As from next week Scotland will have just one police force dealing with everything from Glasgow gangsters to Shetlands’ sheep rustlers. Scotland, with approaching twice the population of Wales and almost four times the land area. Here in Wales we shall plod on justifying four separate police forces on the grounds that Holyhead is nothing like Fishguard, while Llangollen and Brecon might as well be on different planets. OK, so policing is not a devolved issue. But it should be; and it could have been if New Labour had given us a more respectful and workable form of devolution.

As with police forces, so with our 22 councils, a system that has run out of defenders yet staggers along because the Labour Party fears the consequences of culling so many of its councillors. Then there are 7 health boards (plus their impotent ‘shadows’, the health councils). How can the Welsh Management argue it is building a national health service when it fragments decision-making so that those responsible for health in one region look over the border rather than seek, or demand, solutions within Wales?

And how can we ignore the Third Sector? In answer to an FoI I was recently told that the Welsh Management is funding no fewer than 30 schemes across the country ‘helping people back into employment’. Do we really need 30 such schemes in a country the size of Wales? Why not put that money into creating real jobs rather than using it to disguise the fact there are so few jobs . . . and to hell with the hangers-on in the Third Sector, however loyal they may be to Labour.

One issue here is clearly unnecessary duplication. A problem that is almost inevitable in a country dominated by an outdated Statist ethos. For why have one person doing a job when you can have two, and thereby create the illusion of two jobs? A system administered by politicians and others who are good at spending money but have no idea how to generate it, beyond begging.

Responsible for this mess (at least within Wales) is the Labour Party, today driven by little more than the political equivalent of an ancient blood-feud, revived periodically to remind voters of how evil the Tories are. About the only other thing helping Welsh Labour hang on to its vote is the distance it manages to keep – in the public imagination if nowhere else – between itself and its ideology-free masters in London. Done by keeping Wales poor, blaming someone else, then, ostentatiously managing the poverty it must perpetuate to maintain its political grip. The poverty that is then used to justify the colonial relationship with England. As the flowchart explains.(Click to enlarge.)

Having saved most of our people from the corrupting influence of prosperity, and convinced too many of them that the noblest ambition is humbly accepting poverty, in a colony that can aspire to nothing more, the brothers and sisters then frolic and posture on the moral high ground, from where they survey their fiefdom, ‘Caring Wales’. Where everyone is welcome, and everything will be paid for  . . . for something will turn up.

(In fact, if you want to delve into literature to explain this Welsh Government then Wilkins Micawber, hoping something will turn up, and Blanche DuBois, depending on the kindness of strangers, are almost unavoidable. Carwyn Micawber and Edwina DuBois?)

But over the horizon I see threats to this idyll. One being that down in the amoral lowlands of Tory England plans are afoot that might prove a test for Labour’s vision. David Cameron has promised legislation to deny social housing to immigrants until they have lived in England for at least 2 years. If enacted, this legislation would apply only to England. So what will be the Welsh Management’s response? The immediate impulse will be to flaunt their moral superiority by not enacting similar legislation. Which will mean . . . what?

Well, if you’re coming from Bangladesh, then no doubt you’d prefer to move to an English city where there are other Bangladeshis. But if the only social housing available is in Bargoed or Blaenau Ffestiniog, then some will inevitably settle for those towns. Pretty soon, the Welsh Management and its cronies in the Third Sector will realise that the moral high ground can be a very expensive neighbourhood. Unless, of course, the UK Government – partly to offload a few ‘problems’ and partly in order to hold Wales up as an example of why not to vote Labour – is prepared to fund it all. For keeping Wales poor serves the interests of both Conservatives and Labour. Knowing they have no chance of winning a majority in Wales the Tories may even view funding Labour’s lunacies as money well spent.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Wales is potentially a very wealthy country. That we are poor today is due to the colonial relationship with England, aided by the corruption and self-interest of the Labour Party, and ‘policies’ such as actually funding our ‘brain drain’! Yet unfortunately Labour faces no real threat, because the party that once hoped to topple Labour has revised down its ambitions. The best it hopes for now is to be a very junior partner to the party destroying Wales. Which means the opposition must come from somewhere else