Lee Waters

It's not yet six months since the landmark Senedd elections but the contours of the new landscape are becoming clearer. Plaid are finding governing hard; and Labour is finding opposition hard too.  Sporadic polls show voters are still sticking with the Welsh government but there’s an emerging sense that the new team of Ministers represent continuity rather than change. The technocratic approach to the first hundred days in office reinforces the feeling that the minority government is more a set of fresher faces than a set of fresher ideas. Indeed their new Programme for Government feels like an extension of the approach taken during the Labour / Plaid Co-operation Agreement period under Mark Drakeford and Adam Price. The big difference is that Plaid are now operating under their own momentum. Labour have quickly disengaged from being partners in wrestling with the trade-offs of government and have turned to the opportunism familiar in Oppositions.  A set of budget demands o...

Safely out of politics, nearly three years of counselling, and free of all meds, I think I'm finally ready to talk about my mental health and neurodivergence. I've been reluctant to talk about it until I felt I understood it and, frankly, I also didn't want to give people another stick to beat me with. These are obviously deeply private issues and I'm hesitant to share them with the world, until now I've kept my emerging thoughts to the people who needed to know. But in the spirit of the theme of today's World Mental Health day “Livedexperiences heard: real voices, real change ”, I thought I'd share the note I wrote three years ago for the people who worked closest with me at the time.  For context I was a Minister in the Welsh Government, a year earlier I became very unwell with burnout and took 12 weeks off work. During this time an occupational therapist counsellor suggested to me that I had undiagnosed ADHD and so I set about getting a diagnosis (aged...

Published on LabourList on 17th September 2026 Andy Burnham’s early months as Prime Minister have revealed a tension that goes beyond the usual arguments about devolution. Beneath the rhetoric of economic renewal and "good growth in every postcode" lies a deeper contest about who holds power and where it should sit.  Recent interventions in the Welsh political debate expose the fault lines in our uneven  constitutional settlement, and highlight a political class struggling to decide whether it truly believes in devolution and is finally prepared to let go. The first fault line is familiar. For more than two decades, successive Welsh governments have sought incremental strengthening of the settlement. Yet a significant bloc of Welsh Labour MPs at Westminster has consistently resisted further transfers of power , arguing that devolved institutions should make better use of existing powers before acquiring new ones. The opposition has not been driven primarily by evidence or ad...

What does Andy Burnham’s pledge to deliver "deeper devolution" to trigger economic growth ‘in every postcode’ mean?   The Welsh Government are rightly defensive about guarding the boundaries of the hard-won devolved settlement. But Welsh Councils are chomping at the bit to get some of the devolution action in England where the new Prime Minister has promised to fundamentally rewire the state by ‘shifting power, funding and accountability from Whitehall to local leaders’.  The former Mayor of Manchester is now Prime Minister of the whole of the United Kingdom and needs to tread deftly (not least because of the political backdrop of nationalist leaders in each of the devolved governments).  The shape of Welsh local government and the way councils collaborate regionally are the responsibility of the Welsh and not the UK Parliament. Any hint that Westminster intends to bypass the Senedd in pursuit of its own regional agenda opens up a much broader constitutional conflict, n...