This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Just checked the dates, and look like Drakeford timed the announcement to coincide with the fifth anniversary of being sworn into office - 12th Dec 2018.

Unheard of levels of Tidy Filing Systems, really.

Little bit earlier than expected, but I guess he has been telegraphing this for a while. Might be worth checking his garage for a new campervan, just in case.

Heh. Though personal issues are more likely to be a factor in his case. Quite a lot of them.

[Conservatopia]

By far the worst FM Wales ever had. Deliberately stymied investment into infrastructure and passed the utterly absurd 20mph law just so he could worship his climate fantasy.

I always imagined Gething would be a frontrunner, he has good name recognition in Wales and seems switched on. Has a few issues perhaps but probably a safe choice overall.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I always imagined Gething would be a frontrunner, he has good name recognition in Wales and seems switched on. Has a few issues perhaps but probably a safe choice overall.

If he runs he would certainly be a front-runner: the theoretical edge that Miles has stems from him not being a Cardiff politician and being a Welsh speaker, and these aren't insurmountable advantages.

[CumbrianLefty]

Gething has been around for a while and will thus have inevitably acquired some enemies, he maybe also gives off a whiff off Streeting Syndrome (ie being too obviously ambitious for one's own good)

Miles is a relative newcomer, but has undeniably impressed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Gething is first out of the blocks and has made a strong start on endorsements. At the very least, we have a contest and it ought to be a proper one.

[Blair]

An essay question; what is easier for a layman to understand… The internal politics of Welsh Labour, the m***ns or the Catholic Church?

Seriously though can one of our labour watchers do a brief summary? My only experience is knowing everyone knows everyone and has errrr strong opinions on their colleagues

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An essay question; what is easier for a layman to understand… The internal politics of Welsh Labour, the m***ns or the Catholic Church?

Not the Masons. Never the Masons. The Masons are the enemy. Down with the Masons.

No, really. The Senedd is the only legislative body on the Earth in which members must, by law, declare if they are also members of a Masonic Lodge and this is entirely down to the South Wales Labour AMs (as they were at the time the rule was implemented).

Seriously though can one of our labour watchers do a brief summary? My only experience is knowing everyone knows everyone and has errrr strong opinions on their colleagues

How long have you got? This could take a while.

[Blair]

An essay question; what is easier for a layman to understand… The internal politics of Welsh Labour, the m***ns or the Catholic Church?

Not the Masons. Never the Masons. The Masons are the enemy. Down with the Masons.

No, really. The Senedd is the only legislative body on the Earth in which members must, by law, declare if they are also members of a Masonic Lodge and this is entirely down to the South Wales Labour AMs (as they were at the time the rule was implemented).

Seriously though can one of our labour watchers do a brief summary? My only experience is knowing everyone knows everyone and has errrr strong opinions on their colleagues

How long have you got? This could take a while.

Ha indulge me!

[Battista Minola 1616]

An essay question; what is easier for a layman to understand… The internal politics of Welsh Labour, the m***ns or the Catholic Church?

Not the Masons. Never the Masons. The Masons are the enemy. Down with the Masons.

Something which, appropriately enough, Welsh Labour and the Catholic Church one hundred percent agree on!

[CumbrianLefty]

Nick Brown, who had been suspended for some time, has today announced that he's retiring at the next election and also resigning his membership of the Labour Party, describing the process against him as a "complete farce".

There are nine MPs elected as Labour currently sitting as Independent (as well as seven elected as Tories, one as Plaid and one as SNP).  Brown isn't the only one where there's a somewhat mysterious and apparently very slow disciplinary process going on.

It is disappointing and between his remarks on rivals, what went down last year, and long-standing tensions in Novocastrian politics...

What is this a reference to?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Morgan will not be standing. Meanwhile, the Miles campaign (which is still technically unofficial as he has not formally declared that he will run) has unveiled more backers in the Senedd and also the support of Lord Hain: this is not surprising as he was the MP for Neath for years, but counts as significant heavyweight support all the same.

[Blair]

An interesting thing about Drakeford I haven't seen covered much is how responsible he was for the Clear Red Water strategy; an approach that not only clearly helped Welsh Labour but also predicted the direction of the UK wide party over the next 20 years

Morgan will not be standing. Meanwhile, the Miles campaign (which is still technically unofficial as he has not formally declared that he will run) has unveiled more backers in the Senedd and also the support of Lord Hain: this is not surprising as he was the MP for Neath for years, but counts as significant heavyweight support all the same.

I did find it interesting that Gething appeared to get a lot of Westminster endorsements; I've never understood the relationship between the Assembly & Westminster in Welsh Labour compared to Scotland where it was very much a case of SLab expecting their cream of the crop to go to Westminster.

But then Welsh Labour in the PLP is unique as it had a relatively high survival rate

[Wiswylfen]

Nick Brown, who had been suspended for some time, has today announced that he's retiring at the next election and also resigning his membership of the Labour Party, describing the process against him as a "complete farce".

There are nine MPs elected as Labour currently sitting as Independent (as well as seven elected as Tories, one as Plaid and one as SNP).  Brown isn't the only one where there's a somewhat mysterious and apparently very slow disciplinary process going on.

It is disappointing and between his remarks on rivals, what went down last year, and long-standing tensions in Novocastrian politics...

What is this a reference to?

The deselection of Nick Forbes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, Mutually Assured Destruction.

[CumbrianLefty]

Not a massive fan, but that was a somewhat rum business yes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

At present it looks as if there will only be two candidates: nearly all of the people who had been speculated as possible alternative options have ruled themselves out, often endorsing Gething or Miles and in some cases very early on indeed. For people who can only understand internal Labour Party elections through the prism of simple Left/Right bunfighting this might seem like a contest between two near-identical opponents: Miles is a solicitor on the moderate wing of the Party and ticks a minority representation box and Gething is also a solicitor on the moderate wing of the Party who ticks a minority representation box. But that is usually a superficial way of understanding this things and, in this case, a completely misleading one. Before considering the two candidates themselves, a little bit of information on their predecessors is probably necessary context.

Since the advent of Devolution there have been four Welsh Labour Leaders and they have allowed followed a broadly similar profile in certain respects: all four were white, heterosexual men, all four were Welsh-speakers, all four had a background in local government albeit not in the same way,¹ all four were longstanding enthusiasts for Devolution, and none of the four were outside the Party mainstream however defined.² Three were Cardiff based politicians³, but it's notable that only one of these was originally from the Cardiff area and that he, Morgan, had strong family ties to other parts of Wales⁴. Apart from the handful of years Morgan spent as a civil servant at the DTI, none of them ever worked outside Wales except as politicians. None ever worked in a corporate environment (I do stress this phrase) in the private sector. Curiously, none had a strong Trade Union background.⁵ This is all largely coincidental, but it had played a role in the development of the Senedd as an institution and in the shaping of policy.

Some of the above will still hold, but isn't just the first thing there that will change no matter which candidate wins, even if (in both cases) this is what will be noticed. Gething is not a Welsh-speaker, as a lawyer worked for Thompson's (essentially an in-house solicitor's firm for the TUs) and was the President of the Wales TUC in 2008. Miles has been neither a councillor nor a council officer, spent most of his pre-political career outside Wales and often in corporate, private sector settings. It isn't that I would expect a drastic change of direction either way, but this is interesting, isn't it?

Anyway, Jeremy Miles has been the MS for Neath since 2016⁶ and became a member of the Cabinet only a year after his election. He served as Counsel General (i.e. chief legal officer) from 2017 until 2021, when he was appointed as the Minister for Education and the Welsh Language. For some of that time he was also the Brexit Minister. He was born and brought up in Pontarddulais (a postindustrial town notable for many sportsmen located roughly halfway between Swansea and Llanelli), was someone one of the first AMs/MSs to be Out when first elected (in... _{yeah... 2016}), is a Welsh-speaker and a member of the Co-operative Party. If elected he would actually, and quite strangely when you think about it, be the first First Minister to represent a Valleys constituency. There's not much to say of his time in government as he has only moved into a policy-heavy brief very recently, though is known that he works hard and expects others to. Despite not having not yet formally declaring his candidacy he has already attracted significant backers, such as the aforementioned Lord (Peter) Hain, Wrexham MS and present Trefnydd (i.e. Leader of the House) Lesley Griffiths (a political survivor who tends to guess correctly) and Andrew Morgan (Leader of Rhondda Cynon Taf council since 2014 and the most powerful politician in Welsh local government).

Vaughan Gething has been the MS for Cardiff South & Penarth since 2011,⁷ has been a minister since 2014 and has been in the Cabinet since 2016 when he was appointed to the Health portfolio. Since the change of government in 2010 this has not been a fun job in any devolved administration and it became even less so during the Covid Pandemic. Exactly how this affects Gething's prospects is uncertain: on the one hand it has made him a reasonably well-known figure in Wales, though on the other some of the decisions made at the time were, as elsewhere, controversial. He is certainly fortunate that a) certain errors made elsewhere were not made (or were not to the same extent) in Wales,⁸ and also that he has not had to handle the messy post-pandemic situation, having been moved to the Economy post in 2021. Gething was born in Lusaka where his Welsh father (who worked there as a vet) met his mother, a local. The family moved back to Britain when Gething was a toddler, eventually settling in West Dorset. He moved to Wales (and permanently) in the 90s initially to attend university. He was active in student politics and ended up as the President of NUS Wales. He was a paper candidate in the 1999 Assembly election and spent four years representing Butetown on Cardiff Council. As noted above he was also President of the Welsh TUC for a year. He has never lacked for ambition and ran for Leader in 2018, polling better than expected on the final ballot against Drakeford. He is at present the only candidate to have formally declared, and he has already expanded his endorsements beyond those he had in 2018, including that of Gower MS and Finance Minister Rebecca Evans who had been thought of as a possible dark horse contender. At first his endorsements looked to be very South Wales-centric (as they were in 2018) but they have since broadened.

<sub>1. Michael, Jones and Drakeford were all councillors at one stage or another, while Morgan had been a council officer.
2. E.g. Drakeford's qualified support for Corbyn was generally seen as a calculated move aimed to increase his chances of winning a membership ballot - things being as they were at the time - as he was from the same Soft Left group (variously known as the Riverside Mafia or the Pontcanna Mob) that Morgan was the leading light of in the 80s and 90s.
3. Not without consequences at times: some of the difficulties between Michael and Morgan were rooted in disagreements about specifically Cardiff issues, such as the Cardiff Bay Barrage scheme and also the rivalry between the Labour groups on the former South Glamorgan County Council (to whom Michael was close) and on the former Cardiff City Council. The Labour Group on the present 'City and County of Cardiff Council' is largely descended from that of the former SGCC (and not merely descended in the case of the still-powerful and ever... colourful... Russell Goodway), while the leadership of the Labour Group on the old CCC mostly ended up in the Assembly (as it then was).
4. And even then he wasn't from the city proper, but from Radyr, a commuter village on its Western fringes and even more so in the 1940s than now. His father, T.J. Morgan a notable man in his own right, was from the Swansea Valley. Michael was born on Anglesey and grew up there and in Colwyn Bay, while Drakeford moved to Cardiff from Carmarthen.
5. The closest to having one was Michael who was an NUJ Chapel officer when he was a reporter for the South Wales Echo as a young man.
6. He had previously lost the Aberavon selection for the 2015 General Election to Stephen Kinnock by a single vote and, in practice, the endorsement of the steelworkers union Community.
7. The same area represented for many years at Westminster by none other than Alun Michael, you say? Is this relevant? Yes.
8. Which was hit hard by Covid but largely for a mixture of demographic and environmental reasons, plus the sheer appalling bad luck of the first big nosocomial spread in Britain happening to be in Newport.</sub>

[Estrella]

He was born and brought up in Pontarddulais (a postindustrial town notable for many sportsmen located roughly halfway between Swansea and Llanelli), was someone one of the first AMs/MSs to be Out when first elected (in... _{yeah... 2016}), is a Welsh-speaker and a member of the Co-operative Party.

What is the point of Co-operative Party’s, you know, existence? And is there any rhyme or reason to which MPs are Labour Co-op as opposed to just Labour?

[CumbrianLefty]

Well that is a much asked question.

Though in the Corbyn years it acquired a reputation as something of a home for his opponents.

[Torrain]

8 MS backed Jeremy Miles overnight - bringing him to 16 backers in the Senedd, one short of Drakeford’s total in 2018. Pretty impressive flex for a candidate before he’s even announced - presumably that’s coming today?

[CumbrianLefty]

8 MS backed Jeremy Miles overnight - bringing him to 16 backers in the Senedd, one short of Drakeford’s total in 2018. Pretty impressive flex for a candidate before he’s even announced - presumably that’s coming today?

Gething had the "quickest" start, but Miles has caught up well.

[Wiswylfen]

Good God: let Miliband get on with his brief for even ten minutes. This party is plagued with idiots whose only points of reference--indeed, the only two things they can even think of--are 1992 and 1997 and have no idea of what debts they owe or indeed understanding of politics beyond what they get/got from television (and maybe a few crap pop politics books).

I am perhaps as right-wing as it is possible to be in factional terms and it is as utterly infuriating as it is bizarre. All these weird little creeps in their twenties and thirties who get nothing whatsoever and never will because they are morons are a plague on us and I despise them. The left was more accurate about The Briefcases than they will ever know.

[CumbrianLefty]

Excellent rant, and like most excellent rants a fundamentally justified one

I would say it is if anything worse that that, though. These people - who strut around the corridors of Westminster as if they owned the place, viewing actual elected Labour politicians as their expendable pawns - have an actual worldview that can best be described as a mishmash of the very worst aspects of The Thick Of It and The West Wing. Quite simply, totally unserious people - and it is one of the many failings of our lobby hacks that they continue to indulge them.

(btw there is a good chance that the person continually running this one is the same as the sad git who used to brief "StArMeR wIlL oNlY bE a ReAl LeAdEr OnCe He HaS sAcKeD rAyNer AnD MiLiBaNd" every other week, until it finally became obvious even to lobby parasites that wasn't going anywhere)

[Wiswylfen]

Excellent rant, and like most excellent rants a fundamentally justified one

I would say it is if anything worse that that, though. These people - who strut around the corridors of Westminster as if they owned the place, viewing actual elected Labour politicians as their expendable pawns - have an actual worldview that can best be described as a mishmash of the very worst aspects of The Thick Of It and The West Wing. Quite simply, totally unserious people - and it is one of the many failings of our lobby hacks that they continue to indulge them.

(btw there is a good chance that the person continually running this one is the same as the sad git who used to brief "StArMeR wIlL oNlY bE a ReAl LeAdEr OnCe He HaS sAcKeD rAyNer AnD MiLiBaNd" every other week, until it finally became obvious even to lobby parasites that wasn't going anywhere)

Yes: no understanding of politics beyond It In of Thick The and "wow I want to be just like Malcolm Tucker from the tee vee ⦂)". I should say it's not just them, though. As disastrous and malignant as they are, there are elected Labour politicians who are just as bad (MatPat/Pac-Man Fadden the worst of them: for all that he would like himself to be seen as a Smithite, he has the exact opposite of the man's cautiousness; cautious where he shouldn't be, and not cautious where he should be).

[Wiswylfen]

I see the party has finally brought itself down to American/Conservative levels of begging for money: the poorly-cropped bar chart is bad enough, but saying that 'the Tories have a serious shot of clinging on to five more years in power' is on a whole other level.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Excellent rant, and like most excellent rants a fundamentally justified one

I would say it is if anything worse that that, though. These people - who strut around the corridors of Westminster as if they owned the place, viewing actual elected Labour politicians as their expendable pawns - have an actual worldview that can best be described as a mishmash of the very worst aspects of The Thick Of It and The West Wing. Quite simply, totally unserious people - and it is one of the many failings of our lobby hacks that they continue to indulge them.

(btw there is a good chance that the person continually running this one is the same as the sad git who used to brief "StArMeR wIlL oNlY bE a ReAl LeAdEr OnCe He HaS sAcKeD rAyNer AnD MiLiBaNd" every other week, until it finally became obvious even to lobby parasites that wasn't going anywhere)

Yes: no understanding of politics beyond It In of Thick The and "wow I want to be just like Malcolm Tucker from the tee vee ⦂)"

Individuals who watch Ianucci shows and think “gee this sure is a great inspiration for managing people irl” are medically fascinating in their absurdity.