LAST month, former Caerphilly AM Jeff Cuthbert was elected as Gwent’s new Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC). He spoke to NIALL GRIFFITHS about struggling with dyslexia, his flirtation with Trotskyism and his passion for serving the people he lives amongst.

I WAS born in Glasgow in 1948 to a Glaswegian father and a Welsh mother who hailed from Abercynon.

They met through the Independent Labour Party, one of the forerunners of modern Labour. They met towards the end of the war and they got married in 1947 and a year later I came along.

At the age of six months the family moved back to Abercynon, and then in 1950 we moved to the house in Whitchurch in Cardiff.

My great Aunt Anne, who hailed from Nelson in Caerphilly borough, had been a suffragette in her youth and she’d always been radically left-inclined.

She was a teacher in London of what was then called “backwards children”, the official title back then for children with learning difficulties.

I’m dyslexic and my schooldays were very difficult. I failed the 11-plus twice because whilst my arithmetic was spot on, the English grammar was very difficult.

My great aunt identified my dyslexia when no-one in Wales did, which shows how educationally far ahead London was in comparison.

She was very well connected in the left Labour scene, and in her life she knew George Orwell and also had meetings with Oswald Mosley when he was still a Labour politician.

I have to stress that at no time that they seek to drive me into left wing thinking. I first joined both the Labour Party and trade union in 1967 after leaving school.

I made my own decisions and what really sparked off my socialist views was the Vietnam War.

It was the first TV war to be put out in a real-time basis. The injustice that seemed to me and my generation of people having to face a huge power and just being caught up in it as innocent civilians just seemed so wrong. That sparked my interest in social justice and key international affairs.

From about 1968 until the mid-1980s I became an active Militant supporter and I most certainly identified and believed passionately in the Marxist and Trotskyist agenda but my experiences of the Thatcherite government, the failure for Labour to win in 1983 and the miner’s strike really led me to believe that all of it was no more than self-indulgence.

I was a coal board apprentice before studying mining engineering at University College Cardiff between 1970 and 1975, where I was also student union president in my final year.

After my studies, I returned to work for the coal board but clearly the coal board was contracting, the number of mines was shrinking and the writing was on the wall a bit for the coal industry in those days.

So I moved away from coal mining into civil engineering, which involved working in the Middle East/North Africa for four years, Saudi Arabia for three years and Libya for a year.

I stayed in that type of work for a few years until the early 1990s where I was employed by the Welsh Joint Education Committee (WJEC) in a unit called ‘Asset to Industry’.

My transition from a political activist to a professional politician as AM came in 2003 when my predecessor Ron Davies stood down following the ‘Tog Hill incident’.

The role was thrust on me quite unexpectedly as I was quite happy, at the age of 54, at the WJEC but I knew that this opportunity was something I wanted and it was unlikely to happen again. I haven’t regretted it since.

There can be no greater honour than to serve the people you live amongst and I've always taken great pride in my time as AM for Caerphilly, where I still live today and I have no intention of moving away.

During my thirteen years serving the area I was keen to promote the cause of vocational education and, as a type-2 diabetic, healthy living in Wales.

Other highlights include securing the Angel Way relief road in Bargoed and building of Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr, both of which make a tangible difference to people’s lives.

There can be no greater honour than to serve the people you live amongst and I've always taken great pride in my time as AM for Caerphilly.

Many of these improvements were 50 percent funded by European Structural Funds, including the apprenticeship programmes, Jobs Growth Wales, and the proposed Metro plans.

Wales is in fact a net benefiter of European funding and that’s not as well understood as it should be.

I don’t mind admitting that I’m very much in the remain camp and I hope for the sake of Welsh people that that remains the outcome.

In 2011 I was approached by Carwyn Jones to be the Deputy Minister for Skills, where I was responsible for delivering our enhanced apprenticeship programme such as Jobs Growth Wales, which has seen 15,000 young people get into good quality jobs.

Two years later I became a cabinet member for Communities and Tackling Poverty, which gave me an introduction to working with the police at a senior level as well as other devolved services such as health, transport and education.

During my time in this role I also developed and introduced the Wellbeing and Future Generations Act which will bring massive changes to the way public services are delivered in Wales.

When I stepped down as AM in 2014 I had no intention to retire from public life and it was suggested to me to go for the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Gwent post.

After 13 years at the Assembly I felt that I needed a new challenge, and having an understanding of policing and wellbeing following my time there, I trust that I can bring an objective eye to my new role.

I’m absolutely determined to be a visible commissioner during my four years in the post. I want to be out and about visiting community groups, particularly those working in our most vulnerable communities in Gwent such as Community First areas and ethnic minority areas including gypsy and travelling communities.

I want to make sure that this position is one that is a useful one that is doing good for people in collaboration with other key public services and the voluntary sector because they’ve got an important role to play.

A recent BBC survey showed that only 10 percent of the adult population knew there was such a post as the PCC, never mind the person in the role.

I don’t want that to be case in Gwent in four years’ time – and it would be very nice if they knew my name as well.