Posted by Nick Davies

Labour in Wales: A success that dare not speak its name

Welsh Labour leader Carwyn Jones

From Bridgend to Wrexham, it seemed that no pub, club, café or shopping centre was without a journalist  looking for a Labour voter intending to turn Tory. Anyone muttering about ‘voting for Theresa May’ could be sure of an attentive ear. It was, after all, the official line put out by Tory Central Office that the Tories were going to end Labour’s century-long domination of Wales. The strategy was simple: Wales had voted Brexit, in previous elections many voters in Labour seats in the industrial south and north-east had turned to UKIP and now their vote was in freefall, the Tories were delivering Hard Brexit, ergo those Leave and UKIP supporters would turn to the Tories. To ease their passage over to the dark side Theresa May made three visits during the campaign. Continue reading →

After the debacle: why Welsh Labour should work with Plaid Cymru

2012-02-15-83253The election result was terrible  for Wales. If five years of self-defeating, poverty creating state-shrinking austerity from the coalition was bad enough, five more years of the Tories governing alone will be worse. The assault on the public sector threatens thousands of Welsh jobs, the £12 billion in ‘welfare’ cuts will make life even more difficult for the poor and the vulnerable; for many disabled people life will literally not be worth living. The cuts to the Welsh budget will result in cuts to the revenue support and grants to local authorities, making it increasingly difficult for them to deliver basic services and producing what is for the Tories, an added bonus of Labour local authorities blaming a Labour government for Tory cuts. Continue reading →

A Welsh view of Scotland’s ‘No’ vote: the end, or the end of the beginning?

britain‘Settled for a generation’ was the confident assertion of the metropolitan commentariat after Scotland’s referendum resulted in a bigger than expected margin of defeat for independence. An independent Scotland may be off the agenda in the immediate term but we should remember Zhou En-lai’s famous remark about the effects of the French revolution: “too early to tell”.  The Scottish referendum campaign and the vote itself may in time be seen as a sparkling firework, momentarily illuminating the United Kingdom’s gloomy, sterile political landscape, only to fizzle out, or as the catalyst for a process of fundamental change to that political entity. Time will tell whether the opportunities for change presented by the campaign are taken or lost. Continue reading →

The ‘Black’ Route: a black day for Wales

M4_motorway_IEIn July 2014, the Welsh Government, which claims that sustainability is the central organising principle of everything it does, decided to build a motorway relief-road across a wetland containing four Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

Anyone who cares about sustainability, who regards it as more than a pious aspiration or just something one says – anyone, in fact, who still believes, in this cynical age, that what a  government or a politician says should some connection with what they actually do – needs to mull over every word in that sentence.

This is a truly appalling decision, which leaves the Welsh Government’s sustainability credentials in tatters. It represents a lurch back from the lofty aspirations in the Government of Wales Act and the nobly-named Future Generations Bill to the post-war by-pass mania, now largely discredited in the eyes of anyone who takes sustainable transport seriously – although very much favoured by what can loosely be called the ‘roads lobby’, namely the construction industry, motoring organisations and various well-funded free-market think tanks. Continue reading →

The BBC, Question Time and Wales

BBC QT in WalesIf fresh insight or stimulating discussion is what you’re after, BBC’s Question Time is likely to disappoint. The only relief from the stifling conformity of the Westminster consensus is the occasional non-politician (Owen Jones, Billy Bragg or Benjamin Zephaniah, for example). More recently, it has effectively become an almost-weekly audience with Nigel Farage. Many people who would normally be interested in political discussion refuse to watch it at all.

However, it also appears that Question Time has a ‘Welsh problem’. That is that that the panel membership fails to reflect the realities of modern Welsh political life, specifically that from 1999 we have had our own elected government which is responsible for a lot of what touches our everyday lives: most notably health and education. Continue reading →