A fresh voice for Llanelli

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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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2023 - 5 big changes in transport in Wales

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Changing direction takes you to a different destination... We ask our transport system to do a lot of things, but we’ve not asked it to make its contribution to our shared challenge of reducing carbon emissions. Indeed, transport is the sector that has contributed the least to the legal duty to cut emissions. Unless that changes we will not meet our overall NetZero imperative . It is difficult for any incoming Transport Minister to change much in the short-term - road and rail projects take upwards of seven years to implement, and the ongoing pipeline of schemes means that significant spending has already been committed and political expectations raised by the time a new Minister takes office. Though the political spotlight is inevitably on short-term problems, significant change is a longer term project. Over and above the day-to-day activity of keeping a transport system on track I have tried to focus on how to ‘change the wiring’ to secure medium to long-term change. For all its ch...
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