LABOUR MINISTER SAYS 'SEPARATIST' SLURS ARE NO LONGER CREDIBLE

A Welsh Government minister has said that Labour's dismissal of supporters of independence as mere “separatists” just won't wash anymore.

Polling has started to show a trend that the lazy and arguably dishonest approach to the question is seeing support for Labour in Wales begin to fall as it did in Scotland around the same time the rise of today's SNP started to take off.

Lee Waters, an Economy and Transport minister, made the comments on the Hiraeth podcast, where he challenged his party to engage with the issue.

Mr Waters, the Senedd member for Llanelli, said: “I think there’s a real challenge for the Labour Party to try and properly engage on this, and for too long too many people in the party have dismissed independence as just being about separatism, as if this kind of gets you off the hook from having to engage intellectually on the issue.

The laziness of the Labour leadership, especially over the last 15 years, has always seen them say: 

“You just call them separatists and suddenly you’re off the hook from engaging on all the issues”, issues that are coincidentally underpinning a fast growing support for independence in Wales, which has now become a pursuit of the majority in Scotland, almost as if by stealth over the last 18 months, “and that just won’t wash anymore.” the Economy minister said.

Mr Waters' leader in Wales, First Minister, Mark Drakeford, had previously dismissed nationalism as an “inherently right-wing creed” that is incompatible with socialism.

A YouGov poll has shown support for independence has surged from 21 per cent to 33 per cent in little under a year. This is in the absence of any kind of a campaign.

With the poll also showing that 51% of those who voted Labour in the 2019 General election would vote for Welsh independence.

UK media shockers

Lee Waters also lamented the way that Wales is covered in the UK media in the wide-ranging discussion on the podcast.

He said: “I think we’ve seen a couple of examples during the pandemic where there’s been some real shockers. I think what we’re getting now is far more name checking, so some editors make sure there’s a proper distinction between England and the rest is more clearly labelled.

“But what will tend to happen instead, they’ll say; 'well, here's what's happening in England', without asking; 'well what about the other countries in the UK?'

“So I think there’s a long way to go culturally and there's a role for the media to make sure that the electorate are properly informed, as opposed to being herded into one pen or another, we need a move away from the clickbait, analytics led journalism, as they call it.”