Posts Tagged ‘Leighton Andrews’

Losing an election is a deeply personal experience

14/06/2016, 10:01:29 PM

by Leighton Andrews

I had many conversations with other Labour candidates in the run-up to May, and while most of us enjoy campaigning and talking to voters on the doorstep, I think we all felt that this had been a long campaign and we were keen for it to be over.

It had been a long Assembly term – the first time, of course, that the Assembly session had lasted five years rather than four. I have already said that I felt that I had been in a four-year campaign, and that is mentally wearing: it was a treadmill with only one goal in sight.

Jim Murphy wrote about the experience of losing your seat in the New Statesman in January. He said:

“One of the personal downsides of defeat as an MP is immediacy. You make a speech in the middle of the night from a packed stage in a largely empty hall. Each word is offered from behind a fixed smile as you pretend to be delighted that someone else will be leaving with the job that you arrived with.”

Wayne David, who lost the Rhondda Assembly seat in 1999, faced a much worse situation, with the verification on the night but the count delayed until next day. He knew from the verification that he was out, went home and worked out what he was going to say.

He told Matthew Engel in the Guardian subsequently ‘The body reacts in a physical way. I completely lost my appetite. I didn’t eat for four days and lost ten pounds in weight. I suppose it’s a bit like bereavement.’

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Labour’s got a problem in the South Wales valleys

07/06/2016, 10:22:16 PM

by Leighton Andrews

The success of Labour’s overall campaign in Wales on 5 May should not blind us to the challenges underneath. We may have retained 29 seats, losing only one, and maintained our position as by far the largest party in Wales, but overall, our Wales-wide vote fell by nearly 8 percent compared with 2011 – but was also lower than any national election since 1918.

Our national campaign worked brilliantly against the Tories, who had taken seats from us in the UK general election the year before. Against Plaid, not at all. The situation in the valleys is particularly troubling, and became obvious in 3 valleys seats in particular in 2016 – the Rhondda, Caerphilly and Blaenau Gwent. I am grateful to my colleagues Alun Davies AM and Hefin David AM, and to Peter Hain, for our discussions of the common factors.

These seats throw out clear warnings for Labour in the valleys, and there are wider lessons which need to be learned by the party. The swing against Labour in Blaenau Gwent was higher than the swing against Labour in the Rhondda. In Caerphilly, the Plaid vote was concentrated in the south of the constituency, UKIP was strong all over – but the split opposition saved the seat. Meanwhile, to the West, in Neath, Labour lost a significant proportion of votes to UKIP.

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Reflections on the Rhondda

02/06/2016, 07:58:56 PM

by Leighton Andrews

In 1992, Chris Patten, chair of the Conservative Party, delivered an overall election victory for John Major’s Conservative Party against Labour, but lost his own Bath seat to the Liberal Democrats. In 2016, as a member of Welsh Labour’s campaign committee, I played my part in helping to steer Welsh Labour’s campaign this year, where we held on to 29 of our 30 seats seeing off an expected Conservative challenge – but lost my own seat to Plaid Cymru.

Last month I told the Rhondda Labour Party’s AGM that I would not seek to be their candidate in 2021. Now is the time to reflect more fully on the Rhondda result. Next week I will move on to the challenge facing Labour in the Valleys, as the swing to Plaid Cymru was not simply a Rhondda phenomenon.

It is very clear that there was suppressed – and sometimes, overt – anger in the Rhondda over a range of local issues, principally around education and health; that the anger was focused at Labour in general; that Plaid Cymru exploited these issues effectively, digging deep into the networks of groups which were campaigning against everything from nursery changes to school and health reorganization; that Plaid’s campaign successfully sought to turn these specific issues into a general clamour for ‘change’ ; and that Leanne Wood’s profile – as both Plaid’s leader and as  a product of her local community – probably tipped the balance between a close and a clear result.

I have spent most of my adult life running campaigns in some shape or form in a professional capacity. I could have written the Plaid Cymru playbook for this campaign myself:

  • Focus on the loss of services and unpopular council and Welsh Government decisions
  • Link that to Labour’s 17 years in charge at the Assembly
  • Stress the need for change
  • Develop Leanne’s personal profile as a product of her local community and its values and as an agent of change – a four year project which paid off.
  • Link my own former role as education minister to the changes now being implemented by the Council.
  • Avoid obvious public personal attacks, but find ways to provoke a sense of outrage at Labour (MPs’ expenses, Ministerial cars, etc); aggressively project this on social media and on the doorstep in order to generate a sense that Labour is out of touch with local people; and on social media always have people ready to counter Labour positives with negatives.
  • Local factors hit us hard.

Issues with the health service, notably over planned changes to local hospital services and access to GP appointments, were clearly of concern. Chris Bryant MP and I had pressed for and achieved some significant improvements in ambulance waiting times, through ring-fencing ambulances in the Cwm Taf area rather than losing them to other areas when they transported people to the Heath and other hospitals – and this was widely recognized by paramedics in particular. Cwm Taf as a Health Board was trying hard to support communities that were in danger of losing GPs by taking over practices.

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Letter from Wales: Welsh education is in the corner with its thumb in its mouth

23/05/2013, 04:00:41 PM

by Julian Ruck

Did you hear the one about the Welsh education system?

The Estyn Report of 2012 concluded that 40% of Welsh children entering secondary education are going to schools that are barely “adequate.”

Carwyn Jones, admitted that indeed “more work needs to be done”. His education minister, Leighton Andrews, followed this up with an insistence that Wales was not going to follow the English with a new ‘O’ Level type exam that is more rigorous and demanding than the present GCSE.

Can’t have that now can we?

Mustn’t upset the Welsh medium schools with some heinous British deliverance must we? Never mind the fact that Welsh children will be burdened with a third class education, as if their future isn’t grim enough.

Standards? They can go hang. No, the problem is all about money, we are told. It’s all Barnett’s fault. Westminster just isn’t dishing out enough money to Wales, you see.

It’s alright for 10 Welsh poets to enjoy a 10 day little jolly at the Smithsonian in Washington, all expenses paid plus a £100 a day pocket money.

It’s alright to give £4.4m to Welsh publishers to publish 10 books on Welsh place names and DIY manuals on how to fry a Welshcake (I jest not).

It’s alright to give millions of tax-payers’ money to a tiny number of people to write the 100th learned tome on the fanciful Mabinogion, What the hell, there’s no such thing as an ebook in Wales? Stop the tax-payer gravy train? You must be joking!

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