Leading from the front - an open letter to Lee Waters AM

Lee Waters, the new Labour Assembly Member for Llanelli, is not a happy bunny. There's Brexit, for a start, and then the battle for control of Labour where Lee is backing that chameleon for all seasons, Oily Smith, a man with all the charm and Kaa-like appeal (jusssst trusssst in me) of Michael Howard, but without the brains.

The recipe for electoral success in the Labour Party is, apparently, first to depose a leader elected by an overwhelming majority of party members less than a year ago and then to engage in a bitter civil war to bring about unity. A sure fire vote winner, if ever there was, and on his Twitter feed, Lee notes in despair the loss in a by-election last week of a seat on Llannon Community Council to Plaid.

The loss of this "parish by-election" is Jeremy's fault. "I campaigned in this one, he wasn't (an) asset", says Lee.

To make matters worse for the new AM, most of the movers and shakers in his constituency party, including Jeff Edmunds (Labour leader on the County Council), Tegwen Devichand, her daughter, Sharen Davies, and Jan Williams (all county and  Llanelli town councillors) are backing Jez, with Lee and Nia Griffith looking a little lonely on the other side of the great Labour divide. Worryingly for Lee and Nia, the most prominent supporter of their stance in Carmarthenshire is Kevin Madge who has done so much in the last ten years to reshape the party's fortunes in the county and put it where it is today - in opposition and an increasingly distant second to Plaid in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr.

Taking up her knitting and her seat in the viewing area at the foot of the guillotine, Tegwen Devichand told the Carmarthenshire Herald this week that, "Nia is entitled to her opinion. When it comes to re-election, if people want to re-elect her, only time will tell". Ouch.

"Let them eat bara brith"

But Lee is not without his admirers. He recently contributed a piece to the IWA's Click on Wales, entitled "Labour's problems go way beyond Jeremy Corbyn", and this attracted a rave review from another electoral asset, Leighton Andrews, formerly of Rhondda parish.

"Brilliant piece by @Amanwy [Lee Waters' Twitter handle, Ed.] on the challenges facing UK Labour and why it has to be Owen Smith", thunders Leighton.

What the piece says over and over again in the course of nearly 30 cliché-ridden paragraphs is that a chasm has opened up between the party and "our people", i.e. the voters.

The solution is to elect Owen Smith who will restore party unity and credibility among the electorate.

In the unlikely event of a Smith victory, how would Oily restore party unity in the smouldering ruins when huge swathes of the party's membership loathe him and consider him to be a traitor, even before he sets about the herculean task of persuading Joe Public that he is not yet another privileged, besuited Blairite and would not sell Granny Smith for a chance to ride around in a ministerial limo?

It's all about leadership, or rather Leadership, says Lee. But what is Leadership?

Every political party faces the tension between furthering their own set of core values and responding to public opinion. And that’s where Leadership comes in, to balance these tensions, and persuade people to follow a course of action which honours the values of the party and chimes with the priorities of the electorate.

It all sounds a bit vague and misty, but fortunately Lee Waters has given the people of Llangennech in his constituency a demonstration of what this means in practice.

The County Council is proposing to merge the infant and junior schools in the village to create a new Welsh medium primary school, phasing out the English stream in the junior school as it does so.

Children who have started in the English stream would continue to be taught through the medium of English until they go on to secondary school.

As is always the case when the language category of a school is changed, there are mixed views among parents. There are those who couldn't give a toss either way, those who support the proposals, those who oppose them and those who have an open mind.

The latter group is important. They will have questions and will be looking for reassurance, but what they have got from Lee Waters is this headline from last week's Llanelli Herald:

AM SLAMS COUNCIL'S SCHOOLS PLAN

As has happened elsewhere when English streams have been phased out, opposition has been extremely vocal and is driven by a small group of parents. Their individual motives vary, but as always seems to be the case, the more extreme objectors have set the tone and the agenda of the anti-campaign.


This has involved vitriolic attacks on staff, governors and councillors on Facebook, and a website which is full of badly written, rehashed myths, distortions and downright lies. The message which screams out at readers is that this is all an evil conspiracy to deprive children of an English education.

 Here's a flavour of the sort of thing being dished up:

Currently English Stream pupils are exposed to a very high level of Welsh during their school day and it has been expressed that this is just manageable level for pupils and parents.

Currently English Stream pupils have struggled and been upset to be excluded from such celebrations at the school, such as St David’s Day Assembly as it was all in Welsh and they could not understand it all.  

Currently English stream children have been upset to be not allowed to be sung happy birthday to them in English as must be Welsh only.  

The Llangennech objectors' website is not the first example of its kind, and there are some uncanny echos of other sites which have come and gone in other parts of Wales, with the slightly odd, Meerkat English most likely emanating from a notorious Labour activist in North Wales who believes that Carwyn Jones is an evil Welsh nationalist.

Dual stream schools are a classic civil service fudge, designed to give the appearance of producing bilingual children without actually doing so. There are always exceptions which prove the rule, but the fundamental flaw of dual stream education is that English dominates because it is the language that all of the children share.

Welsh medium education produces bilingual children, whereas "bilingual" education doesn't, and if you want your child to reap all the benefits which being able to speak effortlessly in two languages brings - both during their school years and later in life - then Welsh medium is the best way of doing it.

It's not just Carmarthenshire County Council which is saying this, but the Labour government in Cardiff, which Lee Waters supports, and it was while it was still under Labour leadership that Carmarthenshire County Council adopted a policy to move its schools along the language continuum, as the jargon has it. In other words, gradually to increase the use of Welsh in its schools, introducing modest elements of Welsh medium education in schools where there is none at one end of the spectrum, and phasing out English medium streams at the other.

Nobody is advocating doing this overnight, and at the current rate of progress, it will take decades to complete the change.

After staying resolutely silent for months about the row at Llangennech, at least in public, Lee Waters has now come off the fence to say that he supports the government's policy while advocating changes to it which would leave us with the status quo.

In other words, he proposes to pay lip service to bilingual education while opposing it.

His response to the Llanelli Herald can be found on his Facebook page:

The Llanelli Herald asked for my comment on the ongoing controversy in Llangennech about turning the village's dual-stream bilingual school into a Welsh-only one. This is a sensitive issue and I have not made public comment until now:

"The Welsh Government's policy is to increase the number of school places for Welsh language schools. I fully support that policy. Plaid Cymru run Carmarthenshire county council have decided to achieve this by turning all bilingual schools in the county into Welsh-only schools. I am not convinced this is the best way of advancing the language. In villages like Llangennech, where there is no other school, the policy will result in local children being split up and children from outside the village taking their places - in this case children from across Llanelli and from Swansea, even though there are places available in other Welsh medium schools in the area. Meanwhile many of the English language schools they are expected to attend in the area are full, and do not offer the opportunity to be educated in an environment where the Welsh language is vibrant. Until we address the ability of schools to teach Welsh as a second language well I think the children in the English stream of the Welsh schools have a far better chance of learning Welsh than they will by moving them out.

This is a very sensitive issue and I have not publicly commented on it until now. It is causing distress and division in Llangennech and has not been sensitively handled by some local politicians. To safeguard the future of the language we need to take people with us. And there is a real danger of alienating families in the village who want to keep their children within a Welsh-speaking environment. I think the Plaid-run council need to rethink the way this policy is being implemented".

The only reason why children from the village should be split up is if they are unfortunate enough to have hardline parents determined not to accept Welsh medium education in any form, and when the dust settles, there will be very few of those.

As for Welsh as a second language (Cymraeg ail iaith), Lee Waters should be aware of the report his government commissioned from Professor Sioned Davies and the testimony of other leading experts recommending an end to the concept of Welsh as a second language.

Lee Waters' response to policies introduced by his own party boils down to paying lip service to the idea while saying not in my backyard, not now and trying to blame another party. True leadership, as his party colleague Paul Flynn could tell him, often involves taking a stand on issues which some of your constituents won't like, and true leadership, with or without a capital 'L', means that you do your best to calm their fears and persuade them to think again.

One way he could do that is to help concerned parents in Llangennech to take a look at other communities where schools have phased out English streams, despite vocal opposition. They would be pleasantly surprised.

The people of Llangennech deserve better than this opportunistic and cowardly surrender to dogwhistle politics dressed up in nice words about alienation, distress and division.

Small wonder that there is so much cynicism about politicians in the mainstream unionist parties.