A year of change....

Looking backwards and forwards

I began writing this Substack in April, and there’ve been 60 posts since then and a slowly growing number of subscribers. My ambitions were always modest, to seek to find an audience for my interests. My posts have addressed the state of the UK state, technology regulation, and the making of the Welsh Government since 1999. The last of these is likely to be the subject of my next book. I’m grateful for the comments and feedback over the months.

My original intentions, to write two posts a week, one on UK issues and one on the history of Welsh government year by year, proved too ambitious when teaching resumed this autumn and I had to undergo two cataract operations. So posting has fallen back a bit but I hope to catch up a bit in the New Year.

Going back to the start of this enterprise, in terms of the UK state, I can see I posted about the impact of Brexit on public standards, I picked up on themes from my new book on Ministerial Leadership, looking at whether Ministers need training and how the metaphors of death shroud Ministerial departures. By May, I was writing about the crisis of the Westminster state, then a holiday in Berlin sparked some thoughts about the European context of devolution. Drawing again on the book, I wrote about Ministerial Memoirs, and on D-Day and strategic planning. As the UK faced a general election, I considered a tetchy PM facing a historic defeat (John Major, in fact). A reminder of the role of the monarchy in modern politics was followed by a short essay on Keir Starmer’s missions, and some sympathy for the plight of likely losers on election night. With new ministers in post, I discussed the management of ministerial time. With a chapter out in a new book from Oxford University Press on blame avoidance, I wrote about toxic leadership and populism. As the Democrats got their presidential campaign underway, I reflected on the importance of delivery and story-telling.

I had noted that some of the top Tech Bros were backing Donald Trump in July, then riots in the UK provoked some thoughts on the far right and social media. This was followed by a few posts on social media, starting with the degradation of Xitter, the regulation of social media in general, the way in which Silicon Valley tries to paint regulation as the enemy of innovation, and the continuing hype about AI.

In between, I warned about the dangers of the Starmer government losing control of the narrative, pointing out that the gap between the general election and the budget was the longest after a change election (when the government changes between parties) in fifty years:

This has been mentioned elsewhere.

My first cataract operation came two days after the US presidential election, prompting a reflection on the Democrats’ defeat, and responses to it, as a one-eyed view of the world.

I have also written a significant number of posts about the history of the Welsh Government, drawing on the largely unused Cabinet minutes, which have been published regularly since the year 2000. I have reviewed the Cabinet proceedings, and those of Cabinet Committees, for every year now up until 2007, with diversions on the Richard Commission and the making of the One Wales Government, and more topical posts about the 2024 Welsh Cabinet ministerial resignations, a new book on the Labour Plaid Cymru Co-Operation agreement, and whether there will still be a Senedd in 25 years. I was also interviewed by the Hiraeth podcast about my writing and this Substack. These Cabinet Minutes form part of the background research for the book on which I am working. Writing these posts also inspired me to dig back into the archives of my own blog, some of which I have been able to recreate from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Looking forward, equipped with my new 20-20 vision in both eyes, 2025 will of course see the inauguration of a US President, a subject I hope largely to ignore, a continuing fragmentation of the social media space, with an expansion, I suspect, of the user base of Bluesky, which gives you something like the old Twitter with algorithms you shape, rather than being subject to a broligarch’s algorithms on X or Threads, political parties in Wales preparing themselves for a new Senedd in 2026 elected on a different model with a larger membership, and perhaps at a UK level, the Starmer government becoming more sure-footed after what has been an eventful beginning - and even more fundamental reform of the state. Meanwhile, will Ofcom move more swiftly on breaches of regulations by channels like GB News? Will it advance the implementatuon of the Online Safety Act? Will we see more effective coordination between the digital regulators, Ofcom, the ICO and the CMA? Or have we given up on regulating the Tech overlords?

We shall see. At a personal level, I give up chairing the Cardiff City Football Club Community Foundation next year, as my term as a Trustee comes to an end. Other challenges may beckon. Or not.

I am teaching fairly intensively from late January thorugh to late February, so this Substack will begin gently in the New Year, but I hope to step up the publishing after that. See you in 2025!