WE FACE a crisis of political leadership in Wales. A hurricane has passed through the global economic system following the 2008 crash, the pandemic, and now the cost-of-living crisis, but our politicians failed to organise communities, trade unions, and social movements in mass opposition to austerity.

Wales has the highest rates of poverty and low pay in the UK, yet there are Welsh government ministers and senior councillors in Wales who have never ever supported a single strike or ever stood on a picket line with workers fighting for better wages.

Meanwhile there has been a Tory ideological project to shrink the local state to its bare bones by systematically withholding the funding needed to provide the local services considered normal in post-war Britain, so as to force cuts, privatisation and outsourcing.