Probably the most important single point to note in this is that Drakeford has not taken or recommended any government action whatsoever in this speech (beyond some letters to go out next fucking week), despite the clear increase in urgency in the situation now that there has been a death in Wales.  Recommending that people who may have Covid-19 should self-isolate is nothing new, and anyone with a brain would recognise that having been in contact with people who may have it should also be a rationale for self-isolating.

But without resources to enable them self-isolate, most people can’t.  Even if I know of someone who has no savings and is intending to go to work in order simply to get food and rent, there’s nothing that I can say that will make them stay home.  If I had savings myself, I’d be able to help as an individual, but I don’t.  Luckily there are community-led set of organisations aiming to help with this, and some businesses are doing the same. Head straight to the bottom of this blog entry for the ones I’ve spotted so far.

Wales has an older and poorer population than the UK as a whole.  There are more of us in the vulnerable groups, and more of us without savings.  Mark Drakeford’s failure to use his position to get resources to those groups, and to create ways to enable people to self-isolate, is likely to have serious effects.  What he’s done here is simply to act as another layer of advice.

And he’s acknowledged this, in so many words; “My message to you is to go on doing all of those small things.” But government is not about telling us to do what we do anyway, especially if what we do anyway is small.  If it is worthwhile, it is about enabling us to do things that we can’t do without government, or enabling us to things better.

Household isolation as advice is useless without it being tied to compensation for the hardships caused to the entire household.

And the idea of social distancing “where we can” is a perfect illustration of the fact that the Welsh government is not helping us with that social distancing.  Without rationalising and planning of urgent deliveries, and politicians willing to act threateningly towards those stockpiling for profit, nearly everybody’s social distancing will necessarily be preceded by panic buying and stockpiling – as has already happened.

The particular “at risk” categories are being offered, bitterly uselessly, even more advice.  But not yet.  Even a vague promise that there would be further government action to help them would have been useful here – especially because every single politician in the Senedd would then have had a lever with which to bash both Drakeford and the Westminster government until relief arrived.

The only announcement of action was a UK-wide one, and was actually merely an announcement of new inaction – the withdrawal of emergency service support for mass gatherings.  Here Drakeford had the opportunity to do a mea culpa about the disgraceful failure of either he or Vaughan Gething to stop the Wales-Scotland rugby game on the weekend until the last minute (No, I don’t yet know who made the call to cancel, beyond the fact that the social media response to it going ahead was a rare example of Wales being nearly united in anger.  The exceptions I saw were largely the profoundly odd crowd who live within the miniscule Cardiff Bay bubble, and who demonstrate by their existence and continued careers the essential uselessness of a political commentariat in a powerless nation).