Mark Drakeford – 2022 Speech to Labour Party Conference

The speech made by Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales, on 26 September 2022.

Jo, thank you for that very kind introduction and for everything you and our Welsh Labour MPs do and thank you Chair for this opportunity to address conference.

Whenever I come to Liverpool, I’m always glad to be able to say how great it is to be back in North Wales.

And there is a very special reason for that Welsh celebration this year.

This autumn it will be one hundred years since the Labour Party first won a majority of seats in a General Election in Wales.

And we’ve done it in every election across the whole of the century which has followed.

It’s a remarkable achievement, but the celebration is very powerfully accompanied by a growing sense of disappointment and disillusion.

Because, in the 100 years during which Wales has voted, time and time again, for Labour, only 33 of those years have resulted in a Labour Government at Westminster.

The message I bring is a simple one:
The central reason for our Party’s existence;
The reason why our members do those things we ask of them: knocking those doors, delivering those leaflets, making those phone calls is this:
We exist to seek and to win political power.

Not as an end in itself, but because only in that way can we change for the better the lives of those who rely on the Labour Party to fashion that better future for us all.

And, Conference: we can do better.

Whether that’s through a Welsh Labour Government, or a Labour Mayor, or a Labour council, we show every day the difference that Labour can make.

And when we don’t do it, when we don’t win power on their behalf, let’s be clear: we let those people down.

We can carry on winning our own elections in Wales and doing the things which only we can do.

But without a Labour Government at Westminster, the story can never be complete.

And Conference, using the privilege of power, even in the toughest of times, is an obligation, not a choice.

In our local elections in May of this year, while the Tories lost 44% of all the seats they held, we won councils across the country.

For those of you wondering what to do when this Conference is over, I can now offer you the opportunity to walk from the northern shores of Wales to the southernmost tip, without ever leaving territory where Labour is in power.

What a sense of excitement, of new possibility there is when we, at last, are able to put our priorities into practice.

Whenever we’ve had the chance, it is Labour Governments which have shaped the lives of our citizens for the better.

Without Labour in power there would have been no NHS, no National Minimum Wage, no devolution to Wales and Scotland and no peace in Northern Ireland, either.

And, because in Wales we have had the opportunity, we are able to show what a Labour Government can do.

In this Senedd term we won’t be restarting fracking, because we never allowed it in the first place.

But we are paying all our social care workers the real living wage.

And we’ll provide universal free school meals for every child in our primary schools.

Conference, let me just set all this in the context of two current discussions inside our own Party.

First of all, the Senedd, with its unbroken Labour Governments, has always been elected by proportional representation, a system put on the statute book – twice! – by a Labour Government at Westminster.

And, in a special conference, earlier this summer, over three quarters of the entire Welsh Party voted to strengthen the proportionality of our voting system, to make sure that every Labour vote will count towards creating that next Welsh Labour Government.

And secondly, conference, while Labour has always formed the Government in Wales, we’ve never governed alone.

The fault line in Welsh politics runs right down the middle of the Senedd. On the one side, a reactionary, out-of-touch, deeply unloved Conservative Party.

On the other side, those Parties committed to social and economic progress.

Do the Parties of the centre left agree on everything? Of course not.

But we focus on those areas where progressive parties can agree; a politics which recognises the dominant position of Labour, but which also recognises that no Party has a monopoly on progressive ideas.

And, in the face of the dreadful decisions of last week, the obligation to do everything we can to take and exercise power on behalf of that great mass of decent people, the length and breadth of the UK is more powerful than ever.

How has it come to this?

A country in which the rich are rewarded while a cruel and casual kick is aimed at the family struggling by on bare bones Universal Credit.

Conference, of course we are better than this.

People across our country want what we want as a Party: a country in which the broadest backs bear the greatest burden;

Where we protect, not punish, those made vulnerable by sickness or disability or old age;

Where extraordinary windfall profits are put to work for the benefit of us all;

Where borrowing is used to invest in the skills and infrastructure which really create economic growth, not squandered in pursuit of a dogma which has been disproved time and time again around the world.

Today, a fearful United Kingdom looks on in dismay and disbelief at the wreckage caused by a government which they had no hand in creating.

Towards the end of his too-short life, Nye Bevan’s great friend and agent, Archie Lush said to him, ‘you see, Nye, you could have been Prime Minister if you’d wanted to’. Bevan replied, ‘I never wanted to be anything. I wanted to do something’.

And that, Conference, is the simple difference between the Tories and us.

They scrap like ferrets in a sack, just to become Prime Minister.

We want Keir Starmer to be Prime Minister, because we know that he will want to do the things which only Labour can do.

Britain really can be better.

And that’s why nothing is more important for Wales than making sure that happens.