Vaughan Gething: “The political carpet bombing of the National Health Service in Wales is not new"
6 min read
The state of the NHS in Wales is often used as a political football during debate at Westminster. But Vaughan Gething says the “political carpet bombing” of the health service is nothing new. As the Welsh Health Secretary vies to become the next First Minister, can he convince voters he is the candidate for renewal? He speaks to Nicholas Mairs
The fact that Prime Minister’s Questions draws a larger audience than the Welsh equivalent is unlikely to be disputed. And yet those watching the weekly Commons duel will likely have heard Vaughan Gething’s brief raised frequently amid the fervour. The Labour Health Secretary for Wales, and one of three standing to be the next First Minister, is used to his department forming Theresa May’s stock retort to Jeremy Corbyn on all matters NHS.
“The political carpet bombing of the National Health Service in Wales is not new,” he says.
He recounts David Cameron’s claim that Offa’s Dyke represented “the line between life and death” as a “disgraceful slur and not at all borne out by the evidence”.
“The last time that the OECD looked at healthcare systems in the UK, they said pretty definitively that no one health care system is absolutely better or worse than another, so it simply has not borne out,” he says.
The former amateur cricketer is keen to bat for the sector and cites support from respected bodies such as the Nuffield Trust, the Health Foundation and the Kings Trust in seeking to quash the trope that “everything is awful in Wales”.
Gething accepts that the impact of austerity has taken its toll and rues that each of the UK’s nations has similar challenges to address. But he points out that Welsh moves to bring health and social care together has left the country “in a better place than England”.
As he faces off against colleagues Mark Drakeford and Eluned Morgan in the battle to succeed Carwyn Jones from December, Gething makes clear his aspiration for Wales to lead on the dreaded dilemma of social care funding.
Westminster has been grappling for years to find answers to the problems posed by an aging population. Theresa May’s politically catastrophic ‘dementia tax’ arguably precipitated the Conservatives losing their majority at the 2017 election.
As UK ministers add finishing touches to their latest green paper in a bid to get the ball rolling on a solution, Gething has pledged to bring in Labour’s long-mooted National Care Service in Wales – a proposal he says can be funded by ring-fenced cash, charged from a levy, and which would present a politically winnable argument.
“More and more people are recognising that as we live longer you can’t have people living in undignified care. Those people are voters – but they’re also brothers, sisters, husbands, grandparents and parents and so more and more people recognise that they have a rather more direct interest in the future of social care than might have been the case five or ten years ago,” he says.
His proposal, which needs the backing of the UK government, is markedly bolder than that offered by party colleagues down the M4, who have yet to bring forward a funding plan.
“Well I think if you talk to not just Jeremy Corbyn but to [UK Shadow Health Secretary] Jonathan Ashworth as well then I think you’ll find there’s a real willingness to engage in this debate and to want to understand what our future position should be,” he continues.
“On a UK level we’re a long way from a General Election and having to do that, but if the Tories wanted to have a serious conversation, with us, with the SNP and indeed with the remaining Lib Dems, there’s a space for people to be grownup about this.
“If you look at where the Labour party was at the end of Gordon Brown’s time, he was talking about a National Care Service. What we need to do is agree how we use the different set of powers and responsibilities available to us to deliver something.
“And the other opportunity to support Wales in doing this is that you potentially have an opportunity to look at what we can do as a model for the rest of the United Kingdom. So, there is an opportunity for the UK Labour party to take a look at what we’re doing and to follow the lead that we’ve given as they have done on a number of other areas.”
Gething is acutely aware that impetus for fresh ideas will be needed regardless of who takes Cardiff Bay’s top seat. However, he insists that the leadership contest is less about policy and more about whether voters see you as the candidate for the “future rather than the past”.
It’s a pitch which combines promising radical change with acknowledging that it would come from the established party, one which has enjoyed 20 years of hegemonic status, unmatched by any other national government on these islands.
“We need to demonstrate renewal and I think I can do that. I’m in the position of having had experience within government, in one of the most difficult jobs in the government, so it’s not as if I haven’t been tested,” he says.
“But also, I’m in my mid-40s which is still young for politics and I do think that how we communicate our sense of vision about why it still makes a difference, why our life would be better off if you vote Welsh Labour even in a time of austerity is really important.”
The former employment lawyer and president of the Welsh TUC first canvassed for the party in the run-up to his compatriot Neil Kinnock’s failed attempt to replace John Major in No10 in 1992. Gething insists that his own ambitions for political office did not surface until he was persuaded to stand as a councillor in the early-noughties.
“I wanted to be a lawyer and that was just a straight sense of right and wrong. Obviously I wanted to do other things as well,” he adds.
“I wanted to be a singer and I wanted to be an international cricketer, but my singing is decent karaoke standard and my cricket was fairly decent at club standard but never the ‘make a living and have a career’. But from primary school I wanted to be a lawyer, I went to university with that in mind.
“I got more involved in politics and interested, but that was being interested as opposed to thinking ‘that’s the career I want’ and I joined a trade union and got active in my trade union and I obviously ended up becoming president of the Welsh TUC.”
The “bitterly disappointing” formative years spent in the party however are a reminder to Gething of the importance of a united front. His rival Drakeford is widely viewed as the Corbynite candidate, and Gething is naturally keen to steer clear of defining himself by associations.
“I’m very happy to be described as a democratic socialist, and with some of those labels, if people describe themselves as a social democrat, that automatically ends up being a row within the Labour party that I just don’t think the public at large understand or care about,” he says.
“It’s very simple with most members of the public, because I don’t think they read books on political theory, but they have a real lived experience.”
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