Blwyddyn Newydd Dda/Happy and Healthy New Year to Argus readers.

This year is set to be a momentous one in politics with a UK general election, USA presidential election and here in Wales the Welsh Labour election of a new leader and First Minister following Mark Drakeford’s announcement that he is standing down in March.

Mark did a great job for our country, including during the unprecedented Covid crisis. Thankfully we have two strong candidates to succeed him – Jeremy Miles MS and Vaughan Gething MS.

Along with the majority of my colleagues in the Senedd Labour Group and the majority of Leaders in local government in Wales, I am supporting Jeremy Miles to take forward devolution and a progressive agenda for our economy, public services and communities.

We badly need a UK Labour Government to work with our Welsh Labour Government and the general election cannot come quickly enough.

In the last 13 years the Tories have starved our public services of funding, which was made even worse by Liz Truss crashing our economy and tanking mortgage rates at the back end of 2022. This is the only parliament on record where living standards have fallen.

We desperately need Labour Governments at both ends of the M4 – both will work in partnership and invest in our future industries (such as the semi-conductor industry and the production of green steel) and support our public services.

Whoever becomes our next First Minister, I know both candidates will deliver on this with Keir Starmer as our next UK Labour Prime Minister.

Moving onto a different, but a very important area of work, I was very pleased to organise an event for Senedd members last week for Less Survivable Cancers Awareness Day (January 11).

The campaign focuses on the six less survivable cancers - the lungs, pancreas, liver, brain, oesophagus and stomach. The event was to learn more about these conditions and how we can improve survival chances for patients.

Despite accounting for more than 40 per cent of common cancer deaths, the less survivable cancers still suffer from low awareness amongst the public and health practitioners.

Between 2002 and 2014, the less survivable cancers received just 16.6 per cent of research funding of more survivable cancers. Greater research will be critical to increasing survival.

Want to contact John Griffiths? Either e-mail john.griffiths@senedd.wales or call 01633 222302.