Labour have been running the Welsh Government for 9,318 days. For the last 100 days of that long, unbroken stint, Eluned Morgan has been the First Minister of Wales.
100 days is always a milestone for a new premier. Often, manifestos talk about what a party or a candidate will do within their first hundred days if they are elected. So as we look back on Eluned Morgan’s first ton at the crease, what is most striking is the absence of any policy or announcement she can hang her political hat on.
Most governments have a general direction, or a central mission. With Eluned Morgan and the current Welsh Government, there’s none of that.
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And that’s because, 100 days before she became First Minister, nobody expected Eluned Morgan to take the top job. At that point, Vaughan Gething was the First Minister, having beaten his rival by a fine margin of votes with a lot more money. The source of that money – a man who had received a suspended sentence for illegally dumping waste - would be the thread that the Welsh Conservatives pulled until Gething’s Welsh Government completely unravelled.
While the Labour Senedd Group formed a Mexican standoff and engaged in weeks and weeks of psychodrama, Wales went ungoverned. NHS waiting lists continued to creep up. Enough was enough. The Welsh Conservatives called a vote of no confidence in Gething, which he lost. In the end Gething resigned.
Once Gething resigned, Eluned Morgan was brought in as the clean-up crew. Not selected to necessarily solve Wales’ ills, but to steady the ship.
But all we’ve seen since is drift. The Welsh Government is still not governing, because the psychodrama is still going on, only now it’s behind closed doors. The selection of Eluned Morgan as First Minister was an exercise in Labour Party internal management, not an exercise in getting waiting lists down, driving up educational standards, or turbocharging housebuilding.
And that’s why we’ve seen zero positive action since she came to power.
The First Minister’s big idea for cutting waiting lists so far has been a committee of NHS executives to give her and the Welsh Government advice on how to cut waiting lists. Labour have been in power for 25 years. You’d have thought that if they are so bereft of ideas, they would have drafted in the experts earlier.
Prior to being Wales’ First Minister, Eluned Morgan was the health minister who promised to eliminate long waits for treatment of two years more by the beginning of 2023, then again by the beginning of 2024. Waits of this length were virtually eliminated in England long ago.
Instead of breaking this streak of failure, she broke her promise to patients languishing on waiting lists. Nearly a thousand patients have been added to the 2-year waiting list, and that figure is heading in the wrong direction.
In fact, since the First Minister took office, the overall waiting list has grown by nearly 10,000, increasing beyond 800,000 for the first time after seven consecutive record-breaking months.
On education, we had the revelation that a fifth of primary school leavers in Labour-run Wales were functionally illiterate. But instead of ditching the failed cueing method of teaching reading in favour of the phonics programme employed successfully in England, Eluned Morgan’s Labour administration have made the political decision to keep doing things differently for the sake of it.
And on the economy, instead of turning the ship of decline and job losses around, we continue to see Wales sit at the bottom of the UK league table for employment, now with the highest unemployment in the whole UK to add to that record.
Aside from putting forward very little in terms of solutions, Eluned Morgan has also failed some very important tests. Sadly, she hasn’t stood up for Wales on some very key issues.
When Labour took the unforgivable decision to scrap winter fuel payments, pensioners across Wales needed Eluned Morgan to stand up to Keir Starmer and tell him that she wouldn’t accept such a move. She failed to do so.
This shameful move will deprive well over half a million Welsh pensioners of £110 million, just as Labour earmarks £120 million for the creation of 36 more Senedd politicians.
When Rachel Reeves put a death tax on the family farm in the autumn Budget, again, Welsh farmers needed Eluned Morgan to stand up for them. She failed. And now, combined with the Welsh Government’s tree planting targets that will cost 5,500 jobs in the rural sector in Wales, Labour’s death tax may well mark the end of the family farm within just a few generations.
And when the Chancellor introduced a tax on jobs by raising employer national insurance, Eluned Morgan should have stood with our businesses and with Welsh workers and said that we cannot afford another hammer blow to the Welsh economy. And again, she failed.
It’s been a comprehensive failure to put forward solutions, and a failure to stand up for Wales. After another 100 days of Labour, people in Wales are asking: How much longer?
