2. Statement by the First Minister: Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 11:18 am on 3 June 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 11:18, 3 June 2020

Llywydd, can I thank Adam Price for that question about one of the great issues of our day? Many Members will have seen that utterly distressing footage of the death of George Floyd; I think one of the most awful things that I remember ever having to look at. I was reminded in it—just to say one positive thing to begin with—of the very longstanding relationships that have existed between Wales and the black community in America, from the 1930s when Paul Robeson, that great singer and civil rights activist would visit Wales so regularly, speaking memorably in Mountain Ash in 1938 at an enormous gathering of people from south Wales in support of the Spanish civil war, and the people from Wales who went to fight there, right into the 1960s with the church in Birmingham, Alabama, which has a window paid for by people from Wales as part of our interest in the civil rights movement then. So, our interest in the black population and people from those communities in America goes back many, many decades, and I was forcefully reminded of that when I saw those awful pictures.

There is structural disadvantage for black people in America, but Adam Price is right for us not to simply think that it exists elsewhere. It exists in our own communities as well. And at the worst of it, it is straightforward racism, as the leader of Plaid Cymru has said—it is people deliberately behaving towards others on the basis of the colour of their skin. But there is disadvantage for people from those communities that is less overt than that—it is not racism in that deliberate sense, but it's embedded in the way that institutions operate and decisions get made. And the way that black people have clearly been adversely affected by the coronavirus crisis is, I think, just a vivid outcrop of those underlying structural disadvantages, and we've got to be able to grapple with them here in Wales, as they need to be grappled with elsewhere.