More than a slip of the tongue

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Perhaps he misspoke, or maybe it was just a slip of the tongue, but when the Secretary of State for Wales said this week that “Devolution has to do what it says on the tin, which is, it’s up to the Welsh Government to deliver the policy”, I tend to suspect that it was an honest expression of his view about devolution. Insofar as devolution was ever in any sort of tin, delivering policy made by our masters in London is not the label it would have been given, and it isn’t what most of us understood devolution to be. It probably is, though, an expression of what anti-devolutionists wish that it was – a localised way of delivering, rather than making, policy.

In the context, setting up a National Care Service isn’t exactly the hill one might choose to die on; declining to improve care services in Wales might be legally within the purview of the Senedd, but deliberately setting standards lower than those in England would not be a wise choice for a serious Welsh Government. What Kinnock could (and should) have said is that the setting up of an English National Care Service would lead to a Barnett consequential which he hoped would lead the Welsh Government to set up a Welsh National Care Service, the details of which might be different if the Welsh Government saw Welsh needs as being different. It’s impossible to read into his words that he intended anything remotely like that.

It’s a strange thing to pick a potential fight over from his point of view as well – after all, it was his party, when in government at the Senedd, which ensured that the Welsh approach to care was more generous than that adopted in England. Maybe he’s afraid that the Welsh Government might embarrass the English government again: being more generous than a Tory government in London might be OK, but doing the same thing to a Labour government is another kettle of fish entirely.

We don’t know the details of the proposed new service in England as yet, and it looks as though we might not get those details until the next election campaign starts. There’s been enough said already, however, for me to believe that the issue is being seen primarily as a financial one – how much care is to be funded and how the money will be found – rather than looking at the resources and structures required. And that makes it more about protecting the inheritance of the English middle classes than about meeting care needs.

Whilst we shouldn’t set out to be different for the sake of being different, Wales has demonstrated the advantage of being able to do things differently to a degree, even within the limited funding allowed to it by Westminster. It would be a significant setback if the ability to do that were to be undermined by an obsession with standardisation around whatever England decides to do. Yet that is the impression created by the minister’s words.