The UK could break apart unless it is rebuilt as a “solidarity union” where every citizen’s rights to public services and financial security are protected, the first minister of Wales, has warned.
Mark Drakeford said the social and political bonds that tie the different parts of the UK together have come under “sustained assault” from 40 years of neoliberalism, a trend launched by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and then reinforced after Brexit by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
“In order to persuade people in all parts of the United Kingdom that their futures lie together within a restructured United Kingdom, we have to recreate a solidarity union,” the Welsh Labour leader said in an interview with the Guardian.
That included rebuilding the safety net for those sick or out of work, with fundamental rights, he said, to environment, consumer and trade union protections, to human rights and to affordable public services.
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“We have to rebuild the safety net, so you know that your membership of the United Kingdom entitles you to that collective security that it represents,” Drakeford said, implying that without it, Scotland and Northern Ireland could choose to leave the UK.
“If you move from Scotland to Wales, you know that you will take those fundamental rights with you as part of your citizenship. Those have all been eroded progressively by Tory governments, particularly since 1979.
“The long years of neoliberalism have been a sustained assault on the notion that citizenship means rights and the next Labour government needs to rebuild those rights, to do it explicitly and to say to people, this is what you get – that’s why it is worth belonging [to the UK].”
