Bolsheviks on speed
We at WalesHome.org make no apology for covering the Labour leadership race in detail. A contest for the leadership of any of the Welsh parties is a a big deal in our book, but Labour’s has the added spice of selecting the person who will almost certainly become the next First Minister. And, of course, that person may go on to shape the office as well has hold down the job for some time to come.
Nevertheless, signs of boredom are creeping in. The headline is a quote from Jeff Jones, former Leader of Bridgend Council and valued commenter to this site. Jeff’s point is that the flurry of policy statements from each of the three candidates bears little resemblance to the reality of the Assembly’s likely impending budget squeeze. Jeff’s wider argument – that extra spending on one area in a fixed budget means cuts elsewhere – is not a new one, but it bears repetition. Elsewhere on the above thread is the suggestion that the candidates are recycling existing One Wales policy.
Lee Waters, meanwhile, suggests that there are encouraging signs of new policy emerging from the contest. He argues that Labour has struggled to develop new ideas in the post-devolution era, due to its centralist legacy and the weight of incumbency. Labour’s opponents have tended to put the same criticism rather more spicily, alleging that Transport House takes its orders direct from London and has always been much more an election-fighting than a policy-making operation.
As someone who played a part in Welsh Labour’s policy-making from 1999-2003, this is a criticism I’ve heard before. Like most caricatures, it has a nugget of insight liberally adorned with myth and mischief-making. Certainly, the party has a long (and its advocates would argue, proud) history of applying policy on a pan-British basis, according to a class-based analysis. And it is also undeniably true that for many years, the Welsh Regional Council of Labour (as Welsh Labour was revealingly known back then) saw its sole duty as organising the party machine so as turn the vote out. Cliff Prothero, the party’s Welsh Organiser from 1947 until 1966 was as trenchant a centralist as could be found in Labour’s ranks.
But how material is that today? Arguably, Labour’s limited innovation is more the product of the constitutional constraints it set itself in 1999, and to which Jeff Jones alludes. A budget set by a automatic formula established in the 1970s, and the ability to make only secondary legislation were significant straitjackets. Having Labour in power in Westminster was probably another. None of the unionist parties has yet found a fully satisfactory answer to the question of why common values give rise to opposing policies in England and Wales, with the debate often reduced to vapid claims of “distinctively Welsh solutions”. And all the time, there is the sneaking suspicion that the Assembly has maintained its policy distinctiveness through a devolution dividend that, for the first time, will now dwindle.
There is, of course, one further constraint which the candidates, for obvious reasons, have been keen to avoid discussing. The One Wales Agreement is a fairly comprehensive (according to Dafydd Wigley rather too comprehensive) policy statement. It would not be unreasonable for each of the contenders to make fulfilling that programme their ambition and manifesto. But that is the one thing none of them can do.
The programme of policies each candidate has set out must therefore be measures against, on the one hand, the old constraints of powers and budget-setting and against the new ones of partners and budget-squeezing. How have they done? You can judge for yourself by reading our subject-by-subject analysis:
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