Welsh Labour Party Leadership candidate, Carwyn Jones, has set-out in the greatest detail to date, how he intends to lead his Party’s fightback in the run-up to the next General Election.
Earlier this month, Carwyn revealed his plans to re-build and re-connect his Party with the Welsh electorate, as well as announcing his intention to appoint a campaigning ‘supremo’ to work closely with Party Headquarters in Transport House and the Welsh Parliamentary Labour Party in London in readiness for the General Election of 2010.
In his latest announcement, Carwyn has explained how he intends to harness what he calls, “the collective energies” of the entire Welsh Labour movement in forthcoming elections, by establishing a full-time National Campaign Unit (NCU) at the Party’s Cardiff HQ.
The role of the NCU will be co-ordinate Welsh Labour’s General, Assembly and Council election campaigns over the next three years across the country using the very latest tools of engagement to mobilise the Party’s grassroots to help spread messages, policies and priorities to voters in every constituency in Wales.
Carwyn said one of the tasks of the National Campaign Unit would be to mobilise active trades unionists and turn them into Labour campaigners, as he released a video on his website showing him talking to trades unionists across Wales and a substantial number of trades union figures across Wales declared their support for him.
Commenting on the latest phase of his strategy, Carwyn said:
“From day one, if elected the new Leader of the Welsh Labour, I will set in train a series of measures that will be designed to initiate our fightback.
“I intend to harness the collective energies of the entire Welsh Labour movement in this process and the National Campaign Unit will have overall responsbility for co-ordinating this. The new direction will mean re-prioritising the resources available to the Party, in order to achieve our goal.
“To do this, I will ensure that all campaigning techniques are fully employed by Welsh Labour in the coming months and I also intend to take online campaigning to a new level – a level which I can confidently predict, will be unrivalled by any other party in Wales.”
“We must show trades union activists that the rights they enjoy depend on the re-election of a Labour Government. I want to work with the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation (TULO) to create a new generation on union activists who are also party activists.”
Also, in a clear signal of his intent and determination about the task ahead, should he win the Leadership, Carwyn issued a stark warning to Welsh Tories about what they can expect to face in the coming months, saying:
“The next General Election campaign has already started and in just over two weeks time, I intend to lead my Party in the fight of our political lives. There remains all to play for electorally and Welsh Labour will not walk away from the vulnerable people who rely on us.
“Voters in Wales already feel there is an air of arrogance about the Tories’ approach to the next General Election – and they are right. The polls show David Cameron has far from ‘sealed the deal’ with the electorate. The people of Wales do not like being taken for granted and that is why I intend to burst David Cameron’s ‘bubble’ from day one of my Leadership.
“Welsh Conservatives can forget their absurd predictions and wild assumptions of electoral gains equating to a rubgy team. There is only one rugby analogy that will apply to the Tories next Spring and that will be when voters send them back to the ‘Sin-Bin’, where they belong.”
