Mike Phipps reviews For Britain See Wales: A Possible Future? by Joe England, published by Parthian.

The United Kingdom is deeply divided. The richest one per cent are wealthier than 70 per cent of the population. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported in January 2024 that six million people in the UK were “in very deep poverty”, an increase of 1.5 million more than there were twenty years earlier.

Social inequality has increased alongside regional differences. The Centre for Cities reports that relative child poverty grew more between 2014 and 2021 in Swansea, Newport and Cardiff than in any other British city. The Trussell Trust says that a fifth of the Welsh population face hunger because they do not have enough money. Unemployment in Wales is the highest among the four UK nations. The greatest inequality in Europe is that between London and the South Wales Valleys.

Brexit has hit the devolved nations hard. In May 2023 a report by the cross-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee of the House of Commons said the devolved nations were significantly worse off than when they were in the EU. A Welsh Government spokesman claimed: “Wales is £1.1bn worse off as a result of the UK Government’s failure to meet its pledge to replace former EU funds in full.”

The Johnson government’s response to this straining of relations between the devolved nations and the centre was to push for greater centralisation. The EU’s approach of basing the allocation of funds to deprived areas on the basis of a mathematical formula was replaced by a more opaque system which took into account the views of local MPs, raising fears of ‘pork barrel politics’.

The future of Tata Steel’s plant in Port Talbot is a good illustration of the Conservative Government’s attitude to Welsh devolution. The  Welsh Government was neither involved in the discussions over the future of the steelworks nor informed that the talks had reached a conclusion.

The lack of the same amount of devolution in Wales as that enjoyed by Scotland and Northern Ireland remains a constant source of friction and impacts on the quality of public services Wales is able to deliver. An Independent Constitutional Commission set up by the Welsh Labour Government called for “parity of esteem between the governments of the UK” and for the devolution of justice, policing and rail services to Wales.

Joe England’s book surveys the history of Wales. The recent decades of deindustrialisation and privatisation have not only hit the nation economically: they have also destroyed an entire culture, including libraries, union welfare services and local chapels and churches.

The author is upbeat about the future. But he is sceptical about the notion that ‘growth’ is the panacea for Wales’s problems, not only because of its unequal outcomes but also because of its harmful ecological consequences.

Already Wales faces some significant environmental challenges. Around 11per cent of its land is at risk of flooding. Cardiff is ranked sixth among world cities in danger from the effects of climate change. Additionally, Wales has more than 40 per cent of all the coal tips in the UK with 294 classed as “high risk”. Although Wales has shown leadership on introducing 20mph speed limits in built-up areas, which has resulted in a significant fall in traffic injuries, the Climate Change Committee, the UK’s independent adviser on tackling climate change, says Wales must do more to meet its targets.

The author has some answers to the challenges Wales faces, including an emphasis on using local businesses (currently half of NHS Wales’s food budget is spent outside Wales). He favours community wealth building, as developed in Preston, for example, where between 2013 and 2017 the amount spent in the local economy increased from £38m to £111m. He has some great ideas on urban regeneration, new energy sources, food production, affordable housing and new jobs.

Yet the constitutional issue looms over all this: how much will the Welsh Government be allowed to get on with? A look through the Welsh Labour Manifesto does not inspire much confidence, unfortunately. For all its talk that Labour will “strengthen the relationship between the governments in Westminster and Wales” and the pledge of more funding, the only specific areas where the Party will devolve more power is employment support funding; devolution of youth justice will merely be considered.

It’s clear that falls a long way short of the devolution of police and justice and fair funding for HS2, all of which have been called for by Labour in the Senedd. As elsewhere, one is left with the distinct impression that the scale of the challenges Wales faces is unlikely to be met by what Keir Starmer is promising.

Welsh Labour Grassroots go further: they want a reform of the Barnett formula which has always structurally disadvantaged Wales as well as “full devolution of the welfare system and the money to back it up.”

Writing recently for Labour Hub, Dylan Lewis-Rowlands, Co-Vice Chair of Welsh Labour Grassroots, called also for the Devolution of the Crown Estates to Wales: “Reform of the Crown Estates has already been promised by Starmer, but this reform does not go far enough. Wales both demands and requires control over its resources, not only to ensure the profits generated are re-invested in Wales, but also to ensure that we can pursue the political direction demanded by the Welsh voters when it comes to their coastlines and estuaries.”

That’s just on the constitutional relationship with the centre. Welsh Labour Grassroots recently mapped out a socialist vision on housing, the environment, health, the economy, poverty, and Wales’s place in the world.

Joe England’s book is a useful contribution to the debate about the future of Wales. The economic and environmental challenges he sets out now stand under the shadow of new political threats, notably the rise of Reform UK, with its cynical anti-politics and scapegoating. Both in Cardiff and Westminster, Labour will need to put forward some bold solutions if it is to tackle these dangers.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.