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Today both Wales and Welsh Labour will know who their next leader is

I SPEND my life living with, observing and writing about leaders. Much of the debate in this area tends to focus in on the individual qualities of leaders and what may be appropriate for a particular time or environment. But this is the wrong way of viewing the issue. It is confusing the individual leader with the process of leadership.

Our environment – burning issues of the day, desirable leadership qualities, public priorities – is ultimately socially constructed and shaped by language. It is not a question of a particular set of qualities that happen to fit a pre-defined, independently existing and provable reality. The way we as consumers of the political product and how they, the political leaders, form a judgement on what kind of leadership we require is much more complicated than that and is seeped with concerns of power. Power is not a possession, held by an individual, office or for that matter populace, a set of traits able to be called into action to achieve a specific goal. No, power is negotiated between people and objects. Hegemonies of power are dynamic and are constantly being formed and reformulated through a conversation and debate between agents, be that of a covert or overt nature. So what are the practical consequences of this for the way we view leadership in the Welsh context?

It has implications for the way in which we as citizens relate to our leaders and for the manner in which they deal with us. There is a sickness in the UK, and in Wales especially, the symptoms of which are a passive acceptance of ‘strong’ leaders who order us around and tell us what to do. We don’t like to take much responsibility for the state of the nation but prefer to snipe away in letters pages, down the pub and on radio talk shows. Equally, when we perceive things to be going well, we lurch to the other extreme and deify our leaders. This is the football manager syndrome: Hail the boss as the messiah in the good times, then crucify the same messiah when things go bad. This addiction of ours to directive leader-follower relations is especially dangerous in a time of recession. Crises have a peculiar way of pushing people into making decisions that seem, with the benefit of hindsight, quite baffling. For proof of this, witness the horror of the vast majority of US citizens when they finally woke up to the duping of the nation under the disastrous presidency of George W Bush. Yet, in a time of perceived crisis, with the threat of global terrorism all too real for thousands of people, citizens were willing to accept poorly thought-out macho actions. The right questions were not asked until later and it all seemed perfectly logical at the time.

The point here is that, as power is a negotiated phenomenon, leaders are able to influence the environment as much, if not more often, than other agents. President Bush was able to convince the nation of the existence of crisis and it was only until a more persuasive Barack Obama and a more receptive populace came into existence four years later that the case for a more measured, considered public policy stance was able to be countenanced.

In the context of Wales, we have heard much from Edwina Hart about her ‘strength’ as a leader, that she is capable of taking the tough decisions for the benefit of Wales. In her words, “it takes strong leadership, and political determination, to make the machinery of government work for progressive agendas”. This is her pitch, based on a construction of her image as a Welsh Maggie Thatcher. But we must not accept these sorts of claims uncritically. Perceived strength can very easily become stubbornness and an unwillingness to listen.

Take the debacle over the neurosurgery debate in north Wales or the fear among many that the present health reform proposals threaten to create an over-centralized, bossy system. The essence of such a political approach places citizens in the role of children and the state as parent. Her ideology for the management of public services is “voice not choice”. But this is deeply flawed. The philosophy is that patients will be empowered by the powerful centre to speak up about problems in delivery and therefore will have no need to change provider. And how will Mrs Hart empower people to do this? Through community health councils. I challenge anyone reading this article to walk onto any council estate in Wales and ask people if they feel like engaging with the meetings of their local CHC. It is worth gambling the deeds to my house that the take-up would be no higher than a percentage point at best. This is unimaginative stuff.

So what we are left with is a swathe of people, mostly from poorer backgrounds, without much voice at all. Surely the best way of helping people to ‘co-create’ services is by allowing them some say over how and by whom they are treated. This is their money being spent after all. It does not belong to the government or to Mrs Hart. People are not stupid and when given the opportunity to engage in their own services in a real way, through the allocation of funds, they will be far more likely to take an interest in public value than if offered some misleading, flawed and abstract notion of “voice”. Ultimately, of course, the voice system only benefits the better off, those more comfortable with the machinery of institutions and more at ease with kicking up a stink about service offerings.

Another characteristic of such a ‘strong’ leadership relationship tends to be an unwillingness to accept outside influence. It is the creation of silo thinking, a ‘them and us’ attitude. We have seen disturbing flashes of this in Mrs Hart’s refusal to engage with UK Labour Party conferences and in her general hostility towards Welsh MPs. A section in her manifesto should send alarm bells ringing amongst every Labour member in Wales:

We need to argue for a new constitutional relationship between the Labour Party in Wales and the UK party, so as better to reflect the devolution of political authority and range of responsibilities exercised here in Wales.

Why? What is wrong with being part of a strong UK party? Some people this have framed it in financial terms, that the immediate result of any form of federalized party system would be Welsh Labour more closely approximating a skeletal Lib Dem organization than that of a party of power. This is a valid view but there are deeper objections. The Welsh party already enjoys its own policy making process and sets its own election priorities. So it is difficult to view this as anything other than an abandonment of our party in Westminster, to which our Welsh MPs make a valued contribution, not to mention Scotland, a view that when the going gets tough, Wales will bail out.

In these times of economic difficulty, surely we need more joint working between nations, not less, both in policy and financial terms. It is a separatist agenda that will fuel the fire behind the accusation hanging over Mrs Hart that she is too close to Plaid. This is a fear held in north east Wales, in constituencies like Delyn, Alyn and Deeside, Wrexham and others. It is shared in the Gwent valley seats of Islwyn, Torfaen, Blaenau Gwent and many more. In fact this should not just be a concern of these well-known anti-nationalist communities. It should be worry all party members. Do we want to be a party in Wales of increasing isolation or one of active and critical engagement with partners? Constructing walls around Welsh Labour, and, in broader terms, Wales will not help us out of recession.

Strength may of course appear in a more positive guise, one in which a leader pushes followers to come up with bigger, brighter, more ambitious ideas and plans. Yet there have been precious few of these yet from the Mrs Hart camp. It has been a disappointing campaign for her. Yet there is still time to turn it around, to engage more with the media and to adopt a more challenging, rather than directive approach. The coming weeks will prove telling.

The Edwina Hart campaign has stood in stark contrast with those of Huw Lewis and Carwyn Jones. Huw, as always, has displayed an infectious enthusiasm for the causes of regeneration and child poverty. Even if he is a bit too centralist at times, without him this contest would have been much the poorer. His is an important voice that needs to be heard at the heart of government and even if he does not manage to pull off an incredible underdog victory, he will have convinced many people of the justness of his cause.

Carwyn Jones has fought the kind of campaign we would expect from him. It has sought to build broad alliances of people from every part of Wales. It has been outward-facing, has listened to people and yet challenged at the same time. He clearly understands the long-term challenge of reviving Wales from the grassroots, beginning with a radically improved education offer. Out of all the candidates it is Carwyn who has most shown the capacity for statesmanship.

To borrow and perhaps more appropriately apply Edwina Hart’s lexicon, both Carwyn and Huw have genuinely used this campaign to “co-create” a new reality with party members, with some imaginative new ideas and much needed critical engagement the result. They have attempted to raise the tone of debate in our nation and they should both be applauded for that.

So, ultimately, this is not a question of who possesses the most suitable innate leadership skills. The world around us is not fixed, an independently and scientifically verifiable place. We as citizens have as much right to negotiate the meaning of leadership and power as do the politicians. We must be wary of all this talk of strength and instant, decisive decision making because all too often such words lead us down the path towards diktat and centralization. Politicians don’t possess the power any more than we do as citizens. It’s all up for grabs. So be careful what you agree to give away in a time of crisis.