They claimed the former Tory PM used Scotland to try out her most controversial policies, like the poll tax. Lately, Wales has been serving the same purpose – but not for the Tories.
Instead, the devolved Welsh parliament has been the testbed for Labour’s crankiest ideas.
Having wreaked havoc, Labour is applying its failed experiments to Scotland and England too. It’s going to be horrible.
Take education. In Wales, Labour scrapped national tests, dumbed down the curriculum and prioritised ideology over literacy and numeracy.
Welsh children now trail their English peers in international Pisa rankings – even when poverty is accounted for.
Scotland once boasted one of the world’s best education systems. Its children are now plunging down the Pisa rankings too, forcing universities to offer remedial courses just to get students up to speed.
That’s down to the Scottish National Party (SNP), which pursued similarly “dumb and regressive” policies to Welsh Labour.
At the same time, English education has drastically improved.
Reforms started by Tory PM John Major, continued by Labour’s Tony Blair and expanded by the Tories’ Michael Gove have transformed schools.
While Welsh and Scottish standards slid, English pupils soared up the Pisa rankings.
Militant teaching unions blocked those reforms at every turn. Now Labour is caving into their demands.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has blocked new free schools, undermined Ofsted inspections and made excluding disruptive pupils harder.
She’s even railed against what she calls the “obsession with academic achievement”.
That’s right. The woman in charge of our national curriculum scorns “academic achievement”.
Thanks to Phillipson, academic achievement in England will soon start falling as fast as it has in Wales and Scotland. Another generation failed.
The Tories didn’t get much else right but devolved Labour has made an even bigger mess of Wales.
Former First Minister Mark Drakeford embraced every cranky left-wing cause going: a four-day public sector week, universal basic income, gender ID policies and hated 20mph speed limits. Wales also has the UK’s highest unemployment rate.
Drakeford was ousted last March, but Labour councils still push anti-car measures, overburden businesses with taxes and indulge every eco-fantasy.
Voters have had enough. Former Welsh Labour minister Eluned Morgan admits the party faces a “kicking” in next year’s Welsh parliamentary election.
Reform UK, bolstered by Nigel Farage, is surging.
Labour clawed back 36 seats from the SNP at last year’s general election, but it wouldn’t win them today.
Scots are furious over Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s treatment of the Winter Fuel Payment, employer’s national insurance hikes and her assault on small businesses.
Mostly, they’re raging at Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. North Sea oil and gas reserves are naturally dwindling, but he’s speeding up the process.
Last year, Aberdeen and Grampian Chambers of Commerce warned the Government had “100 days to save 100,000 jobs in the North Sea”.
Miliband has spent that time destroying as many of those jobs as he can, by shuttering perfectly viable oil fields including the biggest of all. The Grangemouth refinery has gone too.
Oil city Aberdeen is in rapid decline and all Miliband has done is offered a sop in the shape of his sketchy £8billion Great British Energy quango.
Labour promises growth but its record in Wales tells the real story: higher taxes, crumbling public services, ideological madness and economic stagnation.
Now its blueprint for decline is being rolled out across the rest of the UK. The results will be the same, but unlike the Welsh, voters can’t do anything about it until 2029.
