Lee Waters: ‘We need to debate Welsh Labour’s future, not a backroom deal’

There has been a big disagreement within Welsh Labour. There has not been a ‘witch-hunt’ against Vaughan Gething, but there has been a genuine conflict of values. Now there is an appetite to quickly move on, but I think there’s a real danger that in shutting down discussion we will neither understand nor learn the lessons of what has happened.

As uncomfortable as it will be I think we need proper debate about the future direction of Welsh Labour. Circling the wagons around a ‘unity candidate’ may bring some short-term relief, but it will do nothing to address the fundamental need to renew in office.

I’ve not given any interview and don’t intent to, but as a way of making sense of it all I’ve written this assessment which looks at what should happen now and an analysis of how we got to this position. These are offered in the spirit of honest debate and not point-scoring.

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We’re in a pickle. After 25 years as the largest party in the Senedd, and 102 years as the party of Wales, we have become the establishment. Our opposition is weak, and so like many political systems where single parties dominate we turn on ourselves from time to time in order to check power and keep ourselves honest.

Splits within the party

We are currently in the midst of the biggest schism since 1999, when the ‘pluralist’ section of the party embodied by Rhodri Morgan went ten rounds with the ‘machine politics’ section of the party represented by Alun Michael, and beat ten bells out of the each other. Those bruises took a decade to heal.

The last four months has seen the same happen again, albeit beneath the surface. The inevitable resignation of Vaughan Gething has brought that into the open and now party leaders are desperately trying to keep a lid on it by brokering a quiet deal to avoid any further open conflict.

How do we ‘heal the wounds’ is a question that bleeped across my WhatsApp frequently over the last week. The instinctive response being offered up is to come behind a ‘unity candidate’ and all will be well. I completely understand the instinct, and necessity, to pull together in common cause.

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Disunity is a genie that is very difficult to get back into the bottle. But unity is not an end in itself; if that becomes our primary focus it risks a search for the lowest common denominator.

Unity is a consequence of renewing in office. It is the end result of a process to reach an agreement. It follows an exchange of ideas and is not some precondition for a contest where the less that is said the better.

There are honest differences, as there should be in any group of intelligent adults let alone a political party. We need to talk them through, test the arguments. Persuade and then decide.

We are not a management committee, we are a political movement. We were created for a purpose – to bring about change for working families, to challenge power, to make society fairer, and be a voice for the voiceless. That requires a passion, a hunger, and courage to reshape and reform ourselves as a political force to meet the modern context, in order to do the same for our society.

I think the new MP for Swansea West, Torsten Bell, hit the nail on the head, “The question”, he said, “is whether social democrats can turn themselves from simple defenders of the system into insurgents”.

That’s the real challenge to the people who wish to lead.

In a brilliant speech to a Labour Party conference in Manchester some years ago now, Bill Clinton told delegates that unless they presented themselves as the agents of change somebody else would fill the gap. “Make no mistake about it”, he said, the question for voters “is not whether you will change. It’s how you will change and in what direction.”

The central question of this leadership contest should be how we can meet the appetite for change in a way that honours our values as a political movement?

If we can’t answer that question then this may well be our Scottish moment.

Comparisons with the past

After the collapse of the Labour Party in Scotland Jonathan Powell, the PM’s Chief of Staff through the whole Tony Blair era in office, said that Scottish Labour had become a hollow tree – all it took was someone to come along and push it for it to fall. Nobody wants to hear this at the moment but this could well apply to Welsh Labour too.

There’s nothing inevitable about any of this. The difference between us and Scottish Labour in 2011 is that we have a long-record of devolved governments to be proud of, and a proven ability to stand up for Wales.

But the voters aren’t daft, and the warning signs are clear enough for those who want to look for them in the General Election result. Whereas the Westminster voting system this time flattered us, the new more proportional voting system we’ll be using in Wales will be far less forgiving if our support levels don’t get back beyond the 30% threshold. The last YouGov poll put us at 27% at a Senedd election – just 4 points ahead of Plaid.

The d’hondt voting system we’ve legislated for will actively work against us if our numbers stay at that level and a generation in the wilderness awaits.

That’s where we’re heading as I write, and people are panicking and so the ‘we must unite’ banner is quickly pulled up the flagpole and the call has gone out to rally round. My worry is that a superficial unity is in fact counter-productive. We have to be prepared to do the hard work of remaking our unity based on a real consensus of approach. Not a backroom deal to avoid having to go there.

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I have been boringly consistent on this point. Ahead of Rhodri Morgan standing down I urged the party to challenge ourselves into focusing on what a programme of reform looked like. To talk about ideas.

When Carwyn Jones stood down I again urged colleagues not to flock to candidates until they’d heard what change they would advance (there’s a clip of me saying just that that’s survived!). “Labour does not have a divine right to rule,” I said at the time; “We have to show people we have a vision for change”.

And when Mark Drakeford said he’d be standing down I set out my view on some policy challenges in a substantial lecture to the Brecon & Radnor CLP and urged those who wished to succeed him to remember that “We’re not managers, we’re agents of change”.

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I can’t say I’ve had much success in persuading people, but I’ll try again.

Yes, there is an open wound. But it will not heal itself, it has to be stitched. We need a genuine debate about ideas and policies, and an outcome which gives a mandate for a way ahead. If we duck that incredibly difficult challenge then we will have missed perhaps the last opportunity to win the next Senedd elections.

This is an abridged version of a longer article published here on Lee Waters’ blog, which explores further what went wrong for Gething.

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