Eluned Morgan and Elon Musk
Thankfully all they have in common are their initials!
Each week I ordinarily write a post about UK politics and then one about my new book project, Governing Wales, based on Welsh Government Cabinet Minutes. This week I have been away in Copenhagen visiting family so I haven’t had time to do the research on the Welsh Government Cabinet Committees in 2006, for which you have all obviously been holding your breath.
So this week I just want to mark the election of the first woman First Minister of Wales, my friend Eluned Morgan. I will also follow up my post on Monday about social media and the far right with a comment or two below about Elon Musk.
On 8 June thos year, there was a surprise party to celebrate Eluned’s 30 years in politics (she was elected as an MEP in 1994). It was held at the hall of the Church in the large Council Estate of Ely in Cardiff (thought once to be the largest council estate in Europe) where her late father, Councillor Bob Morgan, had been the vicar. This was where Eluned grew up. She also has strong links to St David’s in Pembrokeshire, where her mother, also for,erly a Cardiff councillor, hails from (She was first elected as MEP for West Wales and now represents the Mid and West Wales Region in the Senedd).
There was a This is Your Life style of presentation by celebrated Welsh broadcaster, Roy Noble, which went through the different stages of Eluned’s political involvement, from school, to picking coffee in Nicaragua, to standing for the European Parliament, to the House of Lords and then the Senedd in 2016. Amongst those attending were Members of the Senedd who had backed the two different candidates last time, Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles (though Gething and Miles themselves were not present), showing she had support across the Labour Senedd group. A number of political figures who couldn’t be there, including Mark Drakeford, Peter Hain and Neil Kinnock, sent video tributes.
Since then, Vaughan Gething has stood down as First Minister and Eluned, having been elected unopposed as Welsh Labour Leader, has been elected First Minister by the Senedd.
I have known Eluned since 1994 when she was first elected to the European Parliament and I was the BBC’s Head of Public Affairs, with tresponsibility, amongst other things, for relations with the European Parliament. I got to know her best when she was involved in the 1997 referendum campaign to get the Assembly established. She was present at the first Steering Committee meeting of the campaign in 1996. Eluned later told me when I interviewed her for my book on the campaign, that ‘to be involved in some clandestine pre-organisation meeting, that was a bit of an adventure’.
She remembered campaigning in the 1979 failed referendum as an 11 year-old just started at secondary school ’going round Ely, the estate in Ely – and of course the school was very much in favour and Ely was very much against’. That understanding of the danger of the gap between elite opinion and ordinary working people is something she has recognised throughout her political career. In the 1997 referendum campaign, she managed to get the Catatonia singer (and now Radio Six Music presenter) Cerys Matthews involved. Throughout the 1997 campaign she shared platforms with people from other political parties and campaigned in a pluralist way.
On the night of the referendum, as the results came in, she feared the Yes campaign was going to lose again. Then the Carmarthen result came through and ‘the whole atmosphere changed within seconds. It was the most emotional time of my whole life. It was a moment of going from absolute loss to absolute joy’.
She later remembered:
I don’t think I’ll ever experience anything like that ever again. The joy of knowing you made a difference. You can be in politics forever, in terms of being in a campaign, but to make a difference to the result, is something extremely rare, to make a difference as an individual. What is nice is that everybody who got involved in that campaign can claim to have made a difference to the actual final result, and this is something I don’t think many people experience.
From the beginning, she wanted the Assembly to embrace all of the people of Wales, worrying ‘what came over in Ely, was this idea of ‘I’m not as Welsh as you and therefore somehow or other I won’t find myself represented or an expression of myself in this new Assembly’.
Eluned opposed the Iraq War, critical of the UK government’s position and mindful of the need to uphold international law. She supported Rhodri Morgan’s One Wales Government agreement with Plaid Cymru in 2007 when others such as Neil Kinnock and many of the Welsh Labour MPs were opposed. She spoke in support of it at the Welsh Labour Special Conference in July 2007.
I worked with her again when, as a front-bench spokesperson in the House of Lords in 2015, she supported Welsh Government amendments to the UK Government’s Trade Union Bill. I was the relevant minister in the Welsh Government. WG was arguing to exclude the public sector in Wales from the UK government’s legislation as public services are devolved.
To understand Eluned, you have to understand her roots in the Ely council estate in Cardiff, her immersion in the Welsh language from childhood, and her internationalism. She has a unique background which has given her great insights into how people in Wales in different communities are feeling and experiencing life. Her political experiences are diverse and she has an understanding of Wales and its place in the UK, Europe and the world. She has good political instincts, tactical understanding, and the ability to get on with people. Now she faces perhaps her greatest challenge.
Elon Musk enables White nationalist propaganda
Over the last few days we have seen Elon Musk’s irresponsibility in full flow. Musk’s promotion of posts by the racist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon amplified his posts, s the researcher Dr Marc Owen Jones has shown:
Marc’s analysis was featured in an article on X in the Financial Times, which noted how Musk was endorsing white nationalist racists and undermining UK democracy. The time is long past for action against the Big Tech Broligarchs. It took seven years for Conservative governments to legislate against Big Tech and still the implementation of the Online Safety Act isn’t over yet. The new government needs to drive this forward as a matter of urgency. Big Tech owners and their complicit executives like Sir Nick Clegg will only face up to the challenges when they face criminal prosecution and the likelihood of jail time for posts on their platforms that enable hate speech and terrorism. And what we have seen in the UK in the last week is networked terrorism.
Many people are talking of leaving X - I share the views of others who say we cannot leave spaces like this to the far right. But I am building up my presence on other sites, and you can find me on Bluesky at leightonandrews.bsky.social and on Mastodon at leightonandrews@toot.wales
I will return to the joys of Cabinet Committees in Wales in 2006 next week….
Good to hear about Eluned. As a Welsh woman, also hailing from St Davids, I'm looking forward to seeing her shine!
I left Twitter yesterday
Llongyfarchiadau EM - (ddim fe Musk!)