Macron's visit to Britain reflects much-improved relations
Additional audio courtesy of Alexander Seale @alexseale.
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Wales Online
5 minutes ago
- Wales Online
'We were right on 20mph, Brexit was wrong and Nigel Farage would be a disaster for Wales'
'We were right on 20mph, Brexit was wrong and Nigel Farage would be a disaster for Wales' Departing Welsh Government cabinet member Julie James gave her no holds barred take as she prepares to leave frontline politics Julie James meeting school children at Lisvane and Llanishen reservoirs in 2021 (Image: Patrick Olner) When Julie James speaks, people listen, not only in terms of her Senedd contributions, where she is more than happy to put her opponents in their place, but her cabinet colleagues too - especially since First Minister Eluned Morgan made her "minister for delivery" a year ago. It is the sort of title possibly more suited for a spoof sitcom, but it's also the sort of job you can only give someone you know will ruffle feathers if that's what is needed. A member of Labour for almost 52 years, she also holds sway in the political party. She was, after all, one of the resignations on that July day last year that signalled to Vaughan Gething he could not resist any longer, and within hours he had quit as First Minister of Wales. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here . Her official Senedd biog reads: "Julie is a committed green campaigner, environmentalist and a keen swimmer and skier. Julie is a member of Unison and is also a member of Gray's Inn" - a varied mix indeed. She has lived around the world, but moved back to Swansea to raise her three children. Professionally she has worked as a lawyer, been assistant chief executive of Swansea council. Now, the clock on her time in frontline politics is ticking, as she is one of the 13 Labour Senedd members who will not seek re-election in May's election. Article continues below Entering politics was a long held ambition, and she finally did it at 53. Brought up in a political household, her father was a Labour Party councillor and trade unionist and, in her words, both her parents were "both crazy climate change activists". It's probably no surprise she is also a lifelong vegetarian, something she describes as being "very bloody weird" when she was growing up. "I've always very firmly been of the view, right from when I was 16, if you want to change something, you have to stay in it. 'Perseverance is everything' "It's a conversation we have all the time, if you've resigned from the Labour Party in principle, then you can't vote for the candidate or make sure the people who believe what you believe are the ones who represent you. So, well done with your principle, but now you don't have a voice. "I've always thought having a voice is important and I've also thought, perseverance is everything. I'm nothing if not persistent. "Some things take a long time. I've been a member of the campaign for one member, one vote, [an internal Labour party voting system] since I joined, we got that in 2018. Fifty years is a long time to be persistent. You get there in the end. I've always been like that." During the pandemic, Julie James was Mark Drakeford's climate change minister (Image: Patrick Olner) Before standing for election to the Senedd she had what she calls a "perfectly good career". A former environmental regulation lawyer, she admits her time in the cabinet "hasn't worked out as quite the little retirement job I had in mind". But had always wanted to do it, when her predecessor in the Swansea West seat, Andrew Davies, said he was standing down "serendipity" saw her selected, and then elected. But six months after being elected, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She kept working. "What are you going to do if you're not working? Sitting at home looking at the wall wondering if you' that's no good for me at all," she said. She had four operations during her treatment, but once she was better, told Carwyn Jones she was ready to join his cabinet. She is now serving her fourth First Minister, with roles like skills and science, local government all on her CV, but the role created for her by Mark Drakeford, whose leadership election campaign she chaired, is her passion despite some very vocal opponents. In his tenure Mr Drakeford axed the M4 relief roads, placed a ban on new roads, set new targets for recycling and net zero, and who can forget it her department, and her deputy Lee Waters who brought in Wales' 20mph law, for example. Public opinion didn't deter her. "I suppose I always felt we were doing the right thing. You get a lot of crap from people who want you to do something that isn't the right thing. "I put a lot of stock by having done the right thing. So yes, we did things that were unpopular. The 20mph is a classic because it has saved tens of lives. It has stopped thousands of people's lives from being changed across Wales. Everyone in Wales now has at least a 10% drop in their insurance, that's the most successful policy we've ever had and sod it, some people didn't like it I did," she said. 'Sheer hypocrisy' The brief was massive, and her deputy, Lee Waters, has since admitted the toll, fronting that policy took on him personally. She says she tried to persuade him from fighting every battle. "There were some people you can persuade and there are lots of people you can't persuade. Don't try, just stick to your guns quietly, carefully, sluggishly, persistently and you'll get there. You don't have to do the warrior thing but it suits some people. "I'm quite happy to quietly do it in the background." For those who watch Senedd regularly, her contributions are the ones you turn your head to watch. She cannot hold back, particularly when the Conservative opposition speaks. She cannot, she says, bear their "hypocrisy". "The Tories spend a lot of time telling us that we should do things faster, whilst also we should cut all the taxes and we should pump a lot of money into businesses that don't need it, take it away from people who do need it, and at the same time we should have done a lot more on, I don't know, salt marshes or something. "That doesn't add up and it's just the sheer hypocrisy." Julie James MS speaking to Conservative Andrew RT Davies MS during the first day of Welsh Parliament at the Senedd in Cardiff Bay in 2021 (Image: Ben Evans/Huw Evans Agency) "The Tory group in the Senedd does my head in a bit because they backed the UK Government big time. Lots of them backed Liz Truss, lots of them publicly. They backed Brexit and then at the same time they stand up in the Senedd and they shout at us about the fact that austerity is cutting our money, crippling our communities, knackering our health service. Brexit has done our trade in. "I can't bear it." But the threat in 2026 to Labour isn't the Tories, they face their own battle to get any seats, but Labour faces a two pronged attack from Plaid on the left, and Nigel Farage's Reform on the right. She knows the threat Reform brings. "It's the same thing as Brexit, isn't it? We failed on Brexit and we failed on Brexit because we didn't understand that a lot of people, just taking Swansea for an example, a lot of people in Swansea could see the largesse of the European Union, they could see the universities they could see, but they had no share in it. "They can see that some people are doing alright out of it, but they aren't. Many worked, for example, in facilities in the university, for example but they were having their hours and wages cut while they could see in their world other people very well out of it. "If you don't share it out, then obviously the people who aren't getting a share are angry, rightly angry, and that's what's happening across the Western developed world and with Reform. 'Taken down a path' "We have a society that, on the one hand, is getting technologically more competent, wealthier, with nicer lives, longer lives and so on and a huge section of that society is sick and poor and struggling and they're bloody hungry. "They're being taken down a path by demagogues who are doing it for their own purposes, and they're going to make their lives worse. "Brexit is a perfect example of that. Nobody can point me to anything that Brexit has done isn't a disaster and of course, if you put that to some of the people who backed it, they say, 'well, it wasn't done properly'. What an absolute nonsense. Isn't that the same as Reform, what they're promising might, on a very surface level, make some sense." Get daily breaking news updates on your phone by joining our WhatsApp community here . We occasionally treat members to special offers, promotions and ads from us and our partners. See our Privacy Notice She speaks of a Reform pledge to give non-doms a chance to avoid paying some UK taxes, by paying a £250,000 fee, and income from the measure would be transferred annually tax-free to the bank accounts of the lowest paid 10% of full-time workers. "Until you talk to people about it and you say, 'well, actually most non-doms would be paying a great deal more than that, they should be paying 40% of their income all the time, and ask 'Do you know how many people in Wales are on the minimum wage?' Think how much it is to give them £10 each per week, which would have to be the absolute minimum for it to make a difference. "When you do that on the doorstep, some people will listen to that but lots of them won't and they'll say they've had a gutsful of 'you lot'. "Until we can get some trust in mainstream politics we've got a problem. We've had 14 years of people shouting at each other, a lot of misinformation. There's no trust in that, people promising them the 'Big Society' or whatever the hell the Johnson one was. it doesn't mean anything to anyone." But, I put it to her, UK Labour has been as guilty, promising change but delivering it via a series of policies which have been deeply unpopular. "Absolutely," she concedes. "UK Labour have come in and they have made a series of decisions which have undermined trust in mainstream politics. They're new. They have four more years to fix it. They will fix it," she is. "But, Labour here is bearing the brunt of that," she said. As deputy skills minister in 2015 Julie James said she was passionate about women in science (Image: Western Mail) When we met, a poll had not long put Labour's support in Wales for the Senedd election at 18%. That is not, she said, being projected on the doorsteps to such a degree but there shouldn't be a lot of hope taken by Labour by that. "In the 80s we used to have 'shy Tories' where people would swear blind they weren't going to vote for Thatcher and clearly were. And we're getting those but for Reform." Her Swansea patch can, broadly, be split into the northern part of the constituency which is mainly social housing or council homes, and the south, with people who work in the university, the hospital or council. It is a patch which tells the story of the threat to Labour in Wales, quite succinctly with the Reform threat in the north, but the Plaid, Green, Lib Dem threat in the south. "What people might think is, 'we don't need Welsh Labour because they're going to win so I can indulge myself in a protest vote', so I spend a lot of time reminding people what happened in Gower when 1,000 people voted Green and they got a Tory MP for the first time in a hundred years. "I personally rang up quite a lot of people and said, 'how's that working out for you?'" The signs are all there that Labour will have a tough time in the election for which she won't be a candidate. "What we've got to do is give people something positive to vote for. I do not want people to vote Labour because it's the least worst option. We've got to do something that means you actually believe in us, which I think we can do. And secondly, we've got to persuade them that even if they're a bit sceptical about that, swapping to a different party and splitting the progressive vote, will put a Reform government into Wales." One of the many narratives she says she cannot tolerate is about immigration and limiting immigration, particularly in Wales. 'This immigration thing does my head in' "In truth, my own view is that Wales should have its arms wide open and say, 'Come, come, come, come, come in numbers' and if you're young, working age, of breeding age, come. We need those people, we need a lot of them. The more highly skilled, the better. And by highly skilled, I mean skilled in care as well as skilled in technology. "The immigration thing just does my head in. I just don't understand why anyone in Wales is even remotely worried about immigration. It's tiny and the immigrants who come to Wales have hugely enriched our society. "Without the Ukrainians where would our care system be?" She is one of those who has seen a new, upstart party come into Welsh politics. In 2016, she saw the Ukip contingent arrive in the Senedd and admits the challenge posed by a new, inexperienced party, was probably good for the institution - in some ways. "For the first time in ages we had to argue from first principles why we were doing what we did," she said. "We didn't have a broad consensus that we could build from. We had people saying that they fundamentally didn't agree with it and I think that's actually quite a decent discipline to have to do". But she saw the weaknesses too. As the group splintered, they did not pull their weight on committees, she says. "They were really disruptive and not because they had an ideology we didn't like but because they were chaotic. "Actually an enormous amount of the work of the Senedd, like any Parliament goes on in the committee rooms behind closed doors and it's long and boring and tedious and very important indeed. On a visit to Coleg Gwent as deputy skills minister in 2016 (Image: Coleg Gwent) "You have to spend hours and hours going through long, awful documents and acts and they didn't show up and the Senedd is tiny so the burden on everybody else is high." She has seen the government machine, first hand for years, what, I ask her, would it mean for the government - away from the political people - if a party like Reform took over. "There's some danger anyway because there's a lot of us leaving," she said. "Even if Labour had its normal share in the polls and whatever, we'd have a lot of new faces coming in." There is work in the government buildings preparing for a new administration, about providing advice and briefings. "You want a government that's got the right information in front of it and so on." But they have also, she said, been putting measures in place so laws cannot be rowed back on easily. "We've been trying to embed a lot of things. We'll make them harder to get rid of, if I'm absolutely honest. I spend a lot of time working through legislation, making sure it's been implemented, and it would have to actually have primary legislation to repeal it so it would be much harder to just turn the ship back the other way. "In the end, we can't prevent them from doing that, but we can make it harder. "I think a Reform government would be a disaster. If they were to do any of the things they're saying, and who knows whether they would, because their policy platform is fluid, at the moment. They're saying that they would abolish the NHS and replace it with an insurance based system. That's pretty disastrous for an old, poor, sick country like Wales, where most people have a pre-existing condition, probably couldn't get insurance or afford it or whatever. "They would absolutely, definitely stop free prescriptions, free parking at hospitals. They would stop the nationalisation of the trains and the buses. "You'd go backwards very quickly. I suspect they would, as they have done in some of the councils they've taken control of, try to stop, as they have done in America, the diversity, inclusion and equality programmes. Article continues below "They would afterwards realise what they'd done and try to scramble to put them back. I think they'd starve public services of money. We protect our local authorities. Most people in Wales do not understand how bad the local authority situation in England actually is."
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Sir Keir Starmer and his allies have no choice but to keep their Trump criticisms implicit
Sir Keir Starmer is straining his diplomatic sinews to simultaneously praise Donald Trump's efforts to end the war in Ukraine, while repeating calls for a completely different approach - one which ends the cosy bonhomie with Vladimir Putin, threatens the Russians with sanctions, and puts the Ukrainians back centre stage. If that's a message which feels like quite a stretch in writing, in person, during this morning's call of international leaders, it must have been even more awkward. Donald Trump 's public dismissal of the Europeans' previous calls for a ceasefire - after his tete-a-tete with Putin - has only highlighted divisions. Of course, the prime minister and his European allies have no choice but to keep their criticism of the Alaskan summit implicit, not explicit. Even as they attempt to ramp up their own military preparedness to help reinforce any future peace deal, they need President Trump to lead the way in trying to force President Putin to the negotiating table - and to back up any agreement with the threat of American firepower. For Downing Street, President Trump's new willingness to contribute to any future security guarantee is a significant step, which Starmer claims "will be crucial in deterring Putin from coming back for more". It's a commitment the prime minister has been campaigning for for months, a caveat to all the grand plans drawn up by the so-called Coalition of the Willing. While the details are still clearly very much to be confirmed, whatever comments made by Donald Trump about his openness to help police any peace in Ukraine have been loudly welcomed by all those present, a glimmer of progress from the diplomatic mess in Anchorage. 5:08 Of course, the promise of security guarantees only means anything if a peace deal is actually reached. At the moment, as the European leaders' bluntly put it in repeating Donald Trump's words back to him: "There's no deal until there's a deal." 8:31 Fears of Zelenskyy being painted as warmonger There is clearly real concern in European capitals following the US president's comments that the onus is now on Volodymyr Zelenskyy to 'do a deal', that the Ukrainians will come under growing pressure to make concessions to the Russians. As former defence secretary Ben Wallace said: "Given that Donald Trump has failed to deliver a deal, his track record would show that Donald Trump then usually tries to seek to blame someone else. I'm worried that next week it could be President Zelenskyy who he will seek to blame. "He'll paint him as the warmonger, when in fact everybody knows it's President Putin." The European leaders' robust statements describing the "killing in Ukraine" and Russia's "barbaric assault" are an attempt to try to counter that narrative, resetting the international response to Putin following the warmth of his welcome by President Trump - friendlier by far than that afforded to many of them, and infinitely more than the barracking President Zelenskyy received. They'll all be hoping to avoid a repeat of that on Monday.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Unless he can fix things at home, Keir Starmer will get no credit for his diplomatic skill
All prime ministers end up being their own foreign secretary. Keir Starmer started off as one. He has been moderately successful in foreign affairs, but has gained no credit for it from the British electorate. He has played a role in rallying Europe to the defence of Ukraine. This bore fruit at what we might call the half-baked Alaska summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The meeting failed to end the war in Ukraine, but that also means that President Trump did not sell out the Ukrainian people, which he has threatened to do. We cannot be sure how important European voices, including the British one, were in holding the line, but it seemed as if the conference call Trump held with European leaders on Wednesday was a significant moment. The briefing from the Europeans was almost ecstatic: that the US president seemed to recognise that a peace on Putin's terms was unacceptable, and that it was Putin who was the obstacle to a fair settlement. Starmer has played a surprising role in organising that show of European unity. Surprising, because so many of those who wanted Britain to stay in the EU argued that leaving would diminish our standing in the world. On the contrary, Starmer's diplomacy has vindicated the Brexiteers who said we could be more nimble, more creative and more assertive outside. Precisely because Britain is not a member of the EU, Starmer was better able to overcome EU disunity by assembling his 'coalition of the willing' to pledge solidarity with Ukraine, backed up by plans for (some) higher European defence spending. He was able to do it because the British people are so supportive of the Ukrainian cause. That allowed him to finesse the two possible sticking points in giving practical expression to that support. As with a lot of opinion-poll findings, the British are very supportive of the Ukrainians until it starts to cost them a noticeable amount of money. We have thrown open our doors to 200,000 refugees, but higher taxes to pay for the Ukrainian war effort? Ni, dyakuyu. Luckily, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, found an electorally painless way of increasing defence spending by simply switching money from the most unpopular Budget heading, namely foreign aid. The almost total silence since that announcement in March has been instructive: the great enlightened achievement of Tony Blair and David Cameron in meeting the UN target for foreign aid spending is something that, it turned out, almost nobody cared about. The other sticking point in support for Ukraine is the idea of sending troops to help repel Putin's aggression. That has been out of the question for all of Ukraine's allies: we are happy to supply arms and money, but Ukrainians must do the fighting. Yet British public opinion is sufficiently supportive that Starmer has been able to talk about deploying British forces to help deter further Russian aggression if there is a peace deal. It is unclear how or whether this would work, but it has helped focus attention on the difficult question of who would guarantee a settlement and how that would work. What was most surprising about Trump's statements after the Alaska summit – apart from referring to Mark Rutte as the 'highly respected secretary general of Nato' – was his promise that the US would provide 'robust security guarantees' to support Ukraine. All in all, then, and considering how badly the summit could have gone, given Trump's belief that the Ukrainians brought their troubles on themselves, his disdain for Nato and his desperation for a Nobel Peace Prize at any cost, the Alaska meeting went well. Starmer can take some credit as the leader of a nation that is an important ally of Ukraine and an enemy of aggression. But that is another limit to the sympathy the British people feel for the Ukrainian cause: they are not going to reward their own leader for giving their sentiments practical expression on the world stage. Just as they are not going to give Starmer credit for his handling of the US president on tariffs, which has allowed him to carve out a better deal for the UK than for any other country. Nor will they give Starmer credit for the deal with Emmanuel Macron by which France has accepted that Britain can send back some of the people crossing the Channel in small boats. My astonishment at Starmer's skill in securing this concession is heavily outweighed by most people's dismay that the boats keep coming. The British public has had enough of the boats and is not inclined to wait a year or more to see if the numbers being sent back can be increased to the point where they act as a deterrent. I remember the European Parliament election in 1999, when Tony Blair had saved the Muslim population of Kosovo from expulsion by Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian dictator. It was a moment of shining moral leadership, by which Blair persuaded a divided Nato and a reluctant Bill Clinton to stand up to ethnic persecution, and which was a triumphant success. It was a success that brought him 15 minutes of adulation from the tabloid press, followed almost immediately by sullen complaints about traffic jams and trains not running on time. In the European election, held on the day that the Serbs withdrew, Labour did extremely badly. What reminded me of that election was a 'government source' quoted in The Times: 'World War Three is breaking out internationally; it's unreasonable for people to expect Keir to be caring about potholes.' Wrong, wrong, wrong. International leadership is well and good, but unless Keir can fix the potholes and stop the boats, it counts for nothing with the voters.
