Welcome to Ukania – a free weekly newsletter

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

I’m starting a free weekly newsletter, Welcome to Ukania. You can subscribe here:

https://ukania.substack.com/subscribe

This weekly newsletter will cover a range of issues related to the state of the United Kingdom, its nations and regions. Ukania, a term originally coined by the late Tom Nairn, seems to me the best description of our post-Brexit trauma, in a failing state where things don’t seem to work any more. You don’t have to sign up fully to Tom Nairn’s view of history and national development, and I don’t, to find the term Ukania useful. The traumas of Austerity, Brexit, and Covid – the great ABC of crises – have accelerated and compounded long-term problems of the state. This crisis has been a long time coming.

We need to map those challenges and build hope for a better future, which will obviously demand, among other things, a more resilient state ready to address the climate crisis. So my posts will touch on challenges to public leadership as well as the state of the country.

I will also write occasionally about the governance and regulation of Big Tech. I’ve published on this in academic journals and collections, as well as my book on Facebook, but the timescales of academic publishing run far behind the need for political intervention.

Posts will draw on my research, my teaching, and my political experience over time.

While I will seek to post more widely under the main theme, I am also starting a sub-theme, Once upon a time in Wales, with a focus on the subject of my next book, the history of the Government of Wales. Again I intend to post weekly about that as I develop my work.

I do not currently have plans to charge for the newsletter, which at this stage (April 2024) is an adjunct to my academic work.

Book now published

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

My new book Ministerial Leadership is based on research into ministerial practice – specifically an analysis of the nearly 150 interviews with former ministers undertaken by the Institute for Government since 2015 for its Ministers Reflectarchive. 

The book argues that the relationship between ministers and civil servants has changed significantly in recent decades, as ministers have placed greater emphasis on delivery and implementation since the New Labour years. Experience in government led to Labour ministers internalising the delivery agenda, and this focus was retained in the Coalition government of 2010-15 and by the Conservative governments at least until 2017. The twin pressures of Brexit and Covid then knocked things off course.

Former ministers identified a lack of front-line delivery experience amongst senior civil servants. There are criticisms of the way in which the civil service manages projects. Former ministers argue that delivery and policy cannot be separated. This cuts across the separation of roles between ministers and civil servants.

Many former ministers identify other areas of weak capacity in the civil service, including specific skills in digital systems and real-time data analysis and modelling. A significant number complain about the weakness of organisational memory, caused in many cases by the speed of churn as civil servants move jobs. Some further believe that the Civil Service also lacks capacity to think about the long-term challenges facing the country. 

The recent report by Francis Maude on governance and accountability of the civil service suggests a bipartisan consensus now exists around this delivery agenda. The rise of the delivery-focused minister means ministers are now more actively engaged in issues which might once have been assumed to have been the responsibility of the civil service alone.

New Book: Ministerial Leadership

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

My new book, Ministerial Leadership, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of the Understanding Governance series edited by Rod Rhodes. More details can be found here.

Ministerial Leadership offers a practice-based account of how ministers in UK governments perform their roles and exercise leadership in their spaces of activity. Drawing on the unique Ministers Reflect archive of the Institute for Government, which is an open and growing resource of over 140 ministerial interviews at UK and devolved government levels, as well as other ministerial reflections, the book addresses the literature on ministerial life and political leadership, and develops new concepts for examining ministerial leadership in different spheres. It argues that the relationship between ministers and civil servants has changed significantly in recent decades, as ministers place greater emphasis on delivery and implementation. The book adopts a theoretically pluralist approach with the intention of offering a valuable teaching aid for existing and new courses. It will appeal to all those interested in leadership, public policy and governance. 

I wrote a short blog on the INLOGOV site about the book last week, and I will blog other short pieces in due course. There will be a couple of sessions at the 2024 Political Studies Association conference where the book will be discussed.

Undermining the Violence against Women Act

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

I have had concerns about a number of aspects of the new Welsh curriculum over recent years but in general I have bitten my tongue as I do not consider that it is helpful when former education ministers criticise the plans of their predecessors or successors.

However, I am concerned that the draft Relationships and Sexuality Education Code fails to take full account of the 2015 Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act. The draft Code will provide guidance that is statutory.

In 2014 I had to work hard in government to win support for changes in the existing ‘Gender-based Violence Bill’, that I had inherited when I became Minister for Public Services, so that it could become an Act that recognised that women and girls are disproportionately the victims of gender-based violence. Despite persistent internal opposition the changes I sought were made and the Bill became the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act.

As the outgoing National Advisers on Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence said in their Annual Plan for 2021-2 ‘prevention remains the key to eliminating violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence (VAWDASV) and education is at its heart’.

I have read the Welsh Government’s draft Relationships and Sexuality Education Code and the accompanying Explanatory Memorandum. There is much in it to support. However, it fails to encompass the learning from and legal obligations of the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act. I do not see how a statutory code which fails to mention women/men or boys/girls is compatible with that legislation or advances it. 

The draft Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) Statutory Guidance and Code which was the subject of consultation earlier this year did contain clear reference to the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act, the resources produced to explain the Act’s use in educational settings including the responsibilities of school governors, and the ‘legal protections that exist for all including consideration of the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015’. I do not know why these references have not been carried through into the draft Code on which the Senedd votes on Tuesday.

I believe that the Act and its legal protections should be explicitly referenced and reinforced in the Code.

From 2014-15, my work to change the focus of the Gender-based violence bill to Violence against Women (and girls) came under fire from misogynists and their allies. Now I fear that the old misogynists have been joined by the new conformists who are intent on undermining the Act within the Education system. The Code is one example, but there are others. I hope that the Welsh Government, and Senedd Members, will stand up against them.

Buffy Williams MS

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

I first met Buffy Williams in 2013. She wasn’t the first member of her family whom I encountered. That was her daughter Georgina, who wrote to me from Pentre Primary School, where she was a pupil, to make the case against its closure. Buffy, meanwhile, was at the heart of the campaign to try to keep the school open, organising meetings at St Peter’s Church – ‘the cathedral of the Rhondda’ – and organising protests and petitions. For years afterwards, when introducing Buffy to anyone new, I would teasingly call her ‘the woman who got me sacked as Education Minister’. But that’s another story for another day.

Buffy has been at the heart of a wide range of community activities in the Rhondda and not least in her home village of Pentre where she and her husband David have been firmly engaged in attempts to rejuvenate the high street. She is one of those key activists you find in all communities, more often than not women seeking to protect or sustain or improve community life and organisation. It was Buffy’s activism I had in mind when developing our plans for reform of local government based on activist councils, more diverse in their membership, more responsive to local communities:

I also want to encourage more of those people who are active in their communities to stand for elected office. Throughout my constituency I come across community activists who would make great councillors and elected politicians.

But most of them would probably run a mile if asked to stand for public office.

After the closure of Pentre Primary, Buffy developed a vision for a new form of community centre in Pentre. She badgered Andrew Morgan, RCT Council leader, until a building was found that could be transferred into community ownership. I was proud to open Canolfan Pentre in 2016. It is now an expanding community facility which has been central to helping local people, not least through a series of crises including traumatic flooding and Covid-19. Buffy has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to develop the centre. Her achievements have been externally validated, with her nomination for the BEM in 2020 and St David’s Award in 2019 and 2021. On Christmas Eve, 2017, BBC viewers could tune in to see a special ‘Bake-Off’ Christmas meal cooked at the centre with Mary Berry, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins in attendance at Canolfan Pentre.

From 2013 on, Buffy became more involved in Rhondda Labour politics, becoming Women’s Officer, and standing for RCT Council in 2017. She was very active in my campaign in 2016, during which I apparently inadvertently outed Elizabeth Williams as ‘Buffy’ by including her nickname in her endorsement of me in my leaflets. Her younger daughter Saff, seen in the picture above, virtually became our campaign mascot in 2016. I kept my fingers crossed, after I made it known in 2016 that I would not seek to be Labour’s candidate to win back the seat in 2021, that Buffy would win the selection to be Labour’s candidate, and I was delighted when she did.

This 2021 election campaign has been very different from 2016, and not just because of the pandemic, where the Welsh Government’s careful and cautious approach has been widely endorsed. Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of UK Labour. Leanne Wood is no longer leader of Plaid Cymru. The controversial RCT school reorganisation, which Plaid cleverly turned against me as a former education minister in 2016, has been largely concluded. A and E facilities have been guaranteed at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, a campaign in which Buffy played her part.

Meanwhile, it’s not every Welsh Labour candidate who has the personal endorsement of Sue Perkins:

One day we may think of Buffy in the same way as another Rhondda woman community activist – Elizabeth Andrews (no relation), who led the campaigns for pithead baths and nursery schools, resulting in the first nursery school in Wales at Llwynypia, for clinics, for trained midwives, and later indeed for local telephone kiosks to ensure speedier access to services. She, like Buffy, was a Rhondda community champion who turned vision into delivery.

But that’s to look too far ahead. Today is Buffy’s day. It’s a great day for her, for her family, for the Rhondda Labour family, and a transformative day for the communities of the Rhondda whose champion she has been elected to be. She will know what an honour that is.

Twenty books from 2020

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

When the pandemic started, I dug out a number of plague stories to read – Camus, Defoe, Marquez, the Adam Mars-Jones short story about the Queen getting rabies, and studies of the Spanish Flu epidemic. I didn’t read any of them – I wasn’t in the mood. So instead here are twenty books I did read that seem worth noting. They are not the only books I read in the year – there must be at least a couple of dozen others I read for work alone. These are not in any order, other than chronological order of reading.

  1. Patrick White The Living and the Dead. Until I went back through my pandemic diary I had forgotten I read this earlier in the year. In my teenage years I remember there were a few dog-eared copies of Voss in the school library, but I never read it – I was more interested in Simenon. This is a family in decline in the 1930s. There’s something of Anthony Powell’s Dance series about it, but it’s darker.
  2. Sara Blaedel is a Danish crime fiction author and we spend – spent, before the pandemic – a fair amount of time in Copenhagen for family reasons. Her Louise Rick series is ideal distraction reading. This year I read several, so let’s go with The Midnight Witness, a murder story set in Copenhagen itself.
  3. The Swedish journalist and crime fiction writer, the late Stieg Larsson, was the source of the material for the next book, which is based partly on his files on the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme: The Man who Played with Fire, by Jan Stocklassa. It’s a thorough piece of investigative journalism, irritating in its development in places, but an important assessment of the failures of the investigations and the right-wing networks that may have been involved.
  4. The Alanbrooke diaries. Lord Alan Brooke was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff for much of the Second World War. This is a fascinating read on the thoroughness of the planning for the defence of the UK, the preparation for D-Day, and the interaction between Churchill and his military chiefs. Anyone who thinks Johnson is another Churchill should read this and think about Churchill’s preparation for speeches and decisions.
  5. Derek Raymond’s The Crust on their Uppers (written when he was known as Robin Cook – not the late Labour politician). Raymond’s Factory series is gripping and doesn’t hide the realities of violence and murder. This is a much earlier thriller set in a 1960s milieu of upper class decadence and criminal association.
  6. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach had sat on the bookshelf for a while. It was engaging and cleverly-imagined, though I thought there should have been some development of both male and female characters in the years following the separation.
  7. Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Observed Trains has also sat on the bookshelf for years. In the early days of lockdown I wanted to ensure a real break between the week and the weekend and without football I turned to shorter novels for a Sunday read, like this and Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Both deal with relatively unknown – to us in the UK – periods in European history – the first, Czechoslovakia’s occupation by the Nazis, and the second, West Germany under threat from the Red Army Faction. The first has many unlikeable characters but contains a tragedy: the latter, I enjoyed more for its sense of a society under threat.
  8. The Mirror and the Light. This was the big one. I found I couldn’t read it in one go as I had the previous two volumes – and Mantel herself has said it is a more difficult read for the reader. I kept seeing Brexit parallels throughout – Henry VIII as a manic Johnson – and the politics of the Kingdom, relations with the North and the Scots, played a significant role. Cromwell’s last days were very effectively conjured.
  9. Curtis Sittenfield’s Rodham was a thoroughly enjoyable read from beginning to end: the story of what Hillary Rodham Clinton’s life would have been like if she hadn’t married Bill. She created plausible futures for both Hillary and Bill after their break-up, and didn’t duck challenges. One of my favourite books of 2020.
  10. We have been to Sicily a couple of times in 2018 and 2019 with Sicily Unlimited and were due to go again on the Montalbano Unlimited tour in 2020 which was of course cancelled by Covid. I am late to the Montalbano novels of Camilleri but I started with the first three and I prefer them to what I have seen of the TV series. Camilleri uses dialogue substantially to shape plot development and character and has said he learned a lot from the way in which Simenon’s Maigret novels were torn part for TV reconstruction on Italy’s public service broadcaster, RAI. The Shape of Water introduces Montalbano and the fictional town of Vigata (we have visited its real-life equivalent), as well as the cuisine, culture and politics of Sicily.
  11. I loved Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes. I spent a lot of time in Scotland in the 1980s for work and personal reasons and this brought back much of that milieu and its culture and distinctive developing politics as it criss-crosses time periods from the 80s to the present. It’s not all set in Scotland, but Scotland – and radical politics, feminism and popular culture north and south of the border – is its centre.
  12. Fintan O’Toole has been one of the most acute observers of the post-Brexit UK, writing from an Irish internationalist perspective. Heroic Failure is full of sharp observations drawn from both political and cultural analysis on how we got to our current crisis and why.
  13. Eimear McBride is an extraordinary writer. I much preferred The Lesser Bohemians to her previous novel, although that itself still sticks in my memory two years after reading it. Bohemians is rich, evocative, challenging and contains one of the most remarkable 70 pages of a single character’s story you are ever likely to read.
  14. Leonardo Sciascia was not only a novelist and short story writer but also a Sicilian politician who wrote devastatingly about Italy and Sicily’s history, political corruption, criminality and social unease. I have read a lot of Sciascia in the last few years and we visited Racalmuto, his home town, in 2019. He wrote a scathing account of the murder of the Italian Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in the 1970s. The Wine-Dark Sea is a volume of Sciascia short stories which is a good introduction to his writing.
  15. I haven’t read any Martin Amis for probably thirty years, but I wanted to read Inside Story largely on because of his exploration of his friendship with Christopher Hitchens, including in his last years (and also with Saul Bellow). It’s not really a novel, though it has novelistic aspects and fictional elements. I’d call it a meditation – it explores themes of life, death, physical decline, and love.
  16. I found Don Delillo’s The Silence a bit thin – it’s a spare, dystopian account of what happens to a small elite group when the electronic systems on which we rely start to fail. I couldn’t really engage with this, despite the contemporary themes and despite having enjoyed much of Delillo’s previous writing.
  17. Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem is an extraordinary piece of dystopian science fiction written by a Chinese writer who actually gets the science of a lot of key issues in physics. It’s the first volume of a trilogy. I enjoyed it not only for the concept itself but also for the insights it gives to Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution and after.
  18. Amongst other things, Hani Kunzru tackles the strategies of the alt-right in Red Pill. The term comes to us of course from the film Matrix but it has been adopted by the alt-right as a description of the process by which people come to shed their supposed delusions and turn to the alt-right world view (I discuss this a little in Facebook, the Media and Democracy). Cleverly done, the novel explores the breakdown of a writer’s sanity.
  19. Jock Colville’s The Fringes of Power cover his years working as Private Secretary to Churchill. They contain a revealing paragraph about Churchill’s conception of the Empire, based on the emotional solidarity of its white inhabitants, which illuminates the Churchillism of the Brexit-backing right today, and on which I have written in a forthcoming book.
  20. I ended the year reading thrillers. There’s always a new Michael Connelly to read around Christmas-time. I read The Law of Innocence in a day. Gripping escapism in itself, as an aside, it is the first novel I read last year that mentions Coronavirus.

We need an Office of Government Ethics if the Nolan Principles are to be revitalised.

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

The Article published this from me at the end of November. The deadline for the CPSL consultation has been extended to 29 January 2021.

The Committee for Standards in Public Life (CPSL) has an open consultation on the future of standards regulation in the UK. Recently the chair of the committee, Lord Evans, made a wide-ranging speech drawing attention to a series of worrying developments, from the process-free Coronavirus procurements to the delays in publishing the report into the conduct of the Home Secretary, asking whether we are in a post-Nolan age. The resignation of the Prime Minister’s independent adviser on standards, Sir Alex Allan, last week, following the Prime Minister’s failure to adopt his recommendation in respect of the Home Secretary is now set to be considered by the CPSL as part of its review.

The Nolan framework has been with us for twenty-five years. It is right that it should be reviewed. It is right that we should recognise where the principles still carry weight, informing the actions of public servants across the UK. But it is time to ensure that the Nolan machinery is strengthened, particularly when it comes to ethics in government.

It is unprecedented to have as Prime Minister someone who has been reprimanded by both the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) and the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. In July 2018, within a week of resigning as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson signed a contract with the Daily Telegraph to write a weekly column. He did not apply to ACOBA for permission until two weeks after signing the contract. The Chair of ACOBA, Baroness Browning, wrote to Johnson on 8 August, saying: ‘The committee considers it unacceptable that you signed a contract with The Telegraph and your appointment was announced before you had sought and obtained advice from the Committee, as was incumbent upon you on leaving office under the Government’s Business Appointment Rules’. ACOBA refused to grant Johnson retrospective permission. 

In December 2018 Johnson was told by the Commons Standards Committee to apologise for his ‘over‐casual’ failure to declare £52,000 worth of expenses in an incident which the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards said was ‘a lack of attention to House requirements, rather than inadvertent error’.

Fast forward to 2020, and Prime Minister Johnson last week urged Conservative backbenchers to ‘form a square around the Prittster’ as he rejected the advice of Sir Alex. The Prime Minister doesn’t respect rules or standards, for himself or for others in his Cabinet. The current system isn’t working. If respect and trust in government is to be restored, we need a new standards infrastructure.

First, there needs to be an Office of Government Ethics (OGE), which reports to Parliament rather than operating as an Advisory body sponsored by the Cabinet Office, which is currently the position with ACOBA. 

Second, the OGE needs to be properly staffed and resourced. It should take over the functions of ACOBA and the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on the Ministerial Code. It should have the power to investigate complaints against ministers, the Prime Minister, senior civil servants, and special advisers. Its conclusions should be made public. The Ministerial Code, Civil Service Code and Special Advisers’ Code should make it clear that if a finding of a serious breach of the Code is made by the OGE, then the Minister or official would be expected to resign. 

Third, legislation should specify that certain breaches of the Code, such as the failure to take advice on appointments, should be regarded as an offence liable on conviction for a substantial fine under the Criminal Justice Act.

Fourth, there should be greater clarity around the question of misleading Parliament, particularly when it comes to commenting on the verdict of independent bodies such as the National Audit Office.

Currently there are no real sanctions available to ACOBA other than the threat of adverse publicity. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee called it ‘toothless’ in a report in 2017 and argued for it to be set up on a statutory basis. 

The Ministerial Codes for the devolved administrations require departing ministers to comply with ACOBA’s rules. The First Ministers of Scotland and Wales have separately appointed independent advisers on their ministerial codes. Discussions should be taken forward with the devolved administrations as to whether they would be prepared to share sovereignty around a single Office of Government Ethics for the whole of the UK. There might be advantages to them in doing so, both in cost and reputational terms. 

Informality has had its day. An Office of Government Ethics, set up on a statutory basis, with wide investigatory powers and legal sanctions for non-compliance, would be a powerful indication that twenty-five years after Nolan, standards in public life are being firmly asserted. 

Leighton Andrews is Professor of Public Leadership at Cardiff Business School and a former Welsh Government Minister.

The Welsh response to Covid-19 shows the benefits of devolution

Posted on by Leighton Andrews

I wrote this last month for The Article

No Welsh Government since the creation of the then National Assembly for Wales in 1999 has had to cope with the scale of a challenge like Covid-19. Paradoxically, no other issue has established the realities of devolution more clearly in the public mind, either in Wales or the UK as a whole. The announcement today (Monday) of a 17-day firebreak lasting from 6.00pm Friday until 9 November hardly came as a shock. The Welsh Government has been consulting with its social partners over recent days and clear indications were given to the public that a ‘firebreak’ lockdown was imminent. Organisations as disparate as the CBI and the teaching unions have welcomed the degree of engagement over the nature of the lockdown.

What a contrast this shows with the stand-off between the Johnson government and local politicians elsewhere in England, particularly in the North-West. 

Today’s announcement has some similarities with the full lockdown in March, in that

  • We will have to stay at home except for very limited reasons, such as exercise
  • We must work from home where they can
  • We cannot meet other people from outside our household either indoors or outdoors
  • Non-essential shops will shut. Eating places and pubs will close except for delivery or takeaways
  • Hotels, hairdressers and beauticians will have to shut  

However, primary school children and those in years 7 and 8 in secondary will return to school after the half-term break and nurseries will stay open. Adults who live alone and single parents will be able to join with one other household from anywhere in Wales for support. A new £300 million support fund for business is being opened. All small businesses getting the small business rate relief will receive a £1000 payment. One-off payments of up to £5000 will be paid to small businesses that have to close. Professional sport will continue. Services to mark Remembrance Sunday, which falls during the lockdown period, will be permitted. The First Minister said at no time than now was it more appropriate to remember the sacrifices made.

The First Minister, Mark Drakeford, made it clear today that the lockdown period would be used ‘purposefully’ to recruit more contact-tracers and to catch up on outstanding contacts who need to be traced. Over the weekend, the Welsh Government revealed that Welsh contact tracers had reached 85% of all cases and 89% of contacts of cases. Wales has a highly successful decentralised contact-tracing system run with cooperation between local authorities, local health boards and Public Health Wales. It’s a complete contrast to the centralized English system which has combined public health resources and outsourced – and hugely expensive – private sector operations. 

The biggest problem the Welsh system has suffered is the delays in processing testing through the UK Government’s Lighthouse Labs. 

The Welsh Government’s objective is – in the absence of a vaccine – to reduce the number of infections, hospitalisations and ultimately deaths from Covid-19.

The Welsh firebreak has led the UK news bulletins today, another sign that the difference  devolution makes is being widely noted. With the announcement of further Covid-19 restrictions on 22 September, BBC Wales figures showed that more people in Wales (525,000) tuned in to the broadcast from the First Minister (525,000) than to the one given that day by the Prime Minister (482,000). 

The most recent opinion polling shows clear public support for the stance taken by the Welsh Government. There has been a substantial decline in Boris Johnson’s popularity in Wales since April. The First Minister has a plus-35% rating for his Government’s handling of the pandemic: the Prime Minister has a minus-22% rating for the way his government has handled it. In April, Welsh opinion was supportive of the UK government’s handling than the Welsh Government’s: by June, that had reversed. And, as Professor Roger Awan-Scully of the Wales Governance Centre has written ‘There have been precious few positives to come out of the Covid-19 crisis, but for Welsh Labour it has at least provided a means for Mark Drakeford to become much better known with the Welsh public than he was during his first twelve months in the role of First Minister.’ 

Last week, the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, derided the Welsh Government’s decision to restrict movements into Wales from Covid hotspots elsewhere in the UK, with the jibe that ‘that’s what you get when you vote for socialists’.  With a successful contact-tracing programme, consistent public support, and a carefully-reasoned approach clearly delivered, the Welsh Government will be heading into next year’s Senedd elections with some optimism. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s words may end up on a few posters.