Our attitudes towards work and ambition – Ron Davies
the last 20 years that they’ve been singularly ineffective.
“What I would say is that I’ve yet to see any evidence whatsoever of a meaningful initiative that brings together all the players across the public sector.
“It’s as if the health service has nothing to say via schools or social services or community services to young people about what they need to be doing.
“They’d certainly expect schools to do their best, but where is the integration that we need to see?”
Asked what different approach he would have adopted if he had become First Minister, Mr Davies said: “I think there’s unfortunately been an acceptance over the last 20 years of adequate provision and a readiness to accept excuses and to justify poor performance.
“We’re too complacent about the outcomes, we’re not realistic in our challenging.
“How can it be that standards in the public sector are falling and why do we have to make excuses for that?
“Why can’t we acknowledge what’s happening?
“And that seems to me the first step – to acknowledge what is happening, instead of all the time making excuses for what’s happened.”
Asked how he responded to those who argued that Wales had stagnated because it is effectively a one-party state, Mr Davies said: “Well certainly there’s an element of complacency, isn’t there?
“We’re not far off from a one-party state in as much as the Labour Party has been in control ever since it was created.
“In a sense, then, the Labour politicians who are now holding portfolios can’t look back at the previous 20 years and say ‘that policy was a failure’ because that’s accusing fellow members of their own party of failure.
“But if the electorate isn’t going to bring about change, then today’s generation of politicians have to take a far harder critical eye of the performance of their own predecessors.”
Asked whether he could see any sign of that happening, Mr Davies said: “No, I can’t”.
The former Cabinet Minister, who at the 2011 Assembly election stood unsuccessfully as the Plaid Cymru candidate in his old seat of Caerphilly, also explained why the Assembly hadn’t been given more powers from the outset, and why it had what some see as an unwieldy voting system.
Mr Davies said: “I think what we’ve failed to do over the last 20 years – what I failed to do at the time – was to make clear that we had an agreement prior to 1997 that there would be legislation in the first term of Parliament [about how the Assembly would function], if Labour won, and the bones of what that legislation would be.
“It was quite clear to all of us in the Shadow Government prior to 1997 that we would only get one shot at devolution. The referendum was there – if we lost the referendum, it was off the agenda.
“If we won the referendum and didn’t get the legislation through in one term, then it would be off the agenda. Tony Blair was very clear about his indifference to the outcome. It wasn’t part of his project.
“He wasn’t emotionally, intellectually or ideologically committed to devolution, but it was part of his inheritance from [former Labour leader] John Smith [who died in 1994], and part of Labour Party policy through successive party conferences. He had to honour that, but he made it clear that if it fell, then he’d discharged his responsibilities.
“The outcome of that was that I had to make sure we could get the legislation through.
“The election was in late spring, we had the referendum legislation before the summer recess, we had the referendum in September and I had to get the Bill before the House of Commons before Christmas.
“In two crucial areas I had to take decisions that meant I could meet the deadline. The first was the powers of the Assembly.
“I took the view that the guiding principle would be that all of the powers that I had as Secretary of State would be conveyed to the Assembly, because no other government department or minister could say ‘no, you can’t do that’.
“That was the principle on which I operated.
“I know that if I’d decided we had to have a discussion about which economic development powers, or which education powers, or which health service powers could be transferred, we’d still be there today talking about it.
“It would have opened up a debate that could never be resolved – and I had literally weeks to solve these matters.
“The other issue was electoral arrangements.
“We were committed to introduce some form of proportionality.
“I would love to have sat down and had a lengthy debate about the best way of ensuring proportionality – the best way of rearranging constituencies and so on.
“But if you want to change constituency boundaries, you have to have a boundary commission, and if you have a boundary commission you lay yourself open to years and years and years of discussion and ultimately legal challenge – and who knows what the outcome will be?
“So I had to have a scheme which used the basic building block which we had – the 40 constituencies.
“That’s how it was – if I’d wanted to change it, I would lose the Bill. And therefore I decided what would be the best way, using that basic building block of 40.
“My idea was that we would mirror what was happening in Scotland with the top-up system, so there was some degree of similarity between the two systems, which gave us 40 plus 20 top-ups making 60.
“I was never under any illusion that that wouldn’t be challenged at some time in the future, and the numbers would increase in the future.
“And that’s why in so many areas my attitude was, ‘we’ve got to get the Bill on the statute book’.
“Imperfect though it might be, we’ve got to start somewhere.
“It’s a pragmatic, it’s a hard-nosed view I suppose, but if we hadn’t got it on the statute book – and these were decisions taken by and large before the election in 1997 – who knows what would have happened afterwards?
“The Labour government might not have been elected, it might have been elected with a narrow majority and get defeated on the floor of the House of Commons, get rejected by the House of Lords, lose the election, get the Tory government back in.
“For me, it was so important to make that first step.
“And therefore it was a process and not an event. You get it on the statute book and then it’s for others to use and to build it up.
“We got the legislation through in that first year.
“But the danger all the time was we were on the cliff edge.”