Labour has too often recycled the same old faces and the same old knee jerk responses: it is therefore little wonder that so few people want to get involved with part politics as attending party meetings can often feel like an episode of Life on Mars, with the same 1970s ideas attitudes and prejudices. But without the charm or humour.

Although Alun raises good and insightful remarks regarding the civil service, I lay the blame for poor administration squarely with the politicians: it really does not matter how able an administrator you are, if the politicians have passed legislation that resembles a dogs breakfast, then its little wonder that we have some of the shambles we do.

I really do hope that the Labour party does get invigorated by the election of a new leader- lets face it, it absolutely needs it.

In military circles, it is quite common for senior offciers to attend staff colleges in other countries. We do need civil servants and local government officers who think outside the box. But you can’t expect departments in a regional administration to have the same ‘firepower’ as their Whitehall equivalents.

We also need to be more open and stop continually reinventing the wheel just to produce a ‘made in Wales’ solution to address problems which are common throughout the UK.

The point Alun is making is far broader than legal drafting – it is about capacity to think creatively and then implement. Most government action is not about law, it is about strategy and funding. Having said that, there are clearly weakenesses in civil service performance in Wales. Edwina Hart, perhaps of all the Labour leadership candidates, recognised this when she said in her manifesto:

“No Manifesto for someone hoping to lead the Government in Wales would be complete without saying something about civil service reform. In many ways, the devolution of 1999 changed the political landscape of Wales, while leaving its administrative structures intact. Over the past decade there have been many hundreds of civil servants who have adapted rapidly to the new circumstances and provided an excellent service to the Assembly Government and the citizens of Wales. In my experience, however, such individuals are having to work against the grain of the current ways in which the civil service is organised and structured. As devolution develops further over the next decade, I believe reform will become more urgent. Wales is simply too small to sustain wholly separate public services in local government, the civil service, the health service, in higher education and so on. We need a far more permeable set of boundaries between these organisations, so that workers in the Welsh public service can move between them, contributing to the Welsh way of maximising the advantage we have as a small, clever country in which we all work together for the benefit of us all.”

Her recommended solutions were establishing a centre for public service improvement, identifying and spreading best practice and innovation across all services; and setting up a Leadership Academy for public service leaders and managers to ensure they have the high-level leadership skills needed to deliver high quality services in Wales.

Whoever wins the Labour leadership election, I hope these ideas and this analysis is not lost.

Alun also makes a fair assessment when he says: “We have a civic society that is far weaker than that which exists in either Northern Ireland or in Scotland.”

As a member of that civic society – and it is far broader than the politicians themselves or the officials who support them – I cannot dispute this statement, much as I would like to try to.

For Labour to be successful in Wales it must also be successful at a UK level. The most important Labour Leader in the eyes of the majority of voters will always be the person who leads the UK Labour party not the person who might be the leader of a regional grouping. If they not attracted by Labour’s UK Leader and Labour’s UK policies then frankly if the Labour Group in the Assembly was led by John F Kennedy it would not make any difference.

Finally it doesn’t augur well for new lawmaking powers if we have AMs informing us that the civil servants in the Bay are not up to the job. Laws have to correctly drafted if they are not to become the play thing of the courts. I now realise why so many in the Welsh legal establishment want a distinct legal system for Wales. They probably can’t wait to start earning the fees from challenging the badly drawn up laws made by a future Assembly. To imply that 10 years after devolution there are still senior civil servants who see their task as merely translating documents from Whitehall is really worrying.