I am tempted to just cough and say the words ‘Cwrt Sart’, but I won’t.

Andrew R.T. Davies was talking earlier about energy, and 18 years is a long time for any party, and I do mean any party, to be in Government. It doesn’t really matter who props them up, it’s still a long time. But the one thing that is good about it is that it gives those parties a long term to plan, and I do think that is a good thing.

Since the Alastair Campbell days of headline-driven policy making, short-termism has become a less than helpful feature of politics. This sort of ‘show me now’ expectation puts pressure on Governments to come up with a shiny new distraction on the back of every budget, and an annual budget cycle brings its own difficulties to long-term planning.

Eighteen years also gives parties a long time to make mistakes. I think we can be forgiven for making the odd mistake. Everyone miscalculates from time to time. But my essential difficulty with these Labour-led Governments is that 18 years is a long time to put those mistakes right. And they haven’t done that—they just keep making them. Eighteen years is also a long time to blame everybody else. In the six years or so that I’ve been here, the standard response to scrutiny has been, ‘Well, it’s not me, Miss, it’s those Tories in Westminster.’ Well, at 18, I would expect a more mature response from anyone. Those Tories had to play the hand that was dealt to them and the Government here needs to do the same, especially as they’ve had 12 years more practice. And, yes, I would expect a party that’s been in power for 18 years to do things differently from the UK Government. The reason we have devolution is to put the needs of the people of Wales first. You’ve seen the Welsh Conservatives develop policies that are quite different from those of colleagues in Westminster, because the needs of Wales are specific. The reality of that, though, is that these needs now are specific, and not in a good way, as a result of 18 years of poor Government here: NHS waiting lists, education and skills and standards—despite the lovely new schools—GVA, child poverty, bad investment decisions along with small business deaths, poor social mobility, and indifference to rural communities.

In the six years that I’ve been here, Labour-led Government haven’t just blamed Westminster, it’s been a series of, ‘I expect the health boards to do this’, ‘That’s a matter for local authorities’, ‘That’s for the headteacher to decide’. And I would go some way to accepting those responses, as a subscriber to localism and subsidiarity myself, if they were followed up by adequate resource following every new expectation, and if they were subject to some visible accountability.

Last week, I was at Bridgend College, which has received a double excellent result from its Estyn inspection. This is a miracle for two reasons. The first is that they managed to weather the loss of 150 members of staff, following the crippling cuts that Welsh Government inflicted on them two years ago, and the second is that 88 per cent of their learners are below level 1 in numeracy and 84 per cent are below level 1 in literacy.

Now, these are the students who were born under a Welsh Labour Government. They have been educated in accordance with Welsh Labour policy. Half of them come from areas classified as ‘most deprived’, most deprived after a whole lifetime of Labour Welsh policy. Our new teachers, of whom we’re going to expect so much in this Donaldson era, only know the education system that they had themselves. How can we imagine that a nine-month PGCE is anywhere near long enough for them to look for those new ideas when their own experience was either about grade-led meltdown, or no expectation at all? I don’t doubt the Cabinet Secretary’s determination not to waste another generation’s potential, but I have no sense of direction of leadership about how this Labour-led Government will ameliorate the consequences of 18 years of mistakes. It is the same old stuff: only already exhausted local authorities can be trusted to effect change, but you won’t give them any sufficient resource to do what you’re asking them to do—not on education; delays in planning anything so local businesses with good ideas give up on the whole idea of partnership working and get on with what they do, locking up their expertise and not sharing it; a lack of frankness about how efficiently public services work, for fear of it being an attack on the workforce when, actually, a workforce feels valued when it’s able to do its job as best as it can without waste and without constant meddling, and you get constant meddling when there is no vision at the top, and no say at the bottom.