Can you remember anything that Mark Drakeford has actually said? Even his most famous rhetorical flourish, of ‘clear red water’ between New Labour and the party’s Welsh branch, was canned at the last minute. Mark Drakeford’s headship of the devolved Welsh administration from 2019 has, at least stylistically, always been an exercise in studied reserve. His was a strange and silent kingdom. Drakeford was seldom seen out of doors; his only points of contact with the outside world seem to have been a small windowless room for press conferences, along with the dull fluorescent chamber of the Senedd – also windowless. It’s an environment that lends itself to his subterranean style, and indeed the only soundbite of his to ever escape its confines – perhaps intentionally, perhaps not – was the solitary meep that “[Boris Johnson] really, really is awful.”
Everything about Drakeford and his Wales seems consciously turned inward. Through the long turbulent years of 2015-22, Welsh Labour had nothing to say to the mother party. It watched the rise of Corbyn; the fall of Corbyn; the crisis of Starmerism, and the triumph of Starmerism with the same staring equanimity. In the middle of 2021 Wales was the only Labour holdout amid a string of electoral failures. But still there were no words of encouragement, no ‘Drakeford Model’ to take heart from, and no attempt at some kind of svelte leap into national office – as with Ruth Davidson. Nor was anything made of the fact that Wales voted to leave the EU. This was a result that had been delivered by voters in the country’s south, which has an almost identical sociological profile to the Red Wall. These kinds of defections have led to years of rumination and recrimination in national Labour. But it’s not something that Drakeford and the Welsh branch have ever felt moved to comment on, or render an account of to the rest of the nation. It wasn’t any of their business. Under Drakeford, Welsh politics, Welsh society, was a separate and settled affair. The silence continued.
Still, there was always a sense that Drakeford was quietly getting on with it, behind the scenes. This was especially true during the Coronavirus lockdown. Drakeford’s basement announcements could be taken for conscientious and unshowy statesmanship. He quickly won a reputation as a sole voice of reason in Pandemic Britain; even Nicola Sturgeon, who still had to prosecute the independence issue, never quite achieved the same replacement of politics with administration that is so beloved of Britain’s governing class in the 2020s. Drakeford really did accomplish this, not least by suspending the Senedd, which was only allowed to reconvene for ‘emergency’ sessions with a predefined legislative remit.
It was therefore possible to see Mark Drakeford as an essentially normal man, doing his best to navigate abnormal times, and abnormal figures like Boris Johnson. But this only obscures the bona fide strangeness of his rule. In keeping with his otherworldly personal style, Mark Drakeford’s project as First Minister of Wales has been one of principled isolation. Every one of Drakeford’s powers has been turned towards cutting Wales off from the outside world, if not from the modern world itself.
In Drakeford’s Wales, the Welsh and the English are not to intermingle. Central to Mark Drakeford’s policy has been the pointed and showy erection of barriers between the two countries. During the Coronavirus lockdown, travel into Wales from England was restricted. This wasn’t something that could be justified on public safety grounds; Wales’s death rate from the virus was more or less identical to England’s. This was a border for its own sake. Peacetime movement is also to be discouraged. The tolls on the Severn and Prince of Wales bridges were scrapped in 2018 by the central highway authority; the Welsh government, as if by way of response, banned the construction of all new roads, including the projects to offload some of the incoming traffic from England. Two of Drakeford’s final acts have been to levy a charge on outside tourists, and a 300% tax on holiday homes – the great majority of which have English owners. Commercially, and even genetically, north and south Wales look more to the neighbouring English counties than to each other. In the 16th Century, 10-20% of surnames in Bristol, Hereford, and Shrewsbury were Welsh; and a fifth of interwar Slough’s population came from Wales. What Drakefordism means, in its profoundest sense, is an attempt to throw this great trend into reverse. It means the dis-integration of the United Kingdom as a commercial unit, at a time when, as we are told, the trend is everywhere running in the opposite direction.
In Drakeford’s Wales, the pace of life is to slow down. Everything is to be brought to a deadening stillness. Welsh drivers must now observe a speed limit of 20 miles per hour and serious proposals to ban the sale of tea and coffee to under-16s were heard in the corridors of government. The island of Anglesey will be cut off from the mainland, and the north of the country is to be isolated from the south. Other devolutionist projects in Scotland or the north of England make much of the need for infrastructure as an instrument of modernisation. Not so in Drakeford’s Wales, which is happy to let the country’s disparate pockets of population drift away from one another, receding back into the forests and hills. This is not even regionalism; this is valleyism.
Nor does Drakeford have anything to say to those forces that have made Wales a modern country. It is hostile to industry, even declining industry, which English and Scottish Labour must at least pay lip service to. It makes nothing of Nonconformism, not even to its much-discussed secular ethos. In 1850, Wales became the first place on the planet where more people were employed in industry than in agriculture; but under Drakeford everything that is rural and anti-urban about Wales has been ceaselessly underlined. As with many other regionalist or small-nation projects, Drakefordism has defaulted to a sort of folkish kitsch, where real traditions are replaced with ahistorical appeals to nature. Projects like these – whether in Brittany, or Galicia, or Lapland – must always include handicraft revival; an economy based around eco-subsidy; a National Assembly housed in a Norman Foster three-dimensional logo; and a national dress that, suspiciously, always seems to consist of the same patchwork quilt overcoat and red pantaloons, and which has exactly zero artistic depictions before the year 1848. In this spirit, Wales is to take for its Coronavirus memorial not a municipal monument, but two new forests.
Capping this all off is a marked change in political style in what it means to be a Welsh politician. Historically, Welsh statesmen have been figures of spirit, energy and razzmatazz; liable to flame out, and characterised always by some great personal excess that eventually brings them low. Nye Bevan was a victim of his own towering rages. Neil Kinnock could never rein in his Tiggerish bounce. Michael Heseltine, famously, ‘wielded the knife’ too soon and too wildly. David Lloyd George was almost feral. But not so with Drakeford, who has won plaudits precisely for his own slumped bureaucratic mien. This is only fitting. There is no need for people like Lloyd George anymore. Drakeford is a still and tranquil politician for a still and tranquil society.
Drakeford’s Wales is a dismal atavism. But it represents the bleeding edge of British politics in the 2020s. Much has been made of the fact that Drakeford refuses to endorse the British union. But this only reflects the emerging consensus in Westminster about what the United Kingdom is and what it’s all about. This consensus, which developed after 2014, holds that the union should be kept together, but with no spirit of goodwill; no concessions to any common identity; no guarantee against dissolution by a simple majority; no defence of an internal market; and a dull, vague anti-Englishness which manifests itself in small acts of spite like the tourism tax. Mark Drakeford has simply been the first British politician to put this ‘Four Nations’ idea into full effect; for this, and for his peevish solemnity, he is Carolean Britain’s modal statesman.
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