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...