Sullivan / Edwards Setting the Record Straight

Capturing the Voices of Women in Welsh Politics
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-912905-73-7
Verlag: Honno Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 122 Seiten

What is it like to be a woman at the forefront of political life? Discover the compelling narratives of women leading the charge in Welsh politics through the ground-breaking initiative by Archif Menywod Cymru/Women's Archive Wales. Dive into candid interviews with trailblazers from the Welsh Assembly, which preceded the Senedd, and was the first UK government to achieve gender parity in 2003. From the Social Services & Welfare Wales Act led by Gwenda Thomas, to the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act led by Jane Davidson, explore the stories of their political motivations, role models and how they navigated the challenges of balancing family life with political representation and their civic responsibilities. Setting the Record Straight stands as an essential record of Wales's political evolution. A work of significant importance, it not only pays tribute to the accomplishments of these remarkable women, but also envisions a future where women of all ages and backgrounds continue to play a central role in shaping the policies and governance of Wales. 'It would have been an absolute scandal not to have captured these rich oral interviews from some genuine political pioneers. Without projects like this, we would continue to be restricted to seeing politics through an exclusively male lens. This fine and readable collection of interviews is not just enjoyable and enlightening, but invaluable to understanding devolution and women's history in Wales too.' Professor Laura McAllister

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sullivan, Kate

Edwards, Catrin

Leseproben

Chapter One

Beginnings And First Impression

The call for devolution in Wales had grown steadily in the 1980s and 1990s, and on 18 September, 1997, a referendum was held that showed a vote of 50.3 per cent in favour of a National Assembly for Wales. The following year, the Government of Wales Act provided the legal ground for such an Assembly, which would have the power to make secondary legislation in specific areas only, such as agriculture, education and housing.

The Assembly met for the first time on 12 May, 1999, and the building was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 26 May. Of the 60 newly elected members of this First Assembly, 24 were women, an important shift in the history of a political arena in Wales which had been hitherto dominated by men.

In this first section of this book, we hear from some of the women who had the privilege and the responsibility to be the first female politicians to sit in the first ever Welsh Assembly, and in subsequent Assemblies, up to the celebration of its first twenty years in 2019.

PAULINE JARMAN

‘My first impression was one of achievement for each of us, irrespective of political party. I felt we had a big responsibility as an organisation to really get some of the things that we so desperately needed delivered. And that was my impatience. It was so new; everything was so new. I had done a sort of apprenticeship in local government, so I was well used to some of the things that other colleagues weren’t, like rules of debate, standing orders, points of order, all these things. I suppose those who were formerly MPs were also very familiar with it. So, it was an alien environment, but I’m a people watcher, and I’m inclined to take my time, get to know the territory, get to know the individuals, I don’t form early judgements on anyone, I sit there and look and listen. We were all new to it and we could all have been lookers and listeners for a very long time. Was I in awe? I don’t know if I was in awe, but I was certainly very proud to be sat there amongst the first 60 people to be given that very serious responsibility of looking after Wales and its affairs and delivering for its people in whatever small way I could. That was the pride that I felt.’

JANE DAVIDSON

‘My first impression of the National Assembly was arriving in an underground car park in Crickhowell House, a building that had been built in the context of the Health Service that had been hastily adapted to become the new National Assembly for Wales. I remember arriving and being allocated to my car parking space and then getting out and a person was waiting for me by the door. And that person was Craig Stevenson, who went on to become my private secretary, both in my first role in the National Assembly as Deputy Presiding Officer and then as a Minister in the government. Craig was “buddied up” to me, as a member of the Civil Service, to help me as a new Assembly Member understand my way around the new institution. So, of course, I had to go and do all the things that new Assembly Members had to do. I had to be allocated a room. I had to be allocated a computer. I had to go and sign a declaration in terms of becoming an Assembly Member. I had to find out where the canteen was, where the toilets were – all the really important things in life!  I remember Craig telling me on that first day how they had no idea what it was going to be like, in a sense, meeting real politicians, because they’d been through a series of exercises as members of the Civil Service about what it might be like but neither they, nor many of us, because many of us had never been politicians before, had any idea what it was going to be like walking through those doors.’

ELEANOR BURNHAM

‘A huge honour and pleasure, but a shock and a fright, because I had been focussing on doing my best in Chester, being a JP, looking after the children, etc. First impressions – my sense of smell is quite acute, and the first thing was feeling rather sick because of the smell of  Brain’s [brewery] coming off the train. No-one wanted to help me, after all I’m an adult, but I didn’t know anyone in the party, didn’t know anyone in the group – they all came from Cardiff and the friendliest person was Mick Bates. So I didn’t have any idea, and had to find that out in a hurry: how to do it, where to do it, and with whom to do it. I remember getting lost, going down in the lift, and not being able to come back up because everyone had gone home and I was on my own in the car park, and of course I didn’t have a car because I’d travelled by train. The Chamber was small and every time a person coughed, everyone caught a cold!’

JENNY RANDERSON

‘The serious point, the serious reason why I was pleased to do it, was it was so exciting. A new institution. We had to make up the rules. The people who became the first AMs, they had various backgrounds. There was Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas, who of course had the Commons and the Lords in his background; there were several MPs; there were a lot of us who’d been councillors and knew how local councils worked; and there were people who’d never done it before. And we all came to it from a totally different perspective and formed what we saw as a new democracy. And I think some of our experiments worked, some were a failure. But the good thing was there was no-one standing there saying, “You can’t do that because we always do so and so.” There was none of the precedent. There was none of the rules set down by our forefathers. It was down to us. And we realised quite early on that we needed much more power.’

KIRSTY WILLIAMS

‘I certainly had not anticipated how all-encompassing the job would be and how you would never be off duty. Even things that wouldn’t be an issue for your average twenty-eight-year-old suddenly became an issue because you had this particular role. People used to make assumptions all the time about [me] not having enough experience, not being good enough, and I just felt that I had to work even harder to prove that somebody young – or younger, because twenty-eight isn’t that young really – deserved to be there and could do that job. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like to go to Parliament in those circumstances. Although there were hugely experienced people in that Assembly in 1999, people who had long and very successful parliamentary careers in a Westminster context, people who’d had long and very successful careers in local government in Wales, because it was new in many ways it was almost like everybody was starting from scratch. I was hugely fortunate to go into that new institution where nobody could pull rank in that sense of having been there before. It was new for everybody. Nobody was quite sure how it would all work, nobody was quite sure what we should all do. There wasn’t that weight of history in that sense upon us because, “Oh, that’s how we’ve always done it.”  We were creating history as a group of people and you certainly felt that way, because the referendum margins had been so narrow. Certainly, I was acutely aware that we had to make it work, it had to be good, we had to prove to people that we had the right to be there, that the right decision had been made. It was terrifying, exciting, bewildering, overwhelming, just a huge sense of pride at simply getting there.’

DELYTH EVANS

‘I think my strongest impression is that everything was new, an unusual, exciting new venture, and it was a brilliant experience to be part of that. But thinking of it now that people are used to the Assembly, it was something completely new in the governance of Wales, the governance of Britain. Not only a change for the people who were part of it, namely the members and the officers and the civil servants – of course that was very new for them – but it was also completely new for all the public bodies in Wales and the local authorities and anyone else who had to deal with the government. All these bodies had always been used to being led from London – the money, the budget, rules, everything coming from London – and suddenly, everything was happening in Wales. Therefore, it was the newness of everything, and the change that came in the wake of devolution was a huge thing for the whole of Wales and for public life to deal with. There was this feeling that people were learning on the job, learning as they went along, working out how to do things, how to behave, how to deal with problems. I was very aware of that process, people trying to work out how to make things work at all levels. On a personal level, politicians trying to learn the job, trying to work out how to contribute; at committee level, what their role was, the officers trying to adapt their way of working instead of looking to London for guidance, and trying to take that guidance from Cardiff; local authorities trying to work out how they fitted in, [what] their relationships were with the different bodies they worked with. It was a huge change – a revolution in a way. So, when trying to remember what people’s objectives were in that first period, I think the most important thing was just trying to establish it and lay down...