LABOUR CUTS COULD WIPE NEARLY BILLION POUNDS FROM WELSH BUDGET, PLAID CYMRU WARN

The £18 billion spending gap in UK Labour’s recently published manifesto could wipe nearly £1bn from the Welsh Government’s budget, Plaid Cymru Leader Rhun ap Iorwerth MS has warned today.

Speaking ahead of the BBC Leaders’ Debate on Friday evening, Rhun ap Iorwerth MS accused Labour of having a programme for government “devoid of compassion” that could drive thousands more families in Wales into poverty.

Plaid Cymru Leader Rhun ap Iorwerth MS said:

“Between Brexit lies on buses and Downing Street parties during lockdown, it is little wonder that trust in politics is at an all-time low. That’s why honesty is so critical in this General Election campaign, and that’s why Labour and the Tories’ conspiracy of silence on public sector cuts is so deeply disappointing.

“The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that whoever seizes the keys to Number 10 in two weeks’ time, at least £18 billion of cuts are coming down the line.

“Based on our population share, the equivalent cut to Wales’s public services implied by Labour’s spending plans is a staggering £935 million.

“Figures like this are difficult to comprehend so it’s worth examining some equivalent spending. A third of Wales’s total annual schools budget, the annual salaries of more than 25,000 nurses, funding for ten years’ worth of Universal Free Primary School Meals, almost the entire level of Welsh NHS spending on mental health, or more than twice the annual revenue funding for the entire Economy portfolio.

“There are 13 mentions of poverty in Labour’s manifesto, yet seemingly not one policy devised to alleviate a problem which continues to cripple far too many communities. Not even a commitment to scrap the pernicious two-child benefit cap which the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned this week will hit another 670,000 children throughout the UK by 2029. 

“The spectre of an end to 14 years of Tory rule should inspire at least some hope in people longing for a fairer future, but that is regrettably not the case. By publishing a programme so devoid of compassion, Labour is promising more of the same and threatening to wipe almost a billion pounds from the Welsh economy in the process.

“This is no time for ambition is half measures. It was Labour’s own Aneurin Bevan who said that people who stand in the middle of the road get run over. The challenges are too great and the stakes are too high for a change of government to represent little more than a change of furniture in Downing Street.

“We in Plaid Cymru know that this is not as good as it gets for Wales. That is why we are offering real change at this election. Not nudge along Westminster’s sliding scale of austerity, but bold strides to bring about the economic, structural and social transformation required to build a fairer, more ambitious nation.”