Posts Tagged ‘Welsh Assembly election 2016’

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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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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Moderates must wait to challenge Corbyn

06/05/2016, 12:55:59 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Friday 6th May  2016 could be the date that Labour’s slow awakening began.

For moderates, the electoral consequences of Jeremy Corbyn have  always been obvious. This dreadful set of election results is confirmation of the expected.

But it doesn’t matter how angry moderates are at the loss of English council seats, the reverses in Wales or the devastation in Scotland. Corbyn, or a hard left alternative, can only be beaten in a vote of the membership and supporters.

What matters most is how Labour’s internal swing vote, the soft left, react to the results.

At last year’s leadership election, their position could be characterised as apathy at a return to Brownite grind with Yvette; outright opposition to the late-Blair confrontation proffered by Liz and scepticism at Andy Burnham’s all too effective impression of Ed Miliband’s muddled equivocation.

In the absence of an alternative, Labour’s largest grouping voted for the only choice not to have failed them in the past twenty years – Jeremy Corbyn’s hard left dreaming.

It’s quite a shift to go from there to defenestrating Corbyn, eight months later.

Until now the soft left stance has largely been to give Jeremy Corbyn the benefit of the doubt.

“Sour grapes” is a phrase I’ve heard frequently used to describe the moderate response to the leader. The narrative about “Bitterites” and internal division undermining Labour’s message has gained some traction.

But given the paucity of Labour’s performance, to blame everything on the enemy within, a phantom army of Blairites, simply isn’t credible.

The Conservative party has been in a state of open civil war over the EU referendum but they still performed amazingly strongly for a government that is in it’s sixth year.

Up and down the country, local Labour parties have seen months of doorstep effort count for nothing when the votes have been tallied.

If the best that Jeremy Corbyn can say about these results is that “Labour hung on,” questions will start to be asked by those who have been supportive if not convinced.

For the first time under in Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader, moderates have permission to speak within Labour’s grassroots debate.

To paraphrase Churchill, in the moderates’ battle for the party, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut

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