Brexit went badly wrong and businesses are suffering, says Wales First Minister
BRUSSELS – Brexit has left Wales poorer and cut off from the world, with the country losing a billion pounds in funding since Britain left the European Union, Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford.
Speaking to i in Brussels, Mr Drakeford said Rishi Sunak’s government was falsely claiming that it had replaced EU grants with national funding. “It’s completely untrue,” he said. “It’s just not the truth. We were repeatedly given a cast iron guarantee that Wales would not be a penny worse off for leaving the European Union – but we’re over a billion pounds worse off since Brexit.”
Mr Drakeford, who is also the leader of the Labour Party in Wales, added that local authorities were no longer able to decide how to spend the money. “Those funds were previously decided at a Welsh level but are now decided in Whitehall by a Conservative government that has never won a majority in any election in Wales in the last 150 years or more,” he said.
Mr Drakeford, who is stepping down next month after five years as First Minister, said he was in Brussels to demonstrate “the continuing ambition for Wales to be a European nation”. His presence, just before St David’s Day on Friday, is more than symbolic, he said. “We’re not in the European Union, we don’t pretend to be. But that certainly does not mean that we have stopped being a sort of outward-looking, engaging, welcoming place we want Wales to be.”
However, he said despite sympathetic hearings from EU officials, he was unable to prevent Brexit’s economic hit. “The obstacles to trade are very real for Welsh businesses and some have simply ceased to trade with European counterparts because of the new barriers that Brexit bakes into everyday life,” he said.
The Welsh mussel industry has been particularly devastated, having previously sent 90 per cent of its catches to the EU, Mr Drakeford said. “They left fresh, they arrived fresh, they were sold. Now, it’s over. It’s just over because you’re just held up everywhere now,” he said, adding that other markets have not emerged to replace the EU. “If you force-fed every school child in Wales mussel Twizzlers, every day of the week, you still couldn’t absorb the product.”
Mr Drakeford was particularly critical of the hardline Brexit that successive Conservative governments pursued, which took Britain out of the EU’s Single Market and other EU measures, like the Erasmus student exchange programme.
“Our focus was not on the fact of Brexit, because that was decided in the referendum. It was the form of Brexit. That’s where I think things are gone so badly wrong,” he said. “We’re about to construct border posts in Anglesey at Holyhead. Goods coming in and out of Wales have moved without a check for over 40 years, and now we’re going to set up some elaborate machinery to check things that nobody ever thought needed to be checked.”
With a general election looming, Mr Drakeford said that Mr Sunak’s Conservatives looked exhausted after almost 14 years in power. “It’s not malign neglect,” he said. “But there is just no capacity, no energy, no ability, in that tail end.”
Mr Drakeford also admitted that Labour leader Keir Starmer is struggling to balance the different wings of his party over the ongoing conflict in Gaza. “It’s a very, very difficult path for Starmer,” he said. “He is trying to make a serious contribution to the way in which those absolutely awful events could be resolved.”
However, he refused to join the critics urging Sir Keir to take a more forthright stance, saying it would not change the course of the war.
“I just won’t sign up to gesture politics,” he said. “I’ve spent 20 years trying to persuade the Senedd not to act like a debating society. It should focus on the responsibilities that it has and not debate things for which you’ve got no responsibility at all, and feeling better because you passed a resolution, which makes absolutely no difference.”
