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Showing posts from October, 2021

Renewing from within

The Tudor Watkins Memorial Lecture, delivered to the Brecon Labour Party 1st October 2021 Thank you for the honour of giving the Tudor Watkins Memorial Lecture. Tudor not only remains in the memory of our movement as one of the generation of Labour MPs who made possible the creation of a welfare state and National Health Service after the Second World War, the ‘revolution without tears’, but he was also a significant figure in the history of devolution.  When he was first elected as the Member of Parliament for Brecon and Radnorshire in 1945 the dominant view in the Labour Party was that the problems faced by working people were best addressed by one strong central Government, a Labour Government. The workers of the world should unite, right? And anyway, as Nye Bevan famously asked in the first St Davids Day debate in the House of Commons in 1944, ‘what is the difference between a Welsh sheep and an English sheep?’ Having just lived through a terrible war based on the idea that there