ON March 21, Wales’s new First Minister, Vaughan Gething, announced the new Welsh government cabinet. To take up his old portfolio (with some new additions), he has chosen his chief opposition in the Welsh Labour leadership race, Jeremy Miles, whose former responsibilities for education will now be replaced by the economy and energy, while still maintaining his responsibility for the Welsh language as part of his new portfolio.
 
Opportunities to combine work on the Welsh language with work on the economy is an exciting and welcome development. The connection between the economic base and linguistic vitality is indisputable and, although not the only government portfolio necessary for increasing the prominence of Welsh, the shifting of language policy into the domain of the economy could prove to be a crucial aspect of any language revitalisation effort.

However, this will require a stark departure from the status quo in Welsh economic policy, a departure from an embrace of neoliberalism to an economics that rebuilds the social infrastructure, institutions and community spaces that sustain(ed) a plethora of distinctive Welshnesses.
 
A deplorable lack of statutory community rights and an economic agenda intemperately fixated on the pursuit of resource-seeking “investment” from spatially mobile economic actors has thrust workplaces and the communities that have grown around them into uncertainty and, in some cases, active decline which has yet to be arrested. The future of vital areas of the Welsh economy remains precarious.
 
A strategic vision for the Welsh economy
 
The challenges facing the Welsh economy are longstanding and brought into sharp perspective by the fact that after a quarter of a century of policy effort, whatever way we slice it, very little has changed.

As the scholars Jonathan Bradbury and Andrew Davies note, there has been “little fundamental change in the relative underperformance of the Welsh economy [  …  ] whether measured in terms of wealth, economic activity, productivity, employment or wage levels.”

This has, of course, been exacerbated by the long shadow of deindustrialisation and more recent events such as the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, which has actively eroded the livelihoods of many and imposed poverty on many more while facilitating massive upward transferences of wealth.

The Welsh government are not blameless — discontinuity across successive government economic strategies has led to the absence of a coherent and long-term set of priorities. The result of this lack of long-termism in economic and innovation activity is that we know what the problems are, but have no robust systems in place to adequately address them.
 
When developments do emerge, as was recently the case when the former economy minister (now First Minister) unveiled the Welsh government’s “economic missions,” these have been wafer-thin on policy detail and we are told it needs further discussion and a deep-dive by officials.
 
To further illustrate the point, I’ll take the metric of productivity. To their credit, the early Welsh governments of the devolution era did draw up targets in an effort to close the productivity gap with the rest of Britain. However, these have long since been abandoned, and while the Welsh government’s current economic action plan does acknowledge the problem, it does not commit to any specific or meaningful targets to deliver improvements in this area.
 
The evidence base for a new economic model is overwhelming and there are opportunities in Wales to act on this, from massively upscaling our ambitions for the co-operative economy to incubating long-term and impactful innovation, recognising the vital role our universities play in this.
 
Apprenticeships, training and workforce planning
 
Further undermining any strategy the government has is the current position of apprenticeships and training opportunities in Wales. I have written in a previous piece for the Morning Star about the precarious place the apprenticeship and work-based learning sector has been placed in due to a combination of financial constraints and the Welsh government’s failure to adequately inform the sector. Without fully rehearsing the arguments made in that earlier piece here, I would urge readers to take a look for context.

Just a little over a month after the cuts to the apprenticeship Budget had been announced, the Welsh government launched its “economic mission,” with a key emphasis on supporting key sectors and prioritising young people as one of its four priorities, despite the glaringly obvious fact that the former undermines opportunities for thousands of young people across Wales and constricts the talent pipeline for employers.
 
As former minister for education, the now Cabinet Secretary for Economy must provide the conditions for the sector to plan for the long-term and tackle this pressing issue head-on.
 
A just transition for workers
 
The spectre of the Thatcherite economic shocks of the 1980s has loomed over Wales in recent months with the announcements around Tata Steel. Nothing has demonstrated more forcefully the need for a just transition for workers in high-carbon sectors such as steelmaking than this in recent times. Workers, the creators of value in our society, cannot simply be cast aside, and any just transition cannot happen at their expense.
 
In a previous piece for the Morning Star, in conversation and in speeches, I have been vocal on the future of the Welsh steel industry and that the fundamental question of ownership is a vital one. Who exerts primary influence over domestic steel production will be the deciding factor for ensuring the industry’s future and the just transition for its workforce.

The question of who owns what is as pertinent to steel as it is to manufacturing in general, for land, for housing, for community assets, for energy and for utilities. The influence that outside forces have on the Welsh economy is fundamentally inhibiting, and such systemic dysfunction will make it hard for any government to get to grips with.
 
But this, ultimately, it must do.

Luke Fletcher is MS for South Wales West and the Plaid Cymru economy spokesperson. Follow him on Twitter @FletcherPlaid.