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New solutions to old problems: economic imperatives for the new Welsh cabinet
New solutions to old problems: economic imperatives for the new Welsh cabinet
The Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Energy and Welsh Language inherits significant challenges from his predecessor — Wales needs new approaches and solutions to the longstanding challenges it faces, writes LUKE FLETCHER MS
HANK ROBERTS welcomes news that asbestos has been judged too dangerous to leave in situ in schools and public buildings, and issues a clarion call to readers to help make sure action is actually taken
VICTOR GROSSMAN believes peace in Ukraine needs to come before anything else and abhors the EU's insane drive to keep the war going on
Wales reporter David Nicholson talks to Morning Star columnist and Plaid Cymru economy spokesman LUKE FLETCHER ahead of the unveiling of his economic strategy for Wales
As the ‘NRx movement’ plots to replace democracy with corporate-feudal dictatorship, Britain must pursue a radical alternative of local food security and genuine wealth redistribution to withstand the coming upheaval, writes ALAN SIMPSON
The Guyanese scholar’s groundbreaking work revealed how Europe deliberately underdeveloped Africa while using its resources and people to fuel Western capitalism, writes ROGER MCKENZIE
By making Personal Independence Payments harder to access, Labour is creating another barrier for those already struggling with soaring care costs, workplace discrimination and prejudiced employers, argues RUTH HUNT
ON March 21, Wales’s new First Minister, Vaughan Gething, announced the new Welsh government cabinet. To take up his old portfolio (with some new additions), he has chosen his chief opposition in the Welsh Labour leadership race, Jeremy Miles, whose former responsibilities for education will now be replaced by the economy and energy, while still maintaining his responsibility for the Welsh language as part of his new portfolio.
Opportunities to combine work on the Welsh language with work on the economy is an exciting and welcome development. The connection between the economic base and linguistic vitality is indisputable and, although not the only government portfolio necessary for increasing the prominence of Welsh, the shifting of language policy into the domain of the economy could prove to be a crucial aspect of any language revitalisation effort.
However, this will require a stark departure from the status quo in Welsh economic policy, a departure from an embrace of neoliberalism to an economics that rebuilds the social infrastructure, institutions and community spaces that sustain(ed) a plethora of distinctive Welshnesses.
A deplorable lack of statutory community rights and an economic agenda intemperately fixated on the pursuit of resource-seeking “investment” from spatially mobile economic actors has thrust workplaces and the communities that have grown around them into uncertainty and, in some cases, active decline which has yet to be arrested. The future of vital areas of the Welsh economy remains precarious.
A strategic vision for the Welsh economy
The challenges facing the Welsh economy are longstanding and brought into sharp perspective by the fact that after a quarter of a century of policy effort, whatever way we slice it, very little has changed.
As the scholars Jonathan Bradbury and Andrew Davies note, there has been “little fundamental change in the relative underperformance of the Welsh economy [ … ] whether measured in terms of wealth, economic activity, productivity, employment or wage levels.”
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