1 out of 10 of Drakeford’s carve-outs 2024 – 14 x 27 x 38cm, plaster, photographs, sheet plastic, spray paint, acrylic paint
Former FM of Mark Drakeford has effectively just sold parts of Wales to private investors. The free zone is not and never can be the Welsh community’s friend. It is not the protector of the environment, it is not the source of collective decision-making, and it does not have livelihoods or workers’srights as a priority. It is turbo-capitalism, a post-Brexit wrecking ball that will lead to an economic boom for the investor classes but will absolutely eviscerate and impoverish those entrapped in ‘the zone’.
Drakeford signed a Faustian pact with the UK government, in which
the small print details a familiar colonialist mindset at play. Freeports are a direct threat to democracy. For direct parallels to historical examples of what free trade in enterprise zones inflicted on surrounding communities, we typically point to countries outside of the ‘protectionist EU’. Nomenclature is key; the old ‘company towns’ now go under the Orwellian moniker of ‘investment zones’, birthed by a plethora of pseudo-academically named right wing think tanks: the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Heritage Foundation.
With Wales still subordinate to Westminster, despite naiveté or the best of intentions, it is a tide pulling us along with it, devolution as detritus. There are no easily available maps of the two Welsh freeports so we
can know what and how much of our land is taken up by them: the UK government website of ‘UK freeport maps’ says ‘applies to England’ in smaller writing, further down. Wales, as ever, invisible except when seen as exploitable.
Did you vote for this? Freeports are part of a process through which libertarian ideologues are installing a global push to reconfigure nation-states, to reverse and dismantle democracy in the 21st century. The zone is a harbinger of offshoring wealth with no checks and balances, no rights, just raw corporate hegemony. This is an experiment which, according to libertarian Tom Bell, “may or may not work”. It goes like this: break up a nation, subdivide the land, invite foreign venture capitalists in, and hand over powers of governance to them while reducing elected government oversight. This means tailoring private laws (as opposed to the often negatively- framed ‘statist’ laws) to corporate demands, legalising the breach of hard-won rights and freedoms.
