Decision time for Labour - but what do the candidates offer?
As voting goes ahead in the battle to become leader of Labour in Wales, and therefore First Minister, Martin Shipton looks at the issues surrounding the contest, and what the three candidates have to offer
MEMBERS of Welsh Labour and the party’s affiliates are now voting to determine which of the three candidates will become leader and First Minister.
Each of them, in their own way, is claiming to offer change.
But how realistic can such offers be from three politicians who all hold office in the latest gestation of a government led by their party since the start of devolution in 1999?
The reason Labour remains in charge is that - to the constant frustration of its opponents - it persists as an enormously powerful brand in Wales.
Despite polling results that show at least two-thirds of the adult population do not know enough about the three leadership candidates to say whether they like them or not, many of those without such knowledge would vote Labour anyway.
But it must be remembered that the electorate in the current contest is not the public as a whole, but those who are Labour Party members.
The target audience of the campaign messages is one that is significantly better informed than the population as a whole. That means that an appeal for “change” must be seen in the context of Labour politics. Otherwise, the stances of all three candidates would stretch credulity.
Mark Drakeford is the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Vaughan Gething the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport. Apart from the First Minister, they hold the two most senior positions in the Cabinet. They are embedded in Welsh Labour’s ruling elite, and have been virtually from the outset. Mr Drakeford was former First Minister Rhodri Morgan’s most senior policy adviser and Mr Gething was a key member of Ron Davies’ campaign team when he defeated Mr Morgan for the leadership of Welsh Labour 20 years ago, later switching his support to Alun Michael.
It should also not be forgotten that Mr Gething was Mr Drakeford’s Deputy Health Minister from September 2014 until May 2016.
Eluned Morgan, too, hardly fits the bill as an outsider insurgent. A Welsh Labour MEP for 15 years until 2009, she was elevated to the House of Lords in 2011, joining the Assembly in May 2016 and becoming a Minister 18 months later.
Each of them has set out a series of pledges that most people would find it difficult to disagree with. It’s ironic that the one specific policy issue on which they appear to part company the virtues or otherwise of nuclear power - is one over which they have no remit as it falls within an area reserved to Westminster.
The fact is that the leadership contest will be decided only partly by members’ perception of the candidates and their programmes. A crucial - and probably deciding factor will be the level of support they have offered to Jeremy Corbyn, whose victory in the British party’s leadership election in 2015 represented real change for Labour. Although no longer played out with the febrile intensity that exposed the split in the party after Corbyn became leader, the fissure still remains.
Mark Drakeford, who declared himself a supporter of Corbyn at an early stage, will expect to pick up the bulk of votes from the thousands who joined or re-joined the party expecting it to embrace red-blooded socialism for the first time since Labour’s early years.
That’s the change Mr Drakeford represents.
The other two candidates portray a different kind of change, entwined with their respective identities as a man from an ethnic minority background and a woman. Their supporters see them in the vanguard of a drive towards a nation that allows diversity to flourish.
Neither of them are from the majority wing of the party that believes Corbyn should be leader. In fact, in ideological terms the change they would prefer is for the party to revert to the centrist position it held for decades.
But what does this mean to the majority of voters in Wales - disparate as they may be - who do not identify as Labour supporters?
For them, change means something different and more fundamental. They want Labour out of government and the party they support in government.
Welsh Conservatives and Plaid Cymru both argue from their different perspectives that Labour’s marathon stranglehold on power in Wales has been bad for the country, and that they can offer something better.
For the Conservatives, Wales’ long flirtation with socialism should end, with the Welsh Government ditching the commitment to universal benefits drawn up by Rhodri Morgan and Mark Drakeford.
Plaid Cymru, under its energetic new leader Adam Price, will be devising a set of policies it hopes could transform Wales into a country of economic boom in which the majority share in the prosperity created and become convinced of the case of Welsh independence.
In the meantime, however, another change in the form of Brexit is knocking on our door. With the first set of job cuts announced by Schaeffler for Llanelli last week because, in part, of “Brexit uncertainty”, there may be a growing realisation that change isn’t always for the better.