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.

They weren't supposed to take him seriously

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It seems as though the PM is finding some of his backbenchers increasingly restless over what he has labelled as his ‘social care plan’. In reality, it is no such thing – it does nothing at all to address the current gaps and failings in social care. It is, in fact, more of an inheritance protection plan, targeted in particular at the wealthiest in society. Under his plan, those who have least stand to lose it all if they need social care, whilst those who have the most will lose just a small part of their accumulated wealth. And the main beneficiaries will be the adult children of the most well-off in the richest part of the UK, namely the south east of England.

It’s easy enough to see many opponents are unhappy with the proposal, but I can understand why the PM might be puzzled by the opposition coming from within his own party. After all, isn’t protecting the wealth of the richest what Tories do? What else are they for? The problem for his whingeing minority is that they were silly enough to stand for election – and win – in constituencies where there are many fewer wealthy people, and to do so on the back of a very unconservative promise (and one of the many which the PM never had any intention of actually doing anything about) to ‘level up’ the country. It’s a promise which, if it meant anything at all, could only ever have been achieved by spreading wealth more evenly.

It’s a sort of ‘Brexit bonus’ in reverse for the PM; having purged the traditional Conservatives from his party prior to the 2019 election and replaced them with people for whom the only thing that mattered was Brexit, he now finds himself leading a party many of whose MPs aren’t even proper Tories, and don’t understand that their sole mission in life is to protect the wealth of the wealthiest. Whilst it’s true that they were supposed to convince the less wealthy electors in their constituencies that they would look after them as well, they were never supposed to believe it themselves. Johnson himself probably can’t even begin to understand what’s going wrong for him. After all, someone who doesn’t believe a word of what he says himself must find it very strange to discover that anyone else might take him seriously.