MORNING STAR readers with good memories will recall that Mark Drakeford supported Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy for Labour leader and shares his love of allotments. 

He says that, despite dealing with the coronavirus crisis, he still tries to get to his allotment in Cardiff, but the council has restricted access to just one hour. 

“I have to dig very fast,” Drakeford laughingly remarks.

It is that wry sense of humour that has sustained his government’s dealings with the government in Westminster.

Drakeford has written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government to persuade it of the need to have regular and planned meetings with the three devolved governments to deal with the pandemic in a more effective way.

He explains that during the weeks since lockdown there has been lots of contact between his government and Westminster, but it has tended to be ad hoc.

“I would prefer a pattern where every week we had official contact with a meeting of devolved governments only, probably with Michael Gove, and end the week with a Cobra meeting to bring all that together and formalise it.”

The Welsh leader had written to the Westminster government and had just received a response from the Cabinet Office Minister.

“I hope the letter I have received from Mr Gove committing to regular contact with devolved governments means we will have a more intensive set of meetings this week.”

That did not happen during the first weeks of dealing with the pandemic, and Drakeford emphasises that he will be pressing the need for all parts of the UK to be working better together, particularly when the lockdown restrictions are eased.

“Along with the First Minister of Scotland, the First and Deputy First Ministers of Northern Ireland, as well as the Mayor of London, we have had regular contact to share ideas and make sure we know how we are approaching some of the challenges,” he says.

Drakeford took the opportunity in our interview to accuse 12 Welsh Tory MPs who wrote to him last week about the differences in the testing regimes of the two governments of playing party politics over the coronavirus crisis.

The letter from the MPs, whose signatures included former Welsh secretary Alun Cairns, laid bare the tensions between the Labour and Westminster governments.

The First Minister accused the MPs of factual inaccuracies in their letter, which was “partisan and political in nature and misunderstood the public mood.

“I was saddened by the letter because we have been doing our best to work with other parties and share information with them and offer access to government staff and ministers.”

Drakeford absolved the Conservative members of the Welsh Senedd from this criticism. But the First Minister was forthright that the Conservative Party was only “indifferently reconciled to devolution. Scratch the surface and basically they believe we should do what we are told.

“With some members of the Conservative Party there is a sense that for Wales: read England. Every time we do something different to England we have to justify it. 

“My job as first minister is to steer a course that the approach to coronavirus requires a UK response, but it has to be fine-tuned to meet the circumstances in Wales.

“We are definitely following the science here in Wales. You have to use the testing capacity to a purpose and that is where we are seeing a difference with England.”

Drakeford is clear that the 100,000 testing target set by England Health Secretary Matt Hancock was “arbitrary and not particularly rooted in anything scientific.

“It has become a distraction with the attention on whether it will be reached rather than what the number is used for.

“My aim is to work as closely with the other parts of the UK as possible to create common solutions to common problems.

“Coronavirus is no respecter of borders and it isn’t a Welsh problem, it is a global problem, and many of the things we need to do are the same across the UK.”

Drakeford tells the Morning Star that entering lockdown was a UK-wide decision by all the governing administrations and that ending lockdown has to be done in the same way and to the same timetable.

“We need systems in place across the UK because people move around all the time and we need systems in place that talk to each other to be able to make sure contacts can be traced wherever contact takes place.”

The extra cost to the Welsh government of the crisis is already over £2 billion, which includes money from Westminster.

Drakeford explains that the extra money from the Treasury for business-rate relief has been used differently from England.

“We have not offered rate relief for businesses with rateable values of over £500,000, unlike England. If we had done that in the same way, many millions would have gone to companies like Tesco, Asda and other large companies. 

“We took that money away from those businesses, and it has all gone to help small and medium-sized enterprises where smaller amounts of money make a real difference between going under and surviving.”

The First Minister is candid about the scale of the economic problem facing Wales after the lockdown, where not every company will survive.

“We have particular anxiety in Wales about manufacturing industry because we have a higher percentage of our economy reliant on it.”

The Welsh government is looking to the post-coronavirus future and Drakeford has appointed former prime minister Gordon Brown to a taskforce that includes Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Dr Rebecca Heaton of the UK Committee on Climate Change. 

“One of the key remits of the taskforce is equality. We want to look at the environment and how we can come out of this in a way that does not just shove to one side the impact of global warning and its impact in Wales.

“We want to set up a group that will be a challenge to our thinking and we wanted to draw together a group of people that will bring us different and new ideas.

“We will be looking at a future where there is economic, social and environmental justice and where the needs of the people at the front line come first.”

Drakeford is also clear that he is sure the Tories will revert to neoliberal type after the current crisis is over and will be looking to claw back the money spent through failed austerity measures and inequality.

“If Labour is to succeed, then we have to set out a different vision of the future, valuing the things that are of greatest value but not going back to old failed ways.

“You do not look at this experience and say: ‘How do we get back to where we were?’ You look at the experience and say: ‘How do we get to where we would like to be’?”