New Labour in denial - really?

Welsh Devolution report

No need to comment as the few elderly members and emloyees of new labour struggle. They are well out of touch.

Labour’s lousy report Sep 10 2007 by Martin Shipton, Western Mail

WELSH Labour’s performance during and immediately after the National Assembly election has been torn apart in an expert study.

And the men behind the new research say the party’s leaders are simply failing to face up to the shortcomings.

In a devolution monitoring report for the Constitution Unit at University College London, Dr Richard Wyn Jones and Dr Roger Scully of the Institute of Welsh Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, say many Welsh Labour members are “in denial” about the extent of their party’s decline.

The report says, “Although hardly helped by the fortunes of the UK-wide party – fighting an election in the dog days of the Blair government, with issues like Iraq and the ‘Cash for Honours’ affair continuing to rumble in the background – or by its concentration on Scotland and the English local elections, Welsh Labour fought a poor campaign. Expectations were absurdly over- inflated, co-ordination from the centre appeared weak, and the essentially nostalgic central message of the campaign seems to have fallen on largely fallow ground.

“The ‘Welsh Labour’ brand appealed to ‘classic Labour’ values. This may have helped shore up the party’s traditional base in the Valleys constituencies, but its broader resonance appears both geographically and socially limited. Furthermore, though the Valleys loom large symbolically – for both Labour partisans and their Plaid Cymru opponents – their real importance is limited and declining. While Labour can take comfort from the failure of other parties to advance in the Valleys, it faces a considerable danger of being pushed out of North Wales in the next Assembly election; it was wiped out in the constituency battle in the Mid and West Wales region; and it now faces substantial challenges in the metropolitan conurbations of South Wales. All this should surely give the party pause for thought. But it may be that Labour’s results, while poor, were not quite bad enough to force the party into undertaking the inevitably painful and divisive process of rethinking its stance and programme.”

Turning to events after the election, Jones and Scully write, “Labour’s election campaign was poor, but its performance during the post- election interregnum often bordered on the inept.

“ It seems extraordinary that a party long privately conceding defeat in key constituencies – such as Cardiff North and Clwyd West – had not done more to prepare the ground for a post-election situation in which it had fallen far short of an overall majority. But this is precisely what occurred.

“It is also extraordinary that leading Labour figures saw fit to both insult (describing as ‘inedible’ and ‘unpalatable’) and ignore (through Rhodri Morgan going on a post-election break) potential coalition partners in the immediate aftermath of the election.

“And it is inexplicable that Labour did not do more immediately after the election to try to secure a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, before the prospect of a Rainbow coalition involving the other three main parties began to solidify.

“In defence of Rhodri Morgan, however, it may be suggested that much of Welsh Labour’s problem is cultural, even psychological. Labour has long been the hegemonic party in Welsh politics, its dominance in terms of votes being underpinned and reinforced by innately disproportional electoral systems. And large and influential sections of the Welsh Labour party remain resolutely ‘in denial’ about the implications of devolution and its semi-proportional electoral system.”

The report adds, “ The many Welsh Labour parliamentarians who remain utterly unreconciled either to coalition with Plaid or devolution retain a significant capacity for mischief making.”

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/newspolitics/tm_headline=labour-8217-s-lousy-report&method=full&objectid=19761409&siteid=50082-name_page.html