Divide. Distract. Exploit. Repeat.
How manufactured division hides systemic injustice in Wales
They want you angry. But not at them.
They want your rage pointed downwards. At the man in the tent, the woman in the food bank queue, the family who fled war on a small boat and arrived here with nothing but a name and hope.
All the while, the people actually bleeding us dry glide through Cardiff Bay on yachts, untouched and unbothered.
Let’s be crystal clear here. Wales is not in poverty because of migrants, and it’s not broken because of refugees. The enemy doesn’t come on a dinghy, it arrives in yachts, it’s in a boardroom, a mansion, or a private jet.
And in Wales, that theft is happening in plain sight.
The great train robbery
Take HS2. A service that doesn’t have a single metre of track in Wales. Not one station. Not one direct route. Yet because the UK Government has classed it as an “England and Wales” project, Wales has been denied its fair share of Barnett formula funding.
Scotland and Northern Ireland got their cut. Wales lost out. How much? Around £4 billion. That’s money that could have been invested into our own rail system, our housing stock, our schools, our NHS. Gone. Just like that. A train we will never board, paid for with Welsh taxes.
When the Senedd tried to challenge it, a motion calling for reclassification was voted down by the Tories and Labour alike. They called it fair. I call it what it actually is: theft.
(My article on HS2 for Bylines Cymru)
Poverty by design
Wales has some of the highest poverty rates in the UK. One in four people here live below the poverty line. In some areas, it’s even worse. But what gets brushed aside is that this poverty isn’t natural. It didn’t appear by accident. It’s built into the system.
According to the Wales Centre for Public Policy and the Bevan Foundation, the key drivers of poverty in Wales are low wages, insecure jobs, poor housing, rising living costs and a broken social safety net. None of these were caused by immigration. Every single one is a result of political decisions made in London, rubber-stamped in Cardiff, and inflicted on the rest of us.
More than 25 percent of low-income households in Wales went into debt just to pay for essentials during the pandemic. And now, with protections gone and costs soaring, thousands face eviction.
Still, we’re told to fear the person arriving on a lifeboat, not the ones buying up second homes in our communities while families sleep in cars.
The truth about who has what
Want to talk about wealth? In Wales, the poorest 10 percent of people have under £8,400 to their name. The richest 10 percent have over £750,000. The median is around £205,000, but that figure means nothing when 1 in 4 households can’t pay their bills.
Worse still, nearly 20 percent of households in Wales don’t own a car, and that figure rises in our poorest communities. Public transport is decaying, internet access is patchy, and we’re given very little in the way of solutions.
The reality is this: millions of us in Wales are just one rent rise, one illness, one lost job away from complete collapse. And still, the government points the finger at the poorest, the newest, the most vulnerable.
It’s not incompetence. It’s intention.
Who should we really be angry at?
The ones hiking up your rent? Not migrants. Landlords.
The ones keeping your pay frozen while inflation rockets? Not refugees. CEOs.
The ones who took £4 billion from Wales for a train we’ll never see? Not asylum seekers. Westminster.
It’s landlords buying up homes across our communities, pricing out locals and turning villages into ghost towns every winter. It’s developers and investors hoarding housing while young families live out of cars. And still, you’re told to blame the person fleeing war, not the person buying their third property with cash.
It’s corporations paying pennies for your labour and making billions off your backs. It’s zero-hour contracts, cut shifts, and wages that don’t even cover rent. But the blame falls on people with accents, not the ones in glass towers.
And it’s governments, both in London and Cardiff, who’ve let this happen and refused to intervene. Who let our NHS be gutted, our councils starved, and then tell us we’re lucky we’re not worse off.
It's not broken, it's working as intended
While they go easy on billionaires dodging tax, they sanction someone on Universal Credit for missing an appointment by five minutes. While they bail out landlords and energy firms, they chase down single mums for overpayments.
It’s always the ones with the least who get punished the hardest.
This is how the system works. It’s a rigged game. And the longer we’re shouting at each other, the longer they stay winning.
Poor people are not the problem. Migrants are not the problem. People trying to survive are not the problem.
The problem is hoarded wealth, unchecked power, and a political class more interested in protecting privilege than people.
Until we aim our anger upwards, nothing changes.
Wales deserves better
We deserve a country where people aren’t punished for being poor, where wealth is shared and nobody is forced into choosing between heating or eating. A country where political leaders actually fight for their people rather than just their careers.
And that starts with telling the truth. With refusing to be divided. With seeing through the smokescreens designed to keep us pointing fingers at each other while the ones responsible sail off with our future.
Let me be absolutely clear: The people fleeing hardship are not your enemy. The ones creating it are.