Bleeding Wales Dry

The fourteen years the Tories were in power in Westminster were bad for Wales. The malign neglect of Cameron’s austerity policies, which wrecked already damaged communities, preceded the bullish British nationalism and contempt for Wales of Cameron’s four successors. We even got a new ‘prince of Wales’s without even having to ask. Lucky us! However, hopes that the reassuring talk which greeted Starmer’s election win last year of Westminster and Cardiff working together might be transformed into action to benefit Wales remain largely unfulfilled.

Two examples will suffice:

Firstly, take the Crown Estate, a land and property business, established by an act of Parliament to generate profit for the UK treasury. In 2020-21, its total net assets were £15.2bn. In Wales, the Crown Estate’s assets were £603 million in the same period with a profit of £8.7 million, having increased due to the leasing of offshore renewables, in other words, wind farms and any future tidal energy projects. 75% of these profits go to the UK Treasury, the remainder to the monarch. The Crown Estate owns 65% of Wales’s foreshore and 50,000 acres of land. As a result of a Freedom of Information request submitted  by the Plaid Cymru MS Cefin Campbell, we now know that the cash-strapped counties of Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion pay a combined total of £105,589.29 per annum in fees to the Crown Estate for access to public land.

The Crown Estate in Scotland has been devolved since 2016, so why not in Wales? There is an obvious need for this anomaly to be corrected. Despite its rich natural resources, Wales is poor. We need that money. The Welsh government and half of Wales’s twenty-two county councils have called for the Crown Estate to be devolved. However, at Westminster, in the committee stage of the Crown Estates Bill, introduced by the Plaid Cymru peer Dafydd Wigley, every Labour MP on the committee voted down an amendment put by Plaid Cymru energy spokesperson Llinos Medi proposing devolution of the Crown Estates to the Welsh government. Hopefully, this is not the end of the road for the bill or any further amendment such as this. Labour, however, is in open disarray. The Labour governments in Cardiff and Westminster are taking diametrically different positions on the issue and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones, having previously denied that there had been discussions on the issue between the two governments, now ‘clarifies’ that these have in fact taken place. Labour at Westminster, including Welsh Labour MPs, has been shown by Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats, who also supported the amendment, to be unserious about placing Wales in the same position as Scotland in managing its natural resources for the benefit of its people.

Secondly, there’s the well-documented scandal of a lack of a Barnett consequential for Wales from the misbegotten HS2 project. In 2022 the then shadow Secretary of State for Wales, Jo Stevens, stated quite correctly, that it was ‘illogical’ for the then Tory government to designate HS2 as an England and Wales project, calling on the government to ‘cough up’. She has since walked back from that position, and ‘recalculated‘ the amount in question to a mere £350 million. Imagine a country losing £4.6 billion because of a railway line being built wholly in another country!

Blighted by the malign effects of de-industrialisation but without full control of its taxation system and with no control at all over benefits and pensions Wales can scarce afford to be bled dry by Westminster in this way. When, in their anger and frustration at the Starmer government’s failure to improve their lives, people in Wales consider voting for Reform in the 2026 Senedd elections, the Welsh government could at least have said ‘look what we did, we got the money from HS2 and the Crown Estate and this is what we did with it’ but at the moment, that isn’t going to happen.

For fourteen years Welsh Labour has been able to blame the Tories for a lot of what is wrong with Wales. Now it can only blame Labour.

Socialists in Wales, in or out of the Labour party, should be demanding that Westminster gives Wales its due.