Welsh Conservatives: RT is out and DM slides in
Welcome to this month's Hiraeth Review, our latest comment and favourite content from the last month that we think will add to, or improve, understanding of matters local, national, union-wide, or international. We hope you enjoy!
It has been a long, long year in Welsh, Scottish, Irish, British, European, American and global politics - take your pick, it’s been a long year everywhere. Elections, shock government collapse, armed conflict, riots, assassinations and assassination attempts. Change, indeed.
So as we close out the year from all of us at the Hiraeth Pod, we’d like to send out a huge thank you to our listeners, guests, and Patreon supporters without whom we could not do what we do. Our mission continues to be to create a space for discussing the issues that matter in Wales and help inform politicians, policy teams, and, most importantly, the public about what is happening in this little old country.
And we are just one element of an increasingly strong Welsh politics podcast landscape and it would be well worth you subscribing to our friends below if you wish to broaden your depth of understanding on the issues facing Wales both internally and externally:
WalesCast - (Felicity Evans, James Williams)
Y Pumed Llawr - the Fifth Floor (Lee Waters MS)
For Wales, See Wales (Will Hayward, Melanie Owen, Robin Morgan)
Gwleidydda (Vaughan Roderick, Richard Wyn Jones)
Sunday Supplement (Vaughan Roderick)
And finally to all the elected politicians, the unsuccessful candidates, the campaigners, the activists, the civil servants, and the election workers who all invest huge amounts of their lives trying to make Wales a better place, our respect and thanks. Politics is hard, especially for those at the front line, and if not for your hard work, ambition, positivity, and professionalism literally nothing would be possible. Diolch and good luck for 2025.
And our recommended content from elsewhere...
Another leader is elected unopposed to heal party division
Clearly the Welsh Conservative group didn’t want to be the odd one out. Not so long ago Rhun ap Iorwerth was elected unopposed as Plaid Cymru leader on a platform of addressing reports of toxic culture within the party and repeated incidents of misbehavior. Then, following a leadership campaign plagued by reports of dirty tricks and even dirtier money, Vaughan Gething’s brief tenure as First Minister ended among party acrimony for Welsh Labour, and Eluned Morgan was elected unopposed to try and unit the party (ably aided by Huw Irranca-Davies, Mark Drakeford and Kevin Brennan). And now, after a close victory in a back-me-or-sack-me vote, Andrew RT Davies’s second spell as group leader was brought to an end by the man himself.
And enter to the fray with unanimous backing from the group, Darren Millar. Who he? Well, you may not be along in asking that question. For people not familiar with the new Conservative group leader, a handy Tumblr blog exists to show the different things Darren has been doing in different places over the years…
He has a tough job ahead. With a pretty tarnished reputation thanks to his predecessor’s antics, the longstanding issues with the party’s history in Wales, a pretty damning record of 14 years in government in London, and Liz Truss simply not going away, the Welsh wing of the party has a tough enough job. But Reform UK are sweeping in and sweeping up voters that would otherwise have been potential Conservatives and despite a non-existent ground operation across much of the country, are already polling at the same level as Labour.
Already Darren Millar has shown a much more competent messaging approach, a clearer vision for the future of the party, and a professional and ambitious attitude towards campaigning to be the next government of Wales (with former Monmouth MP David TC Davies running the show).
However for as much as the ‘success’ of 2021 under Andrew RT Davies was largely buoyed by the Boris Johnson bubble in London, the subsequent implosion and less-than-impressive start to start to Kemi Badenoch’s leadership will make the task a hard one for Millar to replicate. It is a choice that party has made to not afford its Welsh Parliament group leader the status or autonomy its Scottish counterpart has and this is always going to make it harder for them to make the political weather. The fair or foul winds of Westminster will always prevail until that changes.
Labour is heading for disaster in Wales
Ben Walker from Britain Elects in the New Statesman takes a stab at analysing the latest polling prospects for Welsh Labour with a doom-laden headline that isn’t necessarily borne out by the data.
What is true is that ending the role of first-past-the-post in Wales will truly change the dynamics of future elections, starting with 2026. Labour’s long-maintained advantage in FPTP constituencies in Wales, allied with the higher ratio of those seats versus regional ones, as seen in Scotland, has meant that it has been possible for the party to maintain its dominance without necessarily hitting particularly high vote shares across the board.
What is also true is that you don’t win a century of elections without having something special about you. Even though Labour had one of their lowest ever voter percentages in the UK General Election in July, only a fool (or a London-based journalist who has access to the internet but has rarely - if ever - come to Wales) would assume that they are losing their grip on power.
And the final truth is that if a London publication is running a Welsh politics story, whether talking about Welsh Labour, Plaid Cymru, or the Welsh Conservatives, the photo inset will be Farage because the only reason they will be paying attention will be to see indicators of Reform’s potential for Westminster 2029. Such is the UK press.
Making sense of the Welsh Budget
There are very few people with the talent, understanding, and sheer commitment to do an analysis of the Draft Welsh Budget within 24 hours of its announcement. Fortunately, the Wales Fiscal Analysis team at Cardiff University has two such people in the shape of Guto Ifan and Ed Gareth Poole.
This rapidly-published blog is the best summary of the budget introduced my Finance Secretary Mark Drakeford and will no doubt be referred to aplenty as debates about the budget continue into 2025.
Shedding some light on the Welsh Civil Service
Lee Waters MS is using his ministerial experience and parliamentary platform to try and inform debate about the nature of the Welsh Government and Parliament’s working in his podcast Y Pumed Llawr - The Fifth Floor. This also came up on Sunday Supplement, the recent lecture by Mark Drakeford’s chief special advisor, and Lee himself in our live event earlier in the year.
One of the revelations that arose from the first episode was the political choice made by then-FM Mark Drakeford to treat Welsh Government’s resources no more favourably than Welsh local government’s in terms of staffing budget. Sharing the pain of austerity with regard to budgets could be seen as good politics or solidarity in office, but it has also raised serious concerns about capacity inside government where proportionately the staff headcount has fallen way behind England and Scotland. Martin Shipton asks whether the FM was right to do so.
Is Welsh student financing actually working well?
Jim Dickinson at WonkHE takes a dive into the results of a survey from three years ago - only recently published - looking at Welsh students’ financial situation whether they are studying full time or part time at English providers, Welsh providers and FE providers.
What is interesting is to note that Welsh students are (or were, three years ago) managing to successfully avoid the levels of commercial debt that English students were falling into, and that the part-time funding model appears to be working very well.
But what is success in HE policy? If it’s a better quality of life for students then Wales could be seen as a success story but if expanding participation or creating and sustaining world-class institutions is the goal… the story is quite different.
Left Behind Places: What are They and Why do They Matter?
From the Oxford University Press comes a compendium of pieces exploring one of the real touch point stories of the last ten years - ‘left behind places’. Often raised in the course of discussions about anti-establishment sentiment, the rise of the populist right, and of course in the UK context about 2016’s Brexit vote, these are the great known unknowns of our time. These pieces look to address those unknown elements.
Basic Payment Scheme transforms lives in Denver
Wales has, of course, made some truly groundbreaking innovations in recent years in the area of what was once called a ‘universal basic income pilot’ but more accurately a ‘basic income scheme for care leavers’. Not without criticism, the Welsh Government decided to evaluate the success of providing children leaving care - some of the most vulnerable in society - with a basic income to see if it would have short/medium/long-term benefits. Despite its successes and strong support from some quarters of civil society, the Welsh Government has decided not to continue the scheme.
There are other, similar, schemes being trialled across the world and the Denver, Colorado one detailed here takes a specific look at homelessness and between city and private trust funders are trialling different models to see which, if any, provide the most impact. The feedback, including a $500,000+ saving on public services, appears to suggest that this model of providing money rather than just services and programmes, can make a world of difference.
The UK’s Four Families…
With tongue firmly in cheek, Dewi Knight of the Open University’ Police WISE team, dips into mafioso imagery to describe the state of inter-governmental relations inside the United Kingdom.
PolicyWISE are a great go-to source for comparing the four different policy fields of the “awesome foursome” of the UK’s nations and this call for a reset and an end to ‘policy Anglophobia’ will be welcome to many in Wales.
UK Labour looks to the continent for rail savings
While there has been much fanfare from the new UK Government about its plans to nationalise British railways (apart from the bits that are already nationalised, and the bits that are under the control of Wales and Scotland), the one thing that has escaped the process is the extraordinarily profitable series of rolling stock companies (ROSCOs) from which operators are forced to hire their rolling stock at extortionate costs.
It is somewhat surprising that HMG isn’t addressing this incredibly unpopular (unless you are a ROSCO shareholder) model that has remained a feature of the railways since privatisation in the 1990s. However, they are looking to reduce the burden of ROSCO costs by joining Eurofina - the European Company for the Financing of Railroad Rolling Stock - based in Switzerland as a way to bypass the stranglehold of the ROSCO model.
Housing Law and Policy in Wales - explained
Welsh Law continues to diverge from English Law as the two jurisdictions edge towards a no-fault divorce, ending a 600-year relationship. One of the most significant areas of difference is in the field of housing law where Welsh Government has been keen to intervene over the last 25 years.
In this new blog, Prof. David Cowan does some analysis of the latest developments in the field, something that we need to see more of for the legal profession to be aware of the growing difference of the Law of Wales and the Law of England inside the ‘England and Wales’ legal jurisdiction.
And that's it from this edition of our monthly newsletter and indeed 2024's Hiraeth Review.
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