Sitting in the dock in the Bay – Gething loses no confidence vote

6 June 2024 | Admin

Last night, Vaughan Gething faced a vote of no confidence in his leadership. As expected, Mr Gething lost the vote following the announcement earlier in the day that 2 Labour colleagues were ill, unable to attend, and had not arranged proxy votes. Crucially, Welsh Labour do not hold a majority in the Senedd, holding only 30 out of 60 seats due to the quasi-proportional Additional Member System that is used to elect MSs. Thus, just one abstention from any Welsh Labour MSs was enough for Mr Gething to lose the vote.

The motion was called by the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew RT Davies, who made clear in his opening speech that the vote was not against the Welsh Government but instead against Vaughan Gething himself. The vote of no confidence came only 77 days after Mr Gething reached the pinnacle of his political ambitions and became First Minister of Wales.

How did we get here?

The vote was called after concerns were raised regarding a £200,000 donation to Mr Gething’s leadership campaign from a company owned by someone who was previously convicted of environmental offences.

Mr Gething’s problems were confounded when text messages were leaked last month, where Mr Gething appeared to suggest his intention to delete messages. The texts came from a ministerial group chat that operated during the pandemic and promptly led to accusations from the opposition that Mr Gething may have misled the Covid Inquiry.

Mr Gething subsequently sacked Hannah Blythyn, the deputy minister for social partnership for allegedly leaking the texts to the media. Plaid Cymru then responded to this action by withdrawing from a cooperation agreement with Labour in which the party supported the government on key policies.

What happened in the vote?

The central opposition argument was that Mr Gething was unfit to be the Welsh First Minister because he lacked honesty, transparency and integrity, while Labour reiterated that the non-binding motion was simply a partisan gimmick.

Opposition politicians reinforced that this motion was not about the Welsh Government as a whole but simply about the judgement of the First Minister. Plaid Cymru MS, Heledd Fychan, spoke of her regret that the issue had come down to a vote and urged Mr Gething to apologise for accepting the money, which Vaughan Gething refused to do in his speech.

The most poignant moment of the afternoon was when Mr Gething was brough to tears during a speech by Labour MS Vikki Howells, who was speaking in his defence.

The issue of race was raised during the debate about Mr Gething, who is Europe’s first black leader. Mr Gething referred to it when he stood up to defend himself to his Senedd colleagues, saying that his ethnicity may have had an influence of the motives of some people who sought to bring him down. Conservative MS Natasha Ashghar, who is of Pakistani descent, strongly rejected these claims arguing they were “insulting”. Mr Gething was also critical of the Welsh Conservatives for refusing to pair with the two Labour Senedd members who are ill.

What happens next?

The vote in Mr Gething was a non-binding vote, thus Mr Gething is not required to resign, but it does put him in an awkward position. In the immediate aftermath, he promised he would not resign but it will be a challenge for a First Minister carrying on in the long term when he explicitly lacks the confidence of the legislature he is supposed to be leading.

For UK Labour, this comes at a bad time, right in the midst of a General Election campaign which Labour are predicted to win for the first time since 2005. Wales is the only part of the UK currently under Labour administration and their record has already formed a central part of Tory attack, most recently from Rishi Sunak at the first leadership debate on Tuesday evening.

Prior to the vote, Keir Starmer had remained consistent with the Labour line, saying that the vote was “game-playing”. However, prior to the vote, Starmer non-answered a question of what should happen if Gething lost, answering, “I think people in Wales want him to deliver for them, so that’s where his priority is and that’s where my priority is.”

Labour will want as few headlines as possible about Gething over the next four weeks, and will likely seek to dampen down the story until after the 4th July. However, the First Minister’s long-term future is far from secure.