Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth chose Wrexham as the first stop on his new national tour last week, kickstarting a series of public meetings aimed at gathering views from across Wales ahead of next year’s Senedd election.
Speaking to Wrexham.com in a very quick chat shortly before the event, Mr ap Iorwerth said the “Leaders Tour” is about listening to people directly, shaping Plaid Cymru’s vision for government, and offering an alternative to what he called the “establishment politics” of Labour and Reform rising in the polls.
We pointed to a similar style ‘listening tour‘ by the First Minister Eluned Morgan, which had some critics, and asked what the difference was with his and what he hoped to achieve with the meeting and future tour.
I’m not going to pitch myself versus whatever the First Minister did last year.
This is, from my point of view, a part of what I do every day in politics, all about listening to people, being in tune with what is important to people.
We don’t put together a programme for government for our own sake, we do it because we think there are issues that need resolving, and they need innovative answers to resolve them. All that intelligence comes from the people that we serve.
What we’re doing now though – and Wrexham is the first date on this particular tour – in the build-up to what will be a very, very significant election to the Senedd in May next year, I will be visiting every constituency, in every part of Wales, telling people, showing people that wherever they are, their views matter and their concerns matter, and that I want a Plaid Cymru government to reflect what’s in the interests of the people of Wales.
It is great to be here in Wrexham with the first one today, just before the Eisteddfod as well, a busy summer for Wrexham.
Wrexham is a big part of our plans for the future of Wales.
The trends in polls have Reform going from 1% to the high twenties, and even leading some recently. We asked if we are now in an age of full personality politics, and as there does not appear to be a clear ‘face’ of Reform in Wales, would that mean it would be Rhun ap Iorwerth v Nigel Farage. If so, does he have the personality and profile for that electoral battle.
It does seem as if it’s Plaid Cymru versus Reform when it comes to who will take that mantle from Labour as the leading party in Wales.
Labour has led Welsh Government for all the years of devolution, 26 years. It’s not normal for one political party to be in the driving seat for that long.
People have understood that we need a change. They are the establishment in Wales, and what we have now is a challenge to the establishment.
The challenge in Wales comes from two places which make Wales more interesting politically than England, certainly in this election.
But, there is only one challenge that’s made in Wales. Reform is a product of what’s happening in global politics at the moment. It’s happening everywhere from Trump to Hungary to Argentina, to wherever you want to look.
There has been this growth of right-wing populism offering what appears to be simple answers to very, very complex issues.
What Reform have isn’t made in Wales. They don’t even have candidates in Wales. They don’t have a leader in Wales.
What we have in Plaid Cymru is a party that absolutely focuses on what’s in our interests as a nation.
So yes, it is two parties, but two fundamentally different parties, and it’s Plaid Cymru that’s in the driving seat to lead Welsh Government from next year, and that’s what makes this a particularly important time in Welsh politics.
We cited an exchange in the Senedd earlier this month with Gareth Davies MS, where Rhun ap Iorwerth was accused of ‘hypocrisy’ for apparently ‘fundamentally disagreeing’ with Labour yet ‘propping up’ the administration and a direct question on if ‘any future deals’ would be ruled out. No clear answer was given. Referencing his earlier answer about ‘the establishment’, we asked if he would rule it in or out, and how he would convince people Plaid Cymru are entirely separate.
I get it, because we have this thrown at us every day by the Conservatives who, of course, have been in the Senedd or Assembly previously for 26 years and achieved precisely nothing. They decided that their role is to just shout from the sidelines.
People who understand how political systems like ours work, where there has never been a party with a majority, understand that there needs to be an element of cooperation.
Cooperation can be between parties that don’t particularly see the world in the same way on everything, but they know that there needs to be an element of stability. Otherwise, we have elections every few months and that is not in anybody’s interests.
So what we have over 26 years of devolution in Wales, Plaid Cymru has been in coalition once, actually nearly 20 years ago, around 2007 to 2011 the Lib Dems have been in coalition for 12-ish years, and there have been periods of more informal cooperation, just to give that stability.
But, it’s Labour that’s led government all those years. It’s Labour that has set the tone for Welsh Government all those years.
What we’re saying now is we’re offering a different kind of leadership, a new tone, a high level of ambition for Wales, a new level of energy and new and fresh ideas, which we need after 26 years.
If nobody gets a majority, though, there has to be some sort of cooperation that can take many, many different forms to provide stability.
But we’re asking people to focus on what leadership by Plaid Cymru would look like, and what it would mean for them.
There appears to be a marked difference to political campaigning, with a very visible slick active Reform online campaign appearing to resonate with some locally. We contrasted that to Plaid Cymru’s campaign and asked how they were going to demonstrate the apparent difference in that environment.
You are right. It is also a heck of a well-funded machine. We know that it’s a party that’s funded very generously by, for example, the oil and gas companies, who want to make sure that they have a friendly government in place.
They have an awful lot of money. They can channel their UK money into Wales to try to buy Wales votes in Wales. We are not in that field in terms of money to throw at elections.
What we can do though, is have a very distinct message, use our money wisely in terms of how we use our social media pretty effectively in very different ways from Reform.
I also get bots and all sorts just shouting ‘vote Reform’ all the time. That is not political debate, that is not political discourse.
I’m interested in actually talking to people, persuading them that we have a different vision for for Wales, that we actually have a vision for Wales that Reform don’t have, but we have to do the work on the ground.
We can’t throw a million at social media here, a million at something else. We knock those doors and we have those conversations.
We hold this series of public meetings that will go to every single constituency in Wales between now and the election, because that’s how we win people over to understand what our vision is.
It’s two completely different parties that work in completely different ways.
Moving more locally, the issues with the local health board are well documented and long standing. We pointed to extra cash, changes in process and personnel and other attempts to change things. We asked how as First Minister how he would sort things out, and what his solution would be.
It is a massive issue, and we have to admit that because of the depth of the problems that have been left with us by successive Labour ministers, it’s not something that’s going to be resolved overnight.
We have done a heck of a lot of work, and have actually published the work that we want to do around strengthening everything, from cooperation between health boards to make sure that we can focus the resources on where they need to be.
We need to build the workforce in a sustainable way, to get governance right, because I don’t think health is working as effectively as it could in Wales.
It’s about doing all those things, bringing in the regional centres that will help move more quickly through diagnostics and care and so on.
But, it’s also about making that investment right now in the preventative agenda, making us a healthier nation.
I’ve said we will increase the preventative spend year on year. Preventative spend has been cut in recent years by Labour. We are never going to have a sustainable health service if we become an become an ever less healthy nation.
That takes some time, but we need to change that direction. I’ve talked about a revolution in preventative healthcare. We absolutely need to be taking that seriously, or we’re just going to be going round and round in circles.
I have no illusions about what the size of the challenges that have been left to us. I am confident, though, with the kinds of tweaks that we talk about, the kinds of changes around the way the NHS is run, we can make headway.
Wrexham.com readers will be well aware of local council budget problems, reflected across Wales, in part driven by ever rising and often un-budgetable social costs. Often those council budget holes then fall on council tax payers, or service cuts, to help plug gaps. As it feels something significant needs to change, we asked how he saw social care funding in the future.
Plaid has been at the forefront of a lot of the debate on how you bring social care and health together.
We have made it very, very clear that you will not have a sustainable NHS until you have a social care sector that works properly.
We’re going through work on which of those models works best, in terms of making sure that health and local government work together.
What’s key, and we will get to grips with the issue, currently you have people being protective of their own budgets, when we need to be thinking of these budgets as effectively single budgets run by different parts of the public service, but with everybody pulling in the same direction.
We are actively looking at which of those models we’ll put in place in order to make that work.
I’ve been into the ‘huddle’ as they call it in Ysbyty Gwynedd a number of times, where they go through the morning checks, including how many people in that hospital didn’t need to be there.
On the couple of days that I’ve been there, they had nearly 100 people in that hospital who were medically fit for discharge, and that’s why you have a dozen ambulances queuing up outside.
Unless you can have that step-down facility and you’re properly investing in social care, you’re not going to resolve the problem in hospitals.
Looking at Plaid Cymru’s manifesto and pledges there are several mentions where ‘fair funding from Westminster’ would be used to fund transport, the NHS, green jobs and ‘prosperity’. Similarly devolution of the Crown Estate would they say help cover costs of the ‘green agenda’. We pointed out that a lot of those fundamental changes to enable that are out of his control even if he became First Minister, and if it was setting up the blame game for the future when they don’t happen.
No. It is very, very important that people understand in Wales where the buck stops on some of these issues.
We’ve had a situation since July last year when with a Welsh Labour government protecting, if you like, their bosses in Westminster by not wanting to rock the boat too much, not wanting to point the finger of blame.
I want to have a very constructive relationship with the UK Prime Minister if I were the First Minister for Wales.
But it has to be a relationship where I do not hold back in pointing out what UK Government needs to do in order to allow us to move things forward in Wales.
The very best example recently is the decisions around the comprehensive spending review on rail investment.
Now we had £440 million set aside for rail in Wales over the next 10 years, and Welsh Labour government claimed this as a huge triumph that we all ought to be grateful for.
Within minutes, every commentator, expert, student of the investment that’s been lost in rail in Wales, could see that this was a drop in the ocean of what we were owed historically and what would be our share of spending on rail in England.
HS2 is a very good example of it – and the Oxford to Cambridge line, wrongly being a designated England and Wales was another one.
We have to have a First Minister in Wales who calls that out.
Unless you call it out, UK Government has no incentive to change.
That’s the kind of change in emphasis, the change in tone that you’d get from a Plaid Cymru government, that you would never get from Labour who, at the end of the day, don’t want to cause trouble for their bosses in London.
We had a list of about twenty more questions, but time was against us with an engagement in Brymbo next on the Plaid Cymru tour. We raised one point that Wrexham.com readers appear to often cite on Plaid Cymru, as well as a wider hot topic – migration – and asked for clarity on his position as First Minister. Plaid Cymru state they would ‘make good on our pledge to become a Nation of Sanctuary‘, as well as saying they would look to bring in “our own Shortage Occupation List and granting the Welsh Government the ability to manage its own visa schemes“.
I am very, very keen for us in Plaid Cymru, to be talking about migration, what it means to people, and telling people that we understand why there are concerns.
I’m concerned about the loss of control over inward migration into the UK that we’ve seen under Labour and Conservatives in recent years, and that has no doubt been stoked up for their own political reasons, by the politicians on the right and become a big political issue.
Plaid Cymru also wants to make sure that we control our borders properly. Plaid Cymru wants to make sure that the resource goes in to make sure we’re able to process people, and decide who genuinely is fleeing persecution and needs to be protected.
Plaid has a proud record of wanting to be that refuge for people who are fleeing war or famine – these are international obligations that we in Plaid take seriously. We take Wales’ place in the world very, very seriously.
But there has been a weaponising of these issues by the right.
The Nation of Sanctuary, for example, is a UK wide concept, a campaign that has nothing whatsoever to do with migrant numbers or increasing the numbers of migrants.
It’s about saying where there are people who end up in Wales or other cities in England or other countries around the world, where they do end up there, we’ll treat them with respect and provide them with a kind of support that is expected under international law whilst they are being considered for asylum.
Now, the other side of it is asylum seeking, the other is economic migration and people looking for work – you mentioned wanting migrant visas.
That’s because we have needs in Wales, perhaps, that they don’t have in other parts of the UK – greater needs within the care sector.
We want to be able to set those thresholds ourselves and say, listen in this sector – whilst the priority will be to train up our own workforce to do those jobs – we for the time being need some more people to come in.
The thresholds, the pay, the skills gaps, might be different in Wales from England. So that’s what calling for those visas ourselves means.
It’s being able to control it ourselves, but we have to be very, very wary of the weaponisation of this whole agenda.
I get the genuine concerns, but we’ve got to not allow people to sow division between us, when I think as a nation, we have shown over the years that we are tolerant and wish to be tolerant.
Time was up, and as always Wrexham.com hope to bring you more quick Q&As with all party leaders and candidates where possible during the Senedd campaign. Make sure you are registered to vote and exercise your democratic right to have your say!
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