Woeful Wales
Sir: Allison Pearson succinctly points out the absurdity of the so-called Welsh government and its assembly, now trying to masquerade as a parliament (‘Wales of grief’, 31 October).
For those of us living in Wales it is difficult to talk of the Welsh Assembly without using the F-word: failure. For the past 20 years it has failed the Welsh people at every conceivable level, while building a conceit that it is a true government. The only irony of the current Covid-19 debacle is that for once it has been forced to actually do something instead of talking endlessly around a subject before doing nothing. I have described its failure as the Sadim effect. This is the same as the Midas touch except in reverse: everything of value in Wales that it has interfered with has been reduced in value to the Welsh people.
We have also been betrayed over the past ten years by consecutive Conservative governments in Westminster that have failed to take action on behalf of Wales. They have been content to use the Labour failures in Wales as a convenient way of warning English voters of the risk of another Labour government, while leaving Wales to its ongoing fate. For devolution to really work it cannot be a one-way street whereby ambitious but incompetent regional politicians are granted more and more powers despite repeated failings. They should be stripped of their powers in those areas, such as education and health, where they are falling behind the rest of the UK and failing the people of Wales.
Hugh Wheeldon
Peniel, Carmarthen
Drakeford vindicated
Sir: Allison Pearson affects concern for the country of her birth but it is clear that her attack on the Welsh government’s firebreak is nothing more than a diatribe against Wales’s right and ability to govern itself.
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