Pretty Tame Rebel really.

A Welsh Labour MP has used her autobiography to launch a furious attack on the Welsh Government.

Ms Clwyd has been an outspoken critic of the Labour-led Welsh Government’s management of the NHS in Wales ever since she was appalled at the care her husband received in the University of Wales Hospital Cardiff before his death.

In her memoirs, entitled Rebel With a Cause, she writes that has been “bitterly disappointed” by her own party’s performance in government since the National Assembly was launched in 1999.

Ms Clwyd, who represents Cynon Valley, writes: 

“To say the reality of a Welsh Assembly did not live up to my expectations is understating the case. I feel bitterly disappointed and let down by an institution I campaigned so passionately for.
“No one is prouder of their Welsh heritage than I am, but I can recognise our weaknesses as well as our strengths.
“One of our greatest weaknesses as a nation is the giant chip that we carry on our shoulder, a symptom of the centuries of being a poor relation to England.

Our weakness is accepting this position and not seeking to end the Union  and becoming  an Independent Nation.

She continues.

 “As a result, we view any criticism, even the constructive kind, as an attack and immediately pull up the drawbridge.“Translated into institutional behaviour this becomes dangerous as it means organisations do not learn from their mistakes or the experience of others.

Ms Clwyd however seems to be confusing the failure of her Party to run the devolved legislature with Assembly Itself.

If the Assembly has failed to live up to expectations then it is the fault of her Party who have been running it since it first sat with the institution itself.

Or does she?

She continues

Given that my party has been in power at the Assembly, either outright or in coalition, since its inception, it pains me to observe that it has a poor track record. In health, education and other areas we are lagging behind the rest of Britain.
“Meanwhile the Welsh Assembly government refuses to accept people’s concerns, spending more time defending the indefensible rather than fixing what is wrong. What makes it worse is that people who genuinely care about what is happening, and speak out, are accused of betrayal if we dare to voice any concern or criticism. ‘Go back to Westminster and leave us alone’ is the subtext.”

There is still a core of Labour's hegemony  thinking here . If Labour have failed isn't it time  for someone else to take over?

In 2012 Ms Clwyd launched an attack on the treatment of her dying husband, former TV journalist Owen Roberts, in the University of Wales Hospital in Cardiff.

Two months after his death she said her biggest regret was that she didn’t “stand in the hospital corridor and scream” in protest at the “almost callous lack of care” with which nurses treated her husband as he lay dying.

She said she feared a “normalisation of cruelty” was rife among NHS nurses and that she had chosen to speak out because this had become “commonplace”.

She described how her 6ft 2in husband lay crushed “like a battery hen” against the bars of his hospital bed with an oxygen mask so small it cut into his face and pumped cold air into his infected eye.

At the time I pointed out that in her regular surgeries Ms Clwyd must have received other harrowing stories about the running of the Welsh Assembly in Wales. I have nothing but sympathy  for her experience . But it is an experience shared by thousands of people yearly throughout the UK including the years 1999-2010 when Labour were in power in Westminster 

IMs Clwyd's book is called Rebel with a Cause I wonder of we will find what she has rebelled against  and what exactly her cause has been?

Ms Clwyd’s credentials  are tarnished , by the endorsement  of  former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who appointed her a Middle East envoy, Who said: 

“Ann is a long-standing and committed humanitarian, and one of the most compassionate and respected public servants ever to grace the House of Commons. Her tireless support of equal rights, both at home and abroad, is revealed in this lucid account of an outstanding parliamentarian and of a campaigner resolute in her values.”

Blarites and New-Labour as a form of rebellion now that's a new thought.

Ms Clwyd  represents much of what is wrong with
 Wales  a failure to realise that the Union will keep us as poor West Britons and we need to know it and her Parties Hegenomy which infiltrates all aspects of Non- Government Organisations as well as the instruments  of power here must end.