How do you feel your time studying Latin at Kent influenced your politics?
Kent in those days was at the tail end of the 60s student militancy; much of my first year was spent with people sitting in and that sort of thing. Debates in the student union were between the broad left, which certainly didn’t include the labour party, and the International Marxist Group as to whether the working classes of Canterbury were about to rise. I used to sit there suggest we ought to go out and ask all five of them! Student politics didn’t interest me at all given its remoteness and the reality of what was happening in the world.
What do you think the link between Classics and politics?
In classical education you are studying rhetoric from 2000 years ago and when you are reading Latin authors you are aware of the way they construct sentences and use language. Politicians ply their trade through words and Latin does give you insight into the way language can be used for persuasive purposes. I must say Latin has not been of a daily advantage to me.
How has Cardiff changed since 1979?
The city was in a way still in recovery from the post war austerity and I think it has changed in so many ways. When I worked in Ely in 1979, it was very multicultural and had the largest council estate in Europe at the time. Men worked in the paper mill and women worked in the hospital. Those two employers dominated the working experience for people. People left school at 15, with schools having very little ambition, with the expectation being that these people would work in the same occupation as their parents. The city is more buyout and multicultural and attractive city. For the size of it, it has a thriving cultural, arts and sports. All the things’ people enjoy out of work are available in Cardiff which is quite the contrast from 1979.
Are you concerned about the clampdowns on university freedoms?
It is an ambiguously politically driven set of arrangements by a conservative government appealing to people on its own right wing. They are keen on freedom of speech so long as it’s the freedom to express the things they believe in. These are people who want to control what you read, control what you see, control what you get up to in your bedroom think de-platforming people is something you should do in very rare circumstances. I can vividly remember going to hear Mary Whitehouse speak at Kent and she was howled down and unable to speak. All this resulted in was an enormous public relations triumph for her with all the coverage not focusing on critiques but the idea of her being victim to an unruly mob.
What do you feel the key issues are with the NHS?
My view is that its money. Up until 2010 we spent the same proportion of national income as say Germany and France which saw unprecedented public satisfaction. Ever since then, the gap between what we spend domestically compared to nations abroad has widened and is wider than it has been in this whole century. The NHS has been running on empty because the government will not invest in it and that lack of investment means we have exhausted staff who are being asked to double their efforts to deal with the backlog from the pandemic. The number of the people on the waiting list fell last month and the total number of people on the waiting list had risen by 0.4% last year compared to 5.9% in England. We need capital investment in order to offer people the service they need, modern buildings and modern equipment.
How would you say cooperation was between Number 10 and the devolved governments?
I would describe it as frustratingly variable. There were points when cooperation was good such as when COBRA meetings were regularly held but then there would be acres of time with no contact at all. Why the UK government was never prepared to institutionalise a bedrock of regular contact is very hard to understand, although in the inquiry we are starting to see some clues. I wrote to the PM early on that there ought to be regular meetings once a month where we would share information and I never had a reply. I initially felt it was due to the chaotic nature that came as a result of people working flat out and that the letter was buried under a pile of horse and hound magazines or whatever they were reading at Number Ten. It turned out there was a whole meeting about this letter in which they positively decided not to agree as that would have given the impression the PM was on a par with other leaders of Britain. For status driven reasons that was unfathomable to me, they decided not to have a pattern of engagement that would have helped us all.
What were the key factors for devolution in 1997?
One of my predecessors Rhodri Morgan said many times in this office that Mrs Thatcher was the greatest recruiting sergeant of devolution. During debates on devolution, if you said at the end, you’ll never see Mrs Thatcher back ruling Wales they were all for it. In some ways it is a remarkable turnaround. It is the experience of all those years of Conservative rule despite Wales never giving them a mandate, yet the nation receives the full unmitigated impact of policy which have not been endorsed by people in Wales. The first priority of a Labour government ought to be to entrench the devolution settlement in a way that makes it less vulnerable than it has been shown to be over the past five years where we have seen money and power taken away from Wales. I’m in favour of devolution of criminal justice to Wales which I understand is a long-term process and cannot happen overnight. I’m very keen we embark on that journey. The Gordon Brown report recommends job centres should be run by the Welsh government. We would run job centres very differently – we would have them be places where people felt they were supported, helped, and invested in if they need training.
What alternatives would you like to have seen to austerity implemented in 2010?
The alternatives were plain to see – if you look at the way the American economy was steered after 2008 was completely different. They used Keynesian approaches and did the simple thing of government spending money during economic contractions. We had an economic crisis on the one hand and a government who imposed austerity on top of it – which was effectively having one problem and making it worse. This was the equivalent of medieval medicine where they would bleed patients. Our current discontents are very much linked to Osbourne’s time as chancellor who I feel gets off very lightly in the public prints. We would have been far better off with a straightforward Keynesian approach in which government invested money in soaking up the economic slack with infrastructure projects and finding jobs for people which would have stimulated economic recovery.
Do you have any more faith in our economic systems to withstand repeats of 2008?
I’m a socialist and have been throughout my political life. If you’re a socialist, you believe that markets are good servants but bad masters and what we have allowed is markets to become the master. I don’t believe that, and I think there is a large space for markets to work but they have to be regulated in the public interest because they don’t naturally work in the public interest, do they? Their natural tendency is to monopoly and to be a conspiracy against the public. That’s why the job of government is to regulate markets in a way that makes the public interest a powerful player in the way that markets operate which we have stood back form ever since Mrs Thatcher. Look at the scandal of water in England and the private companies monopolising something people cannot live without into a debt-ridden brink of crisis service where all the money is ciphered off to the continental governments. When you allow markets to be in charge, you get outcomes that are not in the public interest. With government regulation, markets will do their job and deliver some beneficial outcomes.