Tagged with Wales

Leanne Wood – an independent leadership

It was standing room only at the Pick and Shovel Club in Ammanford for the formal launch of Leanne Wood’s campaign for the leadership of Plaid Cymru, in the first week of the year. The former miners’ club provided a solid Welsh working class reference point for Wood’s own political background, and she recalled impressions made, 20 years before, in the same club, at a commemoration of  International Brigade members and the fight against Franco’s fascists. Continue reading →

Time to man the bulwark

In its first full year of government, elements in the  approach to the Welsh economy adopted by the coalition administration in Westminster have become much clearer. For the main part, Wales features only as an object of collateral damage in the wider pursuit of neo-conservative economic policy. This aspect gathered particular pace in the final weeks of 2011.

In so far as a distinctive approach has emerged in relation to Wales, then the last year has seen the Tories revert to an agenda which dominated their tenure in government during the 1980s and 1990s: Wales is a place, they believe, where all the excesses of the welfare state are to be seen writ large. Continue reading →

Tom Harris MP – Blairite candidate for Scottish Leader?

There’s an interesting development in the race for Scottish Leader. Tom Harris, Westminster MP and well-known blogger, has put himself forward as a potential candidate for the role of Scottish party leader at Holyrood, saying on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme that he was doing so because of the lack of candidates to emerge from Labour’s ranks at the Scottish Parliament. As a Westminster MP leading the Scottish party (assuming the current review allows that to happen), he would thereby confront the widespread criticism that Scottish Labour has shown more interest in Westminster than Holyrood and “put the interests of the UK above that of Scotland“. However, his intervention is also notable because of what he said today on Wales Home about why Labour did better in Wales than Scotland last May:

Any leader who ostentatiously stands up to his own party in support of his own nation will succeed. That’s as it should be. I hope Scottish Labour gets the message.” Continue reading →

Back to first past the post?

Labour’s Shadow Welsh Secretary, Peter Hain, has called for a return to first-past-the-post voting system in the Welsh assembly elections and is meeting with Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan today to discuss the matter. The proposal is prompted by the reduction in the number of Welsh constituencies for Westminster elections from 40 to 30, which is likely to take effect at the next election. The Welsh Assembly currently has a top up system with FPTP elections for the current 40 Westminster seats, and 20 top-up seats for each of five regions. It seems all parties accept that there must be a change, since two different sets of constituencies don’t make sense (as experience in Scotland has shown, says Peter Hain). Continue reading →