Some covid restrictions have finally been eased in Wales.

We are now back at alert level zero.

I believe Labour were too eager to impose restrictions, which has ruined many livelihoods.

The adverse effects of the restrictions following Christmas and the New Year have been huge for our local pubs, clubs and hospitality sector.

Calls for an independent inquiry for Wales over the handling of covid, are, in my mind, justified.

Drakeford wanted to do things differently - arguably for the sake of doing so - and so, he shouldn’t now be afraid of standing by those decisions, when it is now wanted to look into them on a Wales-only bases. Unless of course, he has something to hide.

Wales had had the highest death rate of all home nations, yet imposed the harshest restrictions in the UK.

It begs the question why shutting down the Welsh economy is always the first knee jerk reaction of a government just trying to do the same thing over again and get different results.

It also makes you wonder, when you looked at the Omicron evidence and patterns of behaviour in England and South Africa, why the Labour government here still found it necessary to make the damaging decisions it did. You have to wonder if their decision-making was political, and not in fact led by science.

The latest example of this is the decision on facemasks in classrooms. While mask-wearing is no longer mandatory for pupils in English schools, children in Wales must continue to wear them in classrooms - all day - until at least February half-term.

UK government evidence and even the Welsh Government’s own scientific advisor, has said wearing facemasks all day long in classrooms, makes ‘minimal’ difference to stopping the transmission of covid. Yet they can have an extremely negative effect on learners and learning in the classroom, particularly those hard of hearing or deaf. To me this isn’t a decision not based on ‘the balance of harms’.

If the Welsh Labour government is so confident in any of its actions, and has nothing to hide, then ministers should openly commit to the Wales-specific independent covid inquiry, that Mark Drakeford is currently blocking.

We need proper scrutiny over the different decisions taken here in Wales, we need to see what the rationale was. We need answers, so that we never repeat the same mistakes.