Experience of failure is not the killer qualification as which some see it

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Experience is an odd commodity. As a generalization, most of us might expect that someone who has a lot of experience of doing something will be better at it than someone who has none, but it doesn’t always work that way. One of the reasons why some people end up doing the same job for many, many years is that they really aren’t very good at it. Peter’s Principle (“In a hierarchy individuals tend to rise to their levels of incompetence”) applies. I once interviewed someone for a job who claimed to have twenty years’ experience, but when we questioned him it turned out that he really had one year’s experience repeated twenty times. Experience is not only about duration – it’s also about depth and breadth. And experience of repeated failure without learning from mistakes made is a handicap, not a qualification.

The First Minister claimed this week that Labour should stay in power because it is the only party with previous governing experience in Wales. Even if it didn’t effectively amount to an argument that Labour should therefore enjoy perpetual power (because no-one will ever be able to gain that experience if we accept the argument), it’s a curious claim to make. In the first place, whilst some of the lessons learned from experience can be passed on after a fashion, ‘experience’ itself is personal to the experiencer. In the second place, ‘parties’ don’t have experience of government, it’s the ministers (who are often in any post for only a comparatively short time) who do; parties, as institutions, tend not to be very good at passing lessons on, which is one of the reasons why new generations of politicians often repeat the mistakes of the past. In the third place, many of those within Labour who possess this magical experience are either standing down in this election, or else at risk of defeat anyway. In the fourth place, whilst not everything that the Labour Government has done can fairly be described as a disaster (whatever their opponents might say), and there are often mitigating arguments based on relative incomes, ages and health, the objective evidence surely means that there are very few who would look at the last 27 years and see nothing but outstanding success; experience of failure may not be quite the qualification as which the First Minister apparently sees it. Finally, the institution which is supposed to be the guardian and repository of experience and its lessons isn’t the party, or even the ministers, but the apolitical civil service – which will still be there after May 7 to serve the new ministers.

I’m not sure that “desperate” – the headline accusation lobbed by Plaid – is an entirely fair description of the tactic by Labour. The subtext is surely a much more powerful condemnation: Inability to comprehend any alternative approach, complete failure to understand that voters in Wales want ‘change’ (even if they don’t all want the same change), and a general weariness with the apparent inertia of our political systems and structures. Our best hope for the outcome on 7 May is a government composed solely of independence-supporting parties. It’s hard to envisage any government which includes the attitudes currently being displayed by Labour having the vision and the energy to do anything sufficiently different.