Title : Lee Waters - how not to be an AM
link : Lee Waters - how not to be an AM
Lee Waters - how not to be an AM
Just when it seemed that the Llangennech row had blown over and that the school would finally be allowed to get on with its plans for the next academic year in peace, Lee Waters AM (Lab., Llanelli) chucked more petrol on the dying embers this week in a bitter speech on the floor of the Senedd.In Waters' view, it seems, just about everyone is in the wrong about Llangennech except himself and the small group of extremist objectors nurtured for so long by the Labour Party. This time, he turned on the school itself, or in reality the school staff and the head teacher who, he said, had failed to tell him about the plan to turn the school into a Welsh medium school when he visited it 18 months ago as a prospective parent.
This statement is not only extremely unfair on the staff, governors and head of the school who cannot defend themselves against accusations made from a privileged and very public platform in the Senedd, but it is also a gross distortion of the truth.
If we accept Waters' words at face value, he would have gone to the school "as a prospective parent" in October 2015. The County Council's Education Scrutiny Committee did not approve the proposal to change the status of the school until 23 November, at least a month later, and that approval was subject to consultations and further votes by the committee, the full council and the Executive Board.
The substance of Waters' accusation is that the school staff, and presumably the head teacher, concealed the change of language category from him and his family. Clearly, they did not.
If his children had gone on to attend the school, they could have gone into the English stream if that is what he and his wife wanted because the English stream was to remain open for admissions for at least another year. And they could have remained in the English stream until they left the school to go on to secondary education.
Somehow, he forgot to mention that.
It is also fair to assume that someone who had been elected as Assembly Member for Llanelli should have been aware that the County Council had voted unanimously to phase out all dual stream schools in Carmarthenshire in September 2014, when the council was led by Labour.
There are only two possible explanations for this. Either Lee Waters is deliberately misrepresenting the situation to make a political point, or he does not understand education policy.
Either way, this is a disgrace for an Assembly Member who is also a prominent member of that body's Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee, and it was as a member of that committee that he made his remarks on Wednesday.
How much he knows about culture and the Welsh Language, and specifically Welsh culture, is a moot point. How familiar is he with the giants of Welsh literature from the past or contemporary Welsh culture? Has he ever read a Welsh novel or a magazine? Does he watch S4C or listen to Radio Cymru? What expertise does he have in language planning?
Judging by his understanding of education policy, the answers to those questions would seem to be not at all, no, never, none and nothing.
The main point Lee Waters appeared to be trying to make in his speech before he lost the plot was that it's all very complicated, but that does not stop him from pontificating about subjects and policies he does not understand. Worse than that, it does not stop him from undermining and obstructing the positive efforts of his own government.
More on Lee Waters' contributions to Welsh public life later.
A prospective parent?
Waters' private life and that of his family are his own affair, but since he brought his family into this controversy, it is fair to point out that his family does not live in Llangennech or even Llanelli, but around 60 miles away in Barry Island.
There is nothing wrong with Assembly Members not living in the constituencies they represent, although for practical reasons it is a good idea for them to live in the general area. Neil Hamilton has famously taken matters to an extreme by not even bothering to live in Wales, and there is definitely something wrong with that, but what is unusual about Lee Waters is that he has put a lot of effort into giving the impression that he lives in Llanelli when he does not.
A bit like the UKIP leader, Paul Nuttall, in the recent Stoke by-election.
Anyone listening to his speech on Wednesday could have been forgiven for thinking that as a "prospective parent" he lives in or near Llangennech, just as anyone reading his blog could be forgiven for thinking that he and his family live in Llanelli:
Like countless families across the Llanelli constituency my wife and I struggle with juggling the needs of our children and the pressures of work. Picking up and dropping off the kids is a challenge for us. My wife works for the NHS in Abercynon, and I need to be in the Senedd in Cardiff Bay four days a week, and active throughout the constituency on other days.
......
As I expected, the role is full-on. But I’m keenly aware our family life can’t be just about managing my demands. My wife is a professional in her own right, and my two children deserve the time and support of us both. They need stability in their young lives and that is why, instead of uprooting our children from their schools and friends, we’ve made the decision that I move around instead.
......
I split my time between Cardiff and Llanelli - where I have a family home which I stay in several times most weeks, enabling me to be busy and active working in the community.
This piece was written in November 2016. Hands up if you think he's trying to tell you that he and his family live in Llanelli, "like countless families in the constituency" who have a "family home" there.
To reinforce the illusion, Lee Waters lodged nomination papers for last year's Assembly elections under an address in Llanelli, and until at least a few weeks ago he was also on the electoral roll for the same address. Oddly, he is also on the electoral roll for an address in Barry Island, perfectly legally, although he may of course vote in only one of those two places.
He is also very coy about his wife's job. She works for the NHS in Abercynon, he says. A casual reader might think she was a nurse or a receptionist in a local surgery.
In fact Mrs Waters is Head of Media and Communications for NHS Wales, a job which commands a salary considerably higher than that of an AM.
As portraits of family life go this is, as someone once said, more accurate than truthful.
Unfortunate
Returning to his speech on Wednesday, so worked up did Lee Waters become about his reception that he posted a clip of this tirade on Twitter (follow the links).
As readers will see, he was very keen to portray himself as a man of consensus while wallowing in a sustained wail of righteous indignation with lashings of self-pity. He had tried to calm the situation in Llangennech, he claimed. He had tried to reach out. He genuinely wanted a cross party consensus.
The trouble is that all of the evidence points in the opposite direction, and for someone who has spent much of his career to date in journalism and television, it was particularly unfortunate that his choice of clip should end with a UKIP AM congratulating him on his speech.
Waters described UKIP's intervention in Llangennech as "unfortunate, unhelpful and incendiary", forgetting to mention that Neil Hamilton had come to the village at the invitation of a group with very close links to Waters' constituency Labour Party.
Not only were several members of the core protest group members of the Labour Party, but one of their number (Jacqueline Seward) is standing as a candidate for the county council, while the party's second candidate, Gary Jones, advised and supported the group, including putting up some particularly nasty, lying posters around the village which bordered on incitement to hatred.
Here's a quick reminder of what one of them looked like:
The poster gives the lie to Waters' claims that he had worked hard to defuse the row. If he had really wanted to reach out and work on a cross-party basis, as he said, why did he allow Labour to become involved in a campaign of vilification, intimidation and scaremongering? Why did he not intervene and tell his supporters to remove the posters which they had been putting up? Why did he not tell them to take down their disgraceful website? Why did he not tell them to cool things and under no circumstances have anything to do with Neil Hamilton?
When it finally emerged that the group had been developing ties with UKIP and even more extreme groups, Waters rightly came in for a good deal of criticism. He thinks this was an organised "cyber mob" unleashed by Plaid. Dismissing his critics as a mob is much easier than having to listen to the voices of overwhelmingly local people who were shocked and dismayed by Waters' conduct in the affair.
Presumably in his eyes the Plaid cyber mob included his predecessor as Labour AM, Keith Davies, who made his views about Waters' acrobatics clear in a recent television interview.
Everything is always somebody else's fault. It's Plaid's fault, the council's fault, the "mob's" fault, Gwyn Hopkins' fault, the school's fault....
Nodding dog
When he was elected, Lee Waters promised voters that he would not be a "nodding dog", voting as instructed by party whips no matter what his views on any given subject.
And so far, he has lived up to his promise to a certain extent, albeit not in the way voters might expect.
Firstly, of course, his "support" for his government's policies on the Welsh language look for all the world like opposition. It's a riff on the old "I'm all in favour of the Welsh language, but" theme.
Then last month he loyally joined his party colleagues to vote down proposals which would have given legal protection to historic place names in Wales. Anyone who wants to turn their Faerdre Fach into a Happy Donkey Hill should send a thank you letter to Lee.
Back in January Lee made more waves when he attacked a long-awaited decision by his government to find £50 million to pay for a sorely needed bypass for Llandeilo.
Llandeilo has suffered for years from illegal and extremely high levels of air pollution caused by the heavy volumes of traffic which are funnelled through the narrow streets in the town centre, and the deal was negotiated by Adam Price AM.
This was pork barrel politics, said Waters, who was joined in criticising the scheme by UKIP and the Tories.
Lee Waters was back on message in October last year when he joined Labour AMs in voting down proposals for an Autism Bill which would have brought Wales into line with legislation in England and Northern Ireland and given people with autism a legal identity.
For anyone who knows someone on the autistic spectrum, and especially those who care for people with more severe forms of the condition, this is an issue of vital importance.
Lee Waters not only did as he was told by the Labour whips, but went the extra mile to the disappointment and shock of many of his friends and supporters, by adopting tactics which came close to the sort of wrecking and filibustering which is a speciality of some Tory MPs in Westminster.
Three times he intervened in the debate to ask why supporters of the Bill were not offering to extend legal protection to people with Tourette's syndrome.
The Bill was duly sunk.
Perhaps someone should buy Lee Waters a copy of Paul Flynn's excellent book, "How to be an MP".
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