A ROW has broken out over £30m from the Welsh government’s budget being put towards the £1bn the UK is sending to Ukraine to prosecute the war against Russia.
The money has come from Welsh ministers’ capital budget, used to fund projects such as hospitals and roads. Finance Minister Rebecca Evans said she agreed to provide the cash, rather than have it taken away later under UK Treasury processes.
But she also admitted that how the cash was found was ‘not right’ and ‘worrying’.
However, the precedent has now been set for NHS money to be diverted away from caring for the sick in the UK, to financing more missiles for the Ukrainian fascists.
Evans told a Senedd committee that she had been asked to either provide the money ‘upfront’ or through a budget reduction later, as a knock-on effect from UK government departments providing cash for military aid. The UK government has now disputed a claim from the Education Minister Jeremy Miles that the Welsh government was not consulted.
In fact, some £65m for Ukraine will come from Scottish government budgets, to help provide the billion that PM Johnson has volunteered for the Ukrainian war drive.
Speaking at the NATO summit, Boris Johnson said: ‘UK weapons, equipment and training are transforming Ukraine’s defences against this onslaught. And we will continue to stand squarely behind the Ukrainian people to ensure Putin fails in Ukraine.’
Now we know where the cash is coming from!
The UK’s military support for Ukraine is in addition to the £1.5bn of humanitarian and economic support provided to the Ukrainian military leadership since February.
Yesterday, the Welsh government’s Finance Minister said it was ‘a novel, worrying and potentially divisive approach by the Treasury – seeking to use devolved budgets, that should be for investment in devolved areas, like health and education, to fund reserved spending areas such as military aid and defence’.
‘Funding for these areas should rightly be met by the UK government,’ she said.
She added: ‘Ultimately, because of the exceptional circumstances, we have accepted this situation in light of our ongoing commitment to support Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in their fight against this senseless act of aggression, but it should not be a precedent.’
But it is a precedent and sets the scene for the NHS to be looted to fight Johnson’s war in the Ukraine in the guise of ‘the price for defending freedom’.
As it is, the war has driven food and oil prices sky high to the point where many working class families are living on one meal a day. As far as the PM is concerned, this is a ‘price worth paying for defending freedom’. For PM Johnson and the ruling class that he represents, bringing down Russia is vital if Anglo-US imperialism is to survive.
Here, patriotism and robbery of the NHS, is not just ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’ but a ‘price worth paying’ to try and maintain the dominance of US and UK imperialism.
The Ukraine revelations come hot on the heels of the TSSA revealing that train operators paid out up to £475 a night for hotel rooms to put strike-breaking staff up, and paid an additional £200 a day to staff working on strike days last week, and £250 on the weekend. A video emerged before last week’s action revealing Network Rail senior management offering double pay and extra holiday to people to work on strike days. These bribes and strike-breaking costs will have run into tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds.
This is another illustration of ‘paying the price to defend freedom’ – this time the freedom to scab.
The TUC is now simply standing on the sidelines and watching. Workers must demand that it calls a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
If it won’t, then it must be sacked and replaced by a new trade union leadership that will take general strike action to defend the basic rights of the working class, both at home and abroad, by bringing down the Tory government and bringing in a workers’ government and socialism.
