Back again

After flirting with blogging last year I have begun to post occasionally on other blogs. I contribute now and again to Our Kingdom, Comment is Free and the Bevan Foundation blog. The purpose of reincarnating Amanwy is to host a repository for my musings.

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There may be trouble ahead...

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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...
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Dysgu gwersi

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A note to members of the Llanelli constituency Labour Party There has been a big disagreement within Welsh Labour. There has not been a ‘witch-hunt’ against Vaughan Gething, but there has been a genuine conflict of values. Now there is an appetite to quickly move on, but I think there’s a real danger that in shutting down discussion we will neither understand nor learn the lessons of what has happened.  As uncomfortable as it will be I think we need proper debate about the future direction of Welsh Labour. Circling the wagons around a ‘unity candidate’ may bring some short-term relief, but it will do nothing to address the fundamental need to renew in office. I’ve not given any interview and don’t intend to, but as a way of making sense of it all I’ve written this assessment which looks at what should happen now and an analysis of how we got to this position.  These are offered in the spirit of honest debate and not point-scoring. Edrych ymlaen We’re in a pickle. After 25 year...
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The Blind Spot and the Bluff - Why Growth in Every Postcode Needs More Than Devolution

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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...
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