Lee Waters

Posted on Progress online on March 1st 2012 With the UK going though a period of flux who would bet against an independent Scotland in three years time? Of course, the prospect has countless permutations but for Labour’s there’s one that stands above others: without Scottish MPs, and with the significant cut in the number of Welsh MPs we’re now seeing, Labour could struggle to govern alone at Westminster again. But as the party still strives to the performance of Labour is Wales will become even more important in showing our values, and our competence to rule. As we’ve seen in recent weeks David Cameron will seize on any opportunity to shine a light on the party in Wales to score a point in Westminster. Labour in Wales therefore has a huge responsibility to our party across the UK to show the way. And to discharge that responsibility we’ve got to get serious. If we are going to be in Government in Wales for the long-term – either in coalition or on our own – we need to take a good h...

Posted on Wales Home on 11 October 2011 So, there’s to be another Commission to examine the future of devolution. Ken Hopkins would have approved. He died this summer. He was a complex man, and the epitome of the machine politician. Indeed, he wasn’t a ‘politician’ at all, a least not formally, which in a way proves the point. He was an apparatchik, and proud of it. After Labour’s traumatic defeat in 1992 Ken Hopkins was appointed to Chair the Party’s Policy Commission to review its policy on devolution. As Secretary of the Rhondda Labour Party, and one of Neil Kinnock’s ‘mates’, Hopkins was certain to come up with a dependable compromise which would not upset the Party establishment. And he duly did, the long forgotten ‘Shaping the Vision’. The reason I think of Ken today is something he said to me about the brief he was given. The purpose of the Commission, Welsh General Secretary Anita Gale told him, was “to occupy the troops”. There was five years until the next election, a...

Posted on This is My Truth on 9 September There can be little doubt that this is a radical Government. And one of its most radical innovations is almost upon us, and yet there has been very little debate in Wales about how it is going to work in practice. In a little over a year’s time we are going to elect a Police Commissioner to oversee each ofWales’ four police forces. Each will have the power to hire and fire Chief Constables. But equally significant will be the considerable informal power that they will exert. Democratic mandates being what they are, the Commissioners will become significant players on the Welsh political scene. They will undoubtedly want to shape the communities they serve as well as influencing the national debate. There has, inevitably, been strong opposition to the move by the Police Federation who fear it will lead to the politicization of the police force – a point reinforced by the existing Police Authorities and the Welsh Chief Constables who do not wi...

Posted on Wales Home on August 10th 2011 IT IS THE calm before the storm. With both Westminster and Cardiff Bay in recess the political scene appears tranquil, but storm clouds are gathering. And when the new Parliamentary boundaries are published for the rest of the UK next month they will erupt. A reduction in the number of MPs Wales sends to the House of Commons by a quarter is certain to unleash powerful and unpredictable weather within the political parties as politicians digest the implications of reshaped constituencies. As well as having profound implications for the nature of future UK Governments, the changes will have more immediate impacts on Welsh politics. Even though the detailed proposals for Wales will not now be published until January, the febrile Westminster atmosphere will make MPs jumpy. At a time when delicate political judgements will be required to decide the future funding arrangements for the Welsh Government, our MPs will be pre-occupied. Where ca...

Here is the unedited version of an essay published in the Summer 2011 edition of the IWA's journal, Agenda : Rachel Banner was right. Well, about some things anyway. Much as I disagreed with the arguments she marshalled to make her case for a No vote in the devolution referendum, there was more than a grain of truth in some of her central charges. As depressing and hypocritical as I found her anti-politics tone, there is no denying that there was much in her analysis of the challenges we face. The No campaign’s assaults struck a nerve in three areas: capacity, scrutiny, and quality. It is only human for those of us who campaigned for a Yes vote to have basked for a brief moment in the satisfaction of a well fought campaign. But it is incumbent on us now to examine the weaknesses in the case that we presented and seek solutions, however uncomfortable they may be. From the vantage point of the engine room of the Yes campaign Wales looked small. Of course, not literally. The task ...

Posted on the Wales Home website on 28 June 2011 “There was a very limited campaign impact.” This was Professor Roger Scully’s verdict said as he presented the results of a survey of voting patterns in March’s devolution referendum last week . “The campaign didn’t actually change a huge amount. It increased the levels of those intending to vote a bit, but other than that we’re not seeing a huge amount of change,” This was his conclusion after analysing the results of a repeat survey by YouGov of more than 2,500 people. This is capable of being interpreted as an indictment of the Yes campaign. As one of the people who sacrificed several months of my life to help run the campaign, I naturally have an interest in discovering what kind of impact our efforts had on the end result. The analysis, by Aberystwyth University’s Institute of Welsh Politics and Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre, does not suggest that the Yes campaign failed. It simply reconfirms what previous studies ha...

Simon Gibson, the chief executive of Sir Terry’s Wesley Clover International Corporation, told the Welsh Affairs Select Committee this week that his recent dealings with Assembly Government had been “fairly arduous” but he said this was not the fault of politicians, but of civil servants: “One thing that I do find extremely frustrating is we are burdened with a civil service in Cardiff that is shaped for Whitehall. “I don’t understand why a small, agile country like we are – or should be – in Wales is burdened with a civil service that’s monolithic in its rule structure... We’re somewhere between a small government and a local authority in terms of its critical mass – why don’t we have something that can move quickly?”