Principles into Practice: policy-making in Wales after May 2011

• a preference for co-operation and collaboration, rather than competition, as the best means of pooling our collective efforts to solve our common problems; and an understanding that market mechanisms rarely provide sustainable solutions to public services and that, in the wider economy, markets have to serve the public interest as well as the pursuit of private profit;
• an approach to public services based on Labour’s record of progressive universalism, in which we ensure that major services – in health and education, for example -  are owned and run for the benefit of us all, but where extra help is provided for those who need it the most;
• a belief that contact between the individual and the state should be modelled on citizenship, rather than consumerism, and on high-trust, not low-trust relationships;
• a recognition that public services work best when the contribution of both users and providers are equally valued and understood. Labour’s long tradition of mutuality and reciprocity must be reapplied again today’s circumstances;
• a commitment to making services responsive to the needs of Welsh citizens by improving the collective means of making sure that the voice of users is heard loud and clear in the way that services are designed and delivered;
• an appreciation that, in a complex world, Wales and Britain are stronger together than apart, and that devolution provides the best constitutional way forward – pooling risks and resources, while putting our domestic agenda directly in the hands of Welsh people;
• a future for Wales as a confident, outward-looking nation, knowing that our radical history, living culture and increasing bilingualism places Wales in the European mainstream and provides us with a set of social and  economic advantages for the future
• an extension of the Labour principle of devolution, so that power is always exercised at the lowest possible level, and as close as possible to  those whose lives are directly affected by the decisions which government has to make;
• a determination to place environmental justice – across and between the generations – at the heart of our policy-making. Socialists understand that our environment is, more than anything else, a resource-in-common – it belongs to us all, and each one of us has a responsibility to take care of it. Environmental failure falls most sharply on those who already have the least. Handing on the planet to our children depends on creating, in the here-and-now, a fairer social order between the nations of the world, and within them.
• a dedication to realising the advantages which more equal societies enjoy – greater economic prosperity, better health, less crime and a strengthened sense of community