Lee Waters

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...

Sometimes it helps to look at things from the opposite point of view to your own: After a generation of devolved Government, with growing powers, Wales remains at the wrong end of every league table. Before asking for further powers, fulfill the potential of the ones you’ve got. That would get a round of applause at the weekly meeting of the Welsh Parliamentary Labour Party. The trouble is that it’s the same argument that a number of Welsh Labour of MPs have made at every turn of the devolution journey. I was a House of Commons Lobby Correspondent when the Richard Commission published the first call for a resolution to the ‘Jagged Edges’ of the devolution settlement and my notebook is full of such comments. Same again when Peter Hain and Rhodri Morgan cobbled together a clever but clunky compromise to fast-track law-making powers in the Government of Wales Act 2006. It was accepted under sufferance. To be fair they weren’t in power when the 2011 referendum on full law-making powers wa...

“I see this as a last chance to change, for the Labour Party and politics more generally. People are giving up on it and that has got to be addressed by a new way of thinking about things, a freshness to what we do” - Andy Burnham   So the stakes are high. Our incoming Prime Minister recognises that, and frames his challenge not just in changing policies to meet the mood of the times, but in meeting the existential threat faced by both his party and the democratic fabric we have come to take for granted. He is right in his analysis. On current polling not a single Labour MP in Wales would be elected in a fresh General Election. Just two years after winning 27 of the 32 seats in Wales the Party would be wiped out. But without the challenge of a leadership election, where he would be forced to flesh out in greater detail how he intends to head off these threats, we don't know much about what Andy Burhham would do differently. We are left wondering if the ‘hopey, changey stuff’ (to u...

Published in Nation.Cymru on May 9th 2026 So, the campaign is over but now comes the hard part. If you think forming a Government is tricky, try running one in the age of the Polycrisis! There are multiple crises all happening at the same time, and the Welsh Government has neither the levers, capacity, nor financial firepower to make more than a dent in any of them. But don’t worry, this is not a counsel of despair. It’s a case for focus. I am neither religious, nor an addict, but during my decade in politics I turned more than once to Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference’. So, what can be changed, and what is out of the control of an incoming Welsh Government Minister? First off, we need to acknowledge the stark reality - times are hard and aren’t going to get better anytime soon. The extra funding the Welsh Government can expect over the n...

Speech in Senedd on 21st January 2026 Tourette's is a complex and misunderstood condition.   And yet it’s a common one. It is a brain disorder that affects 1 in 100 people. That’s a similar prevalence as autism, or childhood epilepsy, but it doesn’t get the same recognition - either from the general public or from the health service. If most people know anything about Tourette's at all, it's that it makes people swear and shout in public. And the excellent new Bafta nominated film, I Swear, which I would recommend to all, to some degree reinforces that stereotype. In fact the vast majority of people with Tourette’s do not have a compulsion to swear.  But as the film also captures they do suffer pain, anxiety and isolation. And yet people think Tourettes is funny. It's not. It causes great distress, and pain. Tourettes is not in itself a psychological condition, nor a behavioural one, nor is it caused by poor parenting.  It’s a complex neurodevelopmental condition tha...