Its war on motorists is universally loathed, its ailing NHS is even worse than we thought. But at least the Labour-run parliament provides free tampons in the gents’ loos… If Wales is Starmer’s blueprint for power, God help us all!
We may be teetering on the cusp of World War III but here in Wales, popular anguish has a more domestic focus.
It is now a month since the incumbent Labour administration teamed up with the Welsh nationalists of Plaid Cymru to impose a basic speed limit of 20 miles per hour across the principality. It is, by some margin, the most unpopular decision in recent Welsh history.
The response has been astonishing. Nearly half a million people have signed a petition which calls for the repeal of a measure which, it warns, marks ‘the end of socialism’ in Wales. No other modern petition has come close.
This is a landmark moment. For more people have now added their names — 463,000 at the last count — than voted Labour in the 2021 Welsh election.
Having driven from one end of Wales to the other this week, testing public reaction, it is fair to say that much of the country is apoplectic.
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer with the First Minister of Wales Mark Drakeford, during a Welsh Labour reception at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, October 8, 2023
A creaking bus service now runs later than ever, as angry drivers try to work out what the hell they are supposed to do when confronted with scenes like the one I find in Usk: a road sign saying ’20’ alongside a painted road marking saying ’30’.
Up in Trevor, I reach a main road with a big sign saying ’50’, turn left and instantly hit another one which says ’20’.
Even some A-roads have traffic reduced to cycling speeds for mile after mile.
Yet Labour leader Mark Drakeford has issued an emphatic ‘No’ when asked if he will think again. His government piously claimed all this was in the name of climate change until the evidence showed it didn’t make a blind bit of difference.
They now insist it is being done in the name of the Welsh NHS, arguing lower speeds equal fewer casualties.
However, this eternally troubled and scandal-prone health service has received a double blow of its own this week. First, it was revealed that Welsh data on Accident and Emergency waiting times managed to omit hundreds of thousands of cases over several years.
Then, new monthly figures released two days ago showed waiting lists for treatment overall have hit a record high. More than 760,000 referrals are overdue, while one in five patients has now been waiting for more than a year.
Labour says this is ‘disappointing’. Out on the streets this week, some comments are unprintable. And no one I meet believes for one minute that spending £32 million on new road signs and slashing speed limits will make one iota of difference to the Welsh NHS.
However, this is not just about Wales. For Sir Keir Starmer has proudly hailed Wales as his ‘blueprint’ for power across the United Kingdom. He said so last year at his party’s Welsh conference.
Given the state of the polls across the UK — especially following this week’s slaughter of the Tories in the Mid-Beds and Tamworth by-elections — we would all be wise to take a look at what could be coming down the tracks, albeit at a very sedate 20mph.
It was revealed that Welsh data on Accident and Emergency waiting times managed to omit hundreds of thousands of cases over several years (File Photo)
I can honestly say that I have never met a subject where people are quite so willing to stop and vent their opinions. I need only say the words ’20 mph speed limit’ and it’s like dropping a match in a petrol can.
In Abergavenny, one of the testing grounds for this scheme, it’s pouring down. Yet tree surgeon Jared Rogers, is more than happy to stop and talk about it.
‘I can’t understand a blanket limit of 20. It’s just bloody infuriating. It gives the impression we’re a bunch of old fossils here in Wales,’ he says.
‘I used to like Labour. But this is crazy. And when you drive into England now, you feel out of your depth.’ Right now, driving on Welsh roads is a head-spinning memory game where the only guaranteed result is drivers spending more time looking at signs than keeping their eyes on the road. It is perfectly possible, in the space of five minutes or a couple of miles, to go from 20 up to 30, back down to 20, up to 40 or 50 and back to 20 on the same bit of road.
Many drivers, having forgotten whatever the limit should be at any given moment, just pootle along at 15 to be on the safe side. Road rage is rife.
The 20mph limit was originally supposed to apply to roads outside schools and hospitals, which everyone supported anyway.
However, the Welsh government then reworked the plan to include all ‘restricted’ roads — those which used to have a 30mph speed limit because of their proximity to people and housing.
One month ago, the 20mph went up overnight from two per cent to 37 per cent of all Welsh roads. This this is just the start. For councils are now receiving Welsh government ‘guidance’ on reducing existing higher limits of 40mph or more. They may apply for ‘exemptions’ to the new rule but it is a very complex process and, in private, they fear that it is legally untested.
No wonder the Tories, both here in Wales but also in Westminster, realise that perhaps their best hope for some sort of salvation at the next general election may be the beleaguered British motorist.
A sign covered in spray paint in North Cardifg, Wales (File Photo)
I begin my journey at the place which came up with this idea.
The Senedd (Welsh Assembly as was) is a parliament so achingly woke that free sanitary products are now mandatory in all the gents toilets.
It has also just banned GB News from its television screens, in response to the recent misogynist outburst on the channel by actor Laurence Fox. Although Fox has been sacked, the Senedd’s presiding officer, Elin Jones, has ordered technicians to reprogramme the internal broadcasting system so that no television anywhere in the building can receive GB News. At least everyone still receives Al Jazeera.
It says everything about the mindset of the political class here that such edicts pass without comment. Welcome to the only legislature in Britain which has only ever had one party in charge since the day it was born nearly 25 years ago.
Labour might preach noisily about the urgent need for ‘change’ at Westminster, but don’t mention that word here in Cardiff.
I arrive at the Senedd to find the First Minister, Mark Drakeford, and his acolytes sitting in the lobby of the £70 million waterfront complex earnestly listening to a lunchtime lecture about racism in sport.
It’s quite hard for the audience to concentrate because they are facing the glass front of the building. On the other side of the glass, angry protestors are making faces and waving banners. It’s yet another demo against the 20mph rule.
Some wave Welsh flags with the dragon replaced by a red snail. I meet Rosemary, a former director of diabetes care in the NHS, holding a banner that reads: ‘Democracy for Wales — Not Dictatorship.’
‘I’ve never demonstrated against anything before but this is the final straw,’ she tells me.
They are joined by some of Senedd’s opposition, the Conservatives being the only party which has vowed to rescind the 20mph rule.
‘People see that this is part of a wider war on motorists,’ says Tom Giffard, MS (Senedd Member) for South Wales West. ‘But farmers and white van men just can’t switch to using public transport.’
First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, delivers a speech to party delegates on day two of the Labour Party conference on October 9, 2023
Inside the Senedd, I meet shadow transport minister, Natasha Asghar. ‘No one has ever had any problem with 20 limits outside schools and hospitals and on estate roads,’ she says. ‘But this is going to cause serious economic harm. Who is going to want to do business here?’ She likens Labour Wales to Little House On The Prairie (the Seventies TV drama about a 19th-century farm in America’s mid-West) and rattles off the arguments against the plan: the rise in congestion and with it polluting exhaust emissions, Labour’s decision to scrap all new major road-building schemes plus chaos with bus timetables and deliveries.
Even emergency services are hit if firefighters and doctors are stuck in traffic, she points out. ‘The problem with Labour in Wales is that they idolise what Sadiq Khan [Mayor of London] is doing in London,’ says Ms Asghar, who, though Newport born and bred, spent many years in London and, at one point, applied to be Tory candidate for mayor.
It clearly suits the Tories to trumpet Mr Khan’s anti-car policies (it was, after all, his ULEZ scheme penalising old diesels which cost Labour the recent Uxbridge by-election in West London). The issue is already, in political jargon, ‘cutting through’.
This week, an opinion poll asked Welsh voters who would make the better First Minister: Mr Drakeford or the leader of the Welsh Tories, Andrew RT Davies? Six months ago, Mr Drakeford had a 15-point lead. This week, for the first time, Mr Davies is in front.
‘Drakeford is an old Corbynite and this 20mph rule is a classic command and control measure, dictating to people how they lead their lives,’ Mr Davies tells me.
‘Labour say they want to help the NHS but they’ve got 27,000 people waiting over two years for an operation and they’re spending £32 million on new road signs.’
A Welsh Government spokesperson tells me: ‘We recognise this is a major change but it is making our communities safer. We’re gathering feedback from local authorities to help them apply exceptions to the default 20mph limit where it’s appropriate to do so.’
As for this week’s row about the hundreds of thousands of missing A&E cases, the Minister for Health, Eluned Morgan, has accused the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (which revealed the issue) of ‘an attempt to undermine the credibility of official NHS statistics in Wales’.
Her argument is that Wales has always done its sums this way. Nothing to see here. Move along now. The same dismissive mindset applies to the new road policy. The scheme is being driven by the transport minister, Lee Waters, except he is not called that.
It clearly suits the Tories to trumpet Mr Khan’s anti-car policies (it was, after all, his ULEZ scheme penalising old diesels which cost Labour the recent Uxbridge by-election in West London). The issue is already, in political jargon, ‘cutting through’ (File Photo)
His title is ‘Deputy Minister for Climate Change’ which gives some indication of where cars and buses fit in the scheme of things. He used to run a charity which campaigns for so-called ‘active travel’.
I drive north, via Cwmbran, where several ’20’ signs are now blacked out and Newbridge, where the main road to Pentre has literally fallen off the hill. Two years on, they have yet to fix it.
In Llangollen, I find a national speed limit sign, indicating a 60mph limit, alongside a road marking saying ’40’.
Hotel receptionist Karen Lloyd tells me her husband’s daily commute to Colwyn Bay takes an extra half an hour, while getting to a hospital appointment — if you ever get one — is more problematic than ever on public transport. ‘I’m furious and I don’t even drive,’ she says.
One thing I notice is the absence of cyclists. The scenery in Glyndyfrdwy is as spectacular as its name. But were I to attempt any ‘active travel’, whether on a bike or on foot, on the narrow, freight-filled A5 which runs through it, even the 20mph sections, I would soon be squashed by a lorry.
At the local A&E unit, at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, I find that everyone has a story about both speed limits and hospital waiting times.
Steel worker Mike Crewe, 60, is here to see his mother who had a fall, waited six hours for an ambulance and then spent another six hours sitting in it in the car park until there was a bed in A&E. The solution? ‘I think the best thing would be to blow up the Welsh Assembly and start again because all they do is throw money away,’ he says.
When I mention the new speed limit, he sighs: ‘Don’t get me started.’ And then he starts.
Look on the ‘heat map’ of the online petition and nowhere is angrier than the former brickmaking town of Buckley, a trial area for the scheme. ‘We had this thing for 18 months and we told them again and again it wouldn’t work,’ says Mike Peers, an independent town and county councillor.
He points out that Buckley sits on the A549, the direct route between Mold, the county town of Flintshire, and England. It may be an A-road but it is now reduced to 20mph for mile after mile.
So, guess what? People now take a much longer A-road to the north or south where there is still a 60mph limit. It’s twice the distance at three times the speed. ‘How does that help the environment?’ asks Mr Peers.
‘It’s suffocating the town centre,’ adds the Mayor of Buckley, Charles Cordery, as I meet a group of local councillors all adamantly opposed to the new limit.
Nor is there anything party political about this, since they all sit as independents. Fellow councillor, David Ellis, a crane driver, is a Unite shop steward.
His wife, Carol, another councillor, is a youth worker. Councillor Dennis Hutchinson drives a school bus and says his day now has to start at 5.30am instead of 6.30am.
The local MP and local council are both Labour. These should be Mr Drakeford’s people. Yet there is fury, real fury, here, as there is across Wales. Rishi Sunak has precious few options right now. But by identifying the shortcomings of Sir Keir Starmer’s disastrous ‘blueprint’, he may just find a roadmap of sorts.
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