Politics, my Dad and the Welsh Election
"My sister failed her A-levels because she was helping the Labour party win the 1983 general election." That's the myth that existed in our family for many years. My sister didn't fail her A-levels, although she may have done better had she not spent quite so much of her free time door-knocking for Labour. My sister was a political animal. It was hard not to be with a father like ours.
I grew up in a home where politics were talked about. I didn't ever think it odd that my father retreated to the living room after Sunday lunch to read the paper from cover to cover; it was part of his ritual. He would watch news bulletins several times a day, listen to Radio 4's PM in the car and express his views on the changing landscape of British politics whenever a cabinet minister resigned in disgrace, fell backwards on a beach or made ill-advised comments about eggs.
My dad loved the soap opera of Westminster and immersed himself in political coverage. He was devastated by John Smith's death and gathered us round the TV to watch Margaret Thatcher's knee-jerk Paris speech when she failed to win the Tory leadership contest.
Despite my father's fervent interest in politics however he wasn't a member of a political party. He was left-of-centre but flirted with Labour, the Liberals, the SDP and their various incarnations. He wasn't a party activist but would attend public meetings to hear politicians speak. He accompanied my sister to hear Michael Foot address an audience at Carmarthen Leisure Centre and he took me to hear Hywel Teifi Edwards at the Lyric Theatre in 1987 when I was just 12-years old.
Dad's interest in politics held sway over us in a very real way and it was predictable that I like my sister would find myself getting involved in politics at a young age. When the 1992 election came around I joined packs of Labour supporters stuffing leaflets through letterboxes after school on the streets of Carmarthen. At University I campaigned for Labour in Tower Hamlets to stop the BNP and went on marches against racism. By the time Tony Blair fought his first general election campaign as leader I was fully radicalised and spent long days campaigning to elect Nick Ainger as MP.
On election day I drove older voters to the polling station and collected polling data. When Portillo lost his seat I was in a house off Spilman Street celebrating a landslide win with others who had campaigned for the party. Over the next few years I witnessed policies I felt strongly about such as civil partnerships, a referendum on devolution and the establishment of a minimum wage being realised. The party I'd believed in was taking action at last and was having a very real effect on society. My faith was being rewarded. Yet somewhere along the line, I felt out of love with Labour. For many of my friends it was Blair's decision to go to war that did it, but when I try to analyse why I left Labour I can only recognise a slow disillusionment with the party as it became comfortable in power.
Nowhere was this truer than in Wales. Ironically, Labour had created the Welsh Assembly and yet their politicians didn't seem to know what to do with the institution. There was an impotence amongst Welsh AMs that seemed to prevent the fledgling government from realising a progressive agenda that worked in Wales's interests. I felt the party in Cardiff was working within the confines of Labour's UK policies over what might be best in a Welsh context. The decision-making had been devolved but the party machine hadn't.
Welsh Labour was typically Welsh in the way it operated in those early days. It was grateful for the opportunity to have its own government and didn't want to step on anyone's toes. Where was the passion and the ambition? I looked elsewhere for that and I found it in Plaid Cymru. One of the things I admire most about Plaid is its desire to devise new ways of doing things. Plaid acknowledges there are alternative ways of tackling Wales's problems and revel in the opportunity to affect change in a positive and rewarding way.
I've sat on enough committees over the years to recognise the dementors who answer every new proposal with "Oh, that'll never work" and I've come to believe that this is one of Welsh Labour's problems. They're frightened of shaking things up or taking risks. What we've ended up with in this last stagnant government is a paucity of policy and ideology. Carwyn Jones seems to suffer from the unfortunate mentality that "If we change the way we do things we'll be admitting we've been doing it wrong all these years... and we can't be doing that." Admit you can do things better, I'd respect you more. Don't scoff from the safety of your comfy swivel chair, Leighton. Seventeen-years in government. Seventeen-years to make a difference. I’m still waiting.
Adaptation shouldn't be feared. We need to change in order to improve. Wales has fewer doctors per head of population that any other part of the UK. Why wouldn't you want to address this issue and take action to correct it? My partner and other teachers across Wales have spent hours during the last few weeks uploading examples of their pupils' work to a cloud because ERW (the education consortium created by WAG) requires it to be done. Not one of the teachers I know seems to understand why ERW require these thousands of documents to be recorded digitally and they would all rather be spending their time teaching. How does filling a teacher's day with this senseless bureaucracy help children learn? Let's be bold, listen to what teachers say they need to do their job and get rid of the red tape. And until Welsh Labour finds the courage to address such obvious problems I will look elsewhere for inspiration. I want a government in Cardiff that's brave and forward-looking. I want a government that's unashamed at addressing what Wales needs to prosper. These are all things I identify in Plaid Cymru.
My father would have enjoyed this election campaign. He would chatted with campaigners on the doorstep, would have roared with laughter at the failure of UKIP to spell Rhondda correctly on their campaign literature and he would have had plenty to say about Neil Hamilton's resurrection in my dad's own back yard. My father's responsible for my interest in politics and I'll be up all night on May the 5th watching the drama unfold as he most definitely would have been were he still alive.