plaid Cymru know that this is not as good as it gets for Wales. That is why we are offering real change at this election.

Not a nudge along Westminster’s sliding scale of austerity, but bold strides to bring about the economic, structural and social transformation required to build a fairer, more ambitious nation.

However much Labour in Wales profess to be passionate about tackling poverty, the patronising attitude of the Shadow Secretary of State for Wales this week has proved that any efforts by Vaughan Gething, particularly after his donations scandal, to influence party HQ in London get lost somewhere along the M4.

Only a vote for Plaid Cymru on 4th July will ensure that there are voices in Westminster determined to ensure that Wales and its most vulnerable citizens are not ignored.