Using common sense depends on knowing what it is

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To adapt the words of Oscar Wilde, to lose one parliamentary candidate due to unfortunate use of social media looks like misfortune, but to lose ten starts to look like carelessness. Unless, of course, we are talking about Reform UK Party Ltd, the mostly Farage-owned limited company standing over 600 candidates (although a currently unknowable number of those may have fallen by the wayside in the meantime) in the forthcoming election. It seems that selecting any old Tom, Dick, or Harry as a candidate and waiting for their past misdemeanours to be exposed is actually a deliberate strategy. They have, in effect, outsourced the vetting of candidates to the media, who are having something of a field day as they work their way through the list uncovering incriminating past statements.

Outsourcing candidate vetting is a novel approach to a difficult issue. The more cynical might even wonder whether Reform are quite happy to be associated in the mind of potential voters with some of the racism and misogyny being spouted by their candidates whilst also hoping to get some sort of credit for acting quickly to sack them when their words are exposed. Both selecting candidates and subsequently sacking them are definitely easier for a hierarchical company where one man has effective total control than for a democratic party where members might, wholly unreasonably, expect to have an input. Abolishing concepts such as membership and democracy is not without its advantages. For a control freak or would-be dictator at least. And for a party which has, according to the polls, zero probability of having anyone elected, maybe they really just aren’t that worried. The company’s puppet leader, Richard Tice, said that “Every party has their fair share frankly of muppets and morons”. From the horse’s mouth, as it were. But I almost agree with him; it’s just that some have a ‘fairer’ share than others.

He does make the entirely correct point that the vetting process is “valid the day you do it, but if the following Friday night someone has a glass or two too much and puts something out on social media they permanently regret, in a sense it never stops”. Well, yes. Although quite how that applies in the case of the candidate for Orpington whose offensive words date from 2019 is an unanswered question. A date 5 years ago is hardly between one day and the following Friday night. Not without a Tardis, anyway.

Candidate vetting is a difficult process, and can be sensitive. I recall one case of a Plaid candidate who was outraged to discover that party officials had looked at their (public) social media accounts, and claimed it was an invasion of their privacy. We thought that it was an extreme reaction, but it highlights the fairly common belief that social media accounts, even if visible to the world, are somehow also private to the individual and his or her online friends. Understanding the way in which social media can broadcast and amplify throwaway comments is still slow in developing in some quarters.

And even when candidates have been vetted, and nothing incriminating has been found, one can never be entirely sure that the individual won’t, as Tice put it, have a glass or two and say something silly. It’s not only a problem for Reform, although to date they’re the only group that have tried to turn a problem into a ‘feature’, as a software developer might describe it. Whether it’s just bad luck, or whether there is a particular propensity on the political ‘right’ to say silly things, it is the Tories who have, in recent months and years, suffered some of the biggest problems. Some of them seem to think that they are just voicing aloud ‘what everybody thinks’ and that makes it just common sense. That was, for instance, a major part of Lee Anderson’s defence. Indeed, returning to Toms, Dicks, and Harrys (and especially the second of those) it turns out that the MP who sent pictures of his body parts to a man through a dating app, and provided the contact details of other MPs so that they could also be targeted, is a fully paid-up member of the so-called Common Sense Group of Tory MPs. But then, ‘common sense’ as defined by Tice’s ‘muppets and morons’ is always going to look a bit strange to the rest of us. An inability to agree on a common sense definition of common sense is one of the reasons why vetting is so hard to do.

Domestic violence is everyone's business

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A guy I once worked with was utterly shocked (along with the rest of his family) when his sister was killed by her husband; they hadn’t known that there were any issues at all between the pair. I remember his words to me at the time: “No-one ever knows what goes on behind closed doors”. When it comes to domestic violence, there are only ever two people who really know what happened, and even they will have different versions of events. Plaid seems to have got itself into more than a little bit of difficulty in its response to the assault by MP Jonathan Edwards on his wife, and the party’s response seems to have led to some uncomradely comments, not to say bitterness and dispute, amongst the members, judging only from the public comments I’ve seen on Facebook and elsewhere. Bearing in mind the words of that erstwhile work colleague, I don’t know enough about the detail of what actually happened to comment on the original event. There are some general political issues, though.

Firstly, it seems that Plaid’s disciplinary rules don’t actually allow the party to distinguish, in the way that the NEC attempted to do, between re-admission to the party and re-admission to the parliamentary group. From my own past extensive involvement with the party’s rules, that doesn’t surprise me: there are always new situations which those drawing up the rules failed to foresee and allow for. It’s why the rule book ends up as a lengthy and unwieldy document as new rules are invented to plug any gaps identified. In principle, though, expecting higher standards from those representing a party – any party – as a candidate for public office than are expected of ordinary members is not at all an unreasonable position to take. It’s part of the reason parties, including Plaid, use some sort of selection or vetting process to ensure that only suitable individuals get selected as candidates, even if such procedures can never be perfect.

Secondly, society as a whole often seems to apply dual standards to the question of domestic violence. It’s hard to imagine another violent crime in which the forgiveness of the victim (even if later regretted) is considered to be some sort of mitigation which diminishes the seriousness of the initial assault. There are power differentials as well as genuine feelings which can drive 'forgiveness' in  such circumstances. No violent assault by one person on another is ever, or should ever be, ‘just a matter for the individuals involved’. It is understandable that, in a domestic situation where the police believe that reconciliation is possible, attempts are made to resolve the issue by issuing a caution rather than a prosecution in order to spare families the trauma of a court case, but it is wrong to assume that the issue of a caution in itself somehow makes the case less serious. The decision between a caution and a prosecution isn’t simply based on the perceived degree of seriousness of the offence. And a perpetrator doesn’t somehow become a victim if the offence affects his or her future career, although that’s what some seem to be arguing.

Thirdly, parties need to be wary of trying to hold other parties to a higher standard than they expect of their own politicians. Arguing that a man fined for breaking lockdown rules should be forced out of office, but a man cautioned for domestic violence should be allowed to ‘move on’ and get back to normal is not a good look.

There is a debate to be had, of course, about whether someone committing a crime should have that held against him or her for ever, or whether society should be prepared at some point to forgive and allow the individual to return to normal life, particularly where contrition is genuine. I’ve always been in the latter camp on that question, but returning to normal life as an accepted member of society isn’t necessarily the same thing as going back to what the individual was doing before. There are some roles where different criteria are going to be applied, even if those roles aren’t formally identified, and the criteria aren’t written down anywhere. Ultimately, it’s a matter of opinion and judgement, and people will make different judgements. That difference of opinion seems to be at the heart of the uncomradely comments to which I referred above.

I haven’t been a member of Plaid for the last 12 years, and I no longer have any involvement with the rules or processes which the party applies, so there’s a sense in which it’s not my business. I do, though, live in the Carmarthen East constituency (the boundary with Carmarthen West is at the end of our drive) and I, like others, will have to decide at some point for whom to vote. It would be naïve for any party, or any individual, to believe that the events which have transpired will not affect the decisions made by individual electors.

More of the same

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Under the curious hotchpotch which passes for a constitution in the UK, we do not elect the leader of the executive branch of government; we only elect members of the legislative branch, despite the increasingly presidential nature of the election campaigns themselves.  But at least when it comes to an election, we all know who the leaders of the parties are, and we all know that the leader of whichever party can put together a majority of seats in the legislature will become head of the executive branch.  From that perspective, it really is entirely a matter for the individual parties to decide who to elect as their leader and how to run that election, because the electorate decide on the basis of knowing the consequences of their votes.

There is a problem, though, when that leader falls by the wayside, for whatever reason, during the term of office of the legislature.  At that point, the leader being elected by the members of a party also becomes the leader of the executive, and who and how that leader is selected becomes a proper matter for debate by the wider electorate, especially given the constitutional fact that there is no requirement for the newly-appointed leader to face a general election.  In that context, the Labour Party’s electoral college system for selecting its leader in Wales is an entirely legitimate subject for debate.

The Western Mail reported on Saturday that “…critics of a change within Welsh Labour fear that moving to one member, one vote could increase the likelihood of a more radical, left-wing candidate winning the leadership”.  Stop and think about that for just a moment: the argument here is that the party needs a complex three part electoral college in order to place a deliberate constraint on who can be elected.  And underpinning that is an assumption that the trade unions and affiliated bodies and the party’s elected MPs, AMs, and MEPs will always and necessarily be more ‘conservative’ in outlook than the ordinary members.

It’s hard to know whether or not that’s true of trade union members, given that their leaders often support nominations on behalf of the members without consulting them, and then give them a very strong steer on who they should support.  What we do know is that many of those who are members of trade unions and/or affiliated bodies effectively get to vote more than once in a leadership election, since if they are also individual members of the party, they also vote in the membership section of the college.  Giving multiple votes in the same election to selected electors is a strange definition of democracy.

What we also know is that the assessment of elected members (i.e. that they are more ‘conservative’ than the rank and file membership) is broadly correct.  There is an argument that allowing the election of a leader who does not enjoy the full confidence of his or her fellow elected members can create problems, and that is a reason for giving those elected members more influence in the process.  That is part of the problem being faced by Corbyn – and I know that he isn’t the first or only party leader to find the wider membership more supportive than the parliamentary group.  The question that the Labour Party should be asking, though, is not ‘how do we ensure that the membership can’t elect a leader who does not enjoy the confidence of the group?’, but ‘why is there such a disconnect between the views of the elected members and those of the wider party membership?’

And actually, that isn’t only a question for Labour.  When I look at other parties I see a similar trend; those party members elected to legislatures, at Welsh and UK level, often seem to be more ‘establishment’ and ‘centrist’ than the wider membership.  Whether it’s the result of being elected and getting sucked into the system, or whether it tells us something about the selection processes being used is an unanswered question.  In a large enough elected body, such as the UK House of Commons, there are some who somehow get through both of those processes whilst retaining a bit more of an edge to their politics; people like Corbyn.  In a small legislature such as the National Assembly, however, the scope for that is more limited, and we see fewer ‘wild cards’.

The result, to answer those anonymous Labour critics referred to by the Western Mail, is that the Labour Party has generally managed to weed out the “more radical, left-wing” candidates before they even get to the Assembly.  It doesn’t matter which method they use to elect their new leader; the future looks like more of the same in any event.

Repeating the same mistakes

Tweet Perhaps it was a little unfair to refer to the decision by some AMs to refuse the planned pay rise as “student politics” as Lee Waters did.  But seeing politicians scrambling to be seen to be doing the right thing, almost invariably caveated with variations on the wording “at a time of public sector pay restraint” wasn’t terribly edifying.  The implication is that it’s the timing rather then the principle which is the problem, and that, if only the lower paid were getting a bigger rise then their large rise would be OK too.

I certainly, though, take the point that a large disparity between the salaries of AMs and MPs can give the impression that we value one set of politicians more than another.  But there are two things wrong with simply chasing the level of salary elsewhere.  The first is that two wrongs don’t make a right – the fact that one group of people are overpaid doesn’t make it right to overpay another group simply to maintain comparability.  And the second is that it reduces the question of how we ‘value’ our politicians to a simple financial equation, and there surely ought to be more to it than that.

In confirming the recommendations of the independent salary review body last week, the chair said something to the effect that they’d listened carefully to the public reaction that they’d received, but had found nothing to make them change their minds.  What that tells us above all is that, whatever the criteria being used to set salaries, acceptability in the court of public opinion – let alone public outrage – isn’t one of them.

That in turn raises the question of who sets the criteria that they use, and who appoints the people who then apply those criteria.  And the answer to that question brings us right back to the people who are washing their hands of the problem, and claiming that the board is an independent one over which they have no control.  Because those statements are only part of the story.

The criteria to be used are set by legislation, available here.  In essence, the AMs themselves have set the criteria which are to be used – and a very limited set of criteria they are too, amounting in essence to:

(a) providing Assembly members with a level of remuneration which—

(i) fairly reflects the complexity and importance of the functions which they are expected to discharge, and

(ii) does not, on financial grounds, deter persons with the necessary commitment and ability from seeking election to the Assembly,

Criteria set by AMs can be changed by AMs; if they don’t like the answers being produced, they can change the criteria being used by further legislation. 

And who appoints the members of the Panel?  Well, that would be the Assembly Commission – which includes, conveniently, one representative from each of the political parties represented in the Assembly.  Yes, the same parties which are now complaining about the recommendations made by the people they appointed applying the criteria which they set.

The biggest argument being used to justify the large increase on an already high salary is all about attracting the most able people to sit in the Assembly.  But what is the mechanism by which that happens?  It seems to be down to blind faith that higher salaries = more ability, but there is absolutely no evidence to support that blind faith.

Even if we accept that it is true that there is a problem with the level of ability of at least some Assembly members (and for the sake of argument, I’m prepared to accept that, although I’d also accept the same proposition in relation to the – higher-paid – Members of Parliament, too by way of demonstrating that paying them more doesn’t actually solve the problem), increasing their salary doesn’t get rid of them, it simply puts more money in their pockets.  It’s a remarkably ineffective way of addressing the perceived issue.

There are no formal criteria for the job, and no qualifications are required.  The ‘ability’ required is undefined.  The selection process is not far off being random in relation to applying any tests of ability.  Deploying a salary increase as the only conceivable response to the perceived problem is only ever going to mean that we pay more for the same sort of people.  And the beneficiaries?  Ah, that would be the same people who set the criteria and appoint the people to apply them…

Electoral fiction

Tweet Last week, the former Secretary of State for Wales once again gave us the benefit of his opinion, in some detail, on the proposal in the latest Wales Bill to remove the Labour-imposed ban on dual candidacy for the National Assembly.

Fundamentally, his logic is sound, and I find it hard to disagree with his contention that individuals who have been decisively rejected by the electorate should not, nevertheless, end up being elected.  But agreeing with the logic isn’t the same as agreeing with the premise on which it is based – i.e. that anyone failing to win an election in a constituency has therefore been rejected as a person.

For a conventionally conservative politician like Hain, the assumption is so obvious as to not even need examination.  It is a convenient fiction of the UK constitution that all MPs (and AMs etc.) are elected as individuals rather than simple nominees of their party, and it would be unreasonable to expect any conservative to challenge that fiction.

But looked at from another point of view, the idea that people in Neath would still have chosen Hain as their MP if he had stood as a conservative candidate – or even as a candidate for the successor to his former party, the Lib Dems – is patently risible.  Whilst there may have been a small number of astute electors who realised that the difference between the parties was so small that they might as well vote for the person that they most liked, the overwhelming majority voted for the party – the man simply came with the package.  (In all fairness, I suppose that it really is possible that he believes that he would still have won as a conservative, given his unique ability and talents.  He wouldn’t be the first politician to be overcome by such an unrealistic level of self-belief.)

If that’s true in Neath, it’s equally true in Clwyd West, his favoured example of the ‘problem’ that he perceives.  But it simply isn’t true that the three losing candidates were ‘rejected’ by the electorate; it was merely that they were wearing the wrong colour rosettes.  The fact that they lost tells us nothing at all about what the electorate thought about them as candidates.  Equally, however, the fact that they ‘won’ places through the regional list tells us nothing about what the electorate thought about them as candidates either; all it tells us anything about is the relative level of support for the various parties.

All judgement of the merits of individuals is, in practice, done by their parties before presenting them to the electorate as candidates.  One would hope (although there is obviously room for doubt) that the parties would be seeking to put forward their best people to serve the electorate.  The Labour/Hain ban on dual candidacy is more likely to put an unnecessary obstacle in the way of that than to facilitate it. As such, it fails to serve the best interests of the electorate.

Missing the point

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Different political bloggers adopt different styles.  Some simply regurgitate press releases, others reiterate the party line, whilst others spend their efforts attacking others.  The nature of blogging is that in some ways it offers an opportunity for a more personal style and approach; and part of my approach is to illustrate my points with anecdote and personal experience.  It’s a technique to get my point across which I found effective as a manager and which I use in my writing.

There is a problem though; sometimes people can pick up on the illustration rather than the main point – and that seems to have happened with yesterday’s post.  So, let me be clear – if I had intended to post largely about myself, I would have done so, and some months ago at that.

Politics is overly dominated by men in suits (although I’d prefer the expression middle-aged rather than old men!); on that I agree with Ieuan, and I have been trying for many years to address that – openly and democratically through the party’s processes.  My point, however, was that a concentration on addressing the image aspect of that alone will have an impact on the level and range of experiences which people bring into politics.

It isn’t the only factor limiting the experience which politicians bring; there are a number of others.  Here are a few for starters.

1. The intensely personalised nature of politics.  Some of the most able people in other walks of life do their best work in a collaborative fashion.  Ability in others is seen as an asset to be leveraged rather than as a threat.  In the world of science in particular, Dr Phil used to talk about how one scientist correcting another would earn thanks and a friend for life; a politician doing the same would make a bitter enemy.  "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" is no basis for building the most able team.
2. The lack of responsibility.  Although AMs and MPs claim to have highly responsible jobs, in practice few of them have real authority over anything.  Backbenchers are usually told what to say and how to vote.  Ministers have rather more authority, but the Civil Service as an institution exists largely to prevent them exercising it.  Why would someone with real authority and responsibility relinquish that for the possibility of sitting on the backbenches in opposition?
3. Time commitments.  People sometimes talk about the salaries of politicians as though increasing them would attract high-fliers.  I’m not convinced.  Firstly, politicians are already paid well above average wages, and secondly, it would take a very significant increase to attract some of the real high fliers.  But I don’t think that it’s the salary which keeps them out in the first place – it’s more the case that people on the highest salaries have to make a massive commitment of time and energy to their work and would find it difficult to sustain a campaign as well.

There are others, of course.  But to return to the point which I think Adam was making – the pool from which politicians are being selected is a very small one, and getting smaller.  I believe that all parties are having difficulties in attracting candidates from outside that narrow range, and are increasingly falling back on 'career politicians'.  And I think that it is the nature of political debate and activity which is causing that to be the case. 

It’s also a vicious circle, unfortunately.  We need a paradigm shift in the nature of our politics, but the narrower the pool from which politicians are selected, the more likely it is to deter others – and the less likely it is that those within the pool will be able to make that shift.  That’s the issue which we should be discussing, not the personal feelings of any individual; but the fact that people choose to reduce the debate to comments about individuals serves only to highlight one of the problems.

The thoughts of Adam

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I’m not quite sure what Adam Price was thinking when he made his comments yesterday about the lack of skills and experience amongst Assembly Members.  It’s not that the point isn’t a relevant one, it’s more that there is a danger that a politician making such a criticism of other politicians can give an unfortunate impression of superiority.

I was on a course once (to prepare us for impending redundancy, as it happens), and one of the key messages was that “Negative criticism is a dishonest form of self-praise”.  It’s a useful thought for people to bear in mind.

Having said that, does he have a point?  Certainly, as the Assembly gains more power and influence, I think all of us, whether involved in politics or not, would want our AMs to be of the highest quality. 

But what do we mean by that – and who decides how to measure ‘quality’?  And how do we balance ‘ability’ and ‘experience’?  These are not simple questions; ultimately, they are matters for the political parties to consider as part of their selection processes.  It’s an issue which much exercised me when I was trying to reform Plaid’s selection processes and introduce more objective candidate assessment processes.

I cannot, of course, speak in detail about the selection processes of other parties, but there does seem to be something of a ‘cult of youth’ affecting all parties.  There’s an increasing tendency for people to go straight from university to politics, with no wider experience of the world outside, and I’ve never been convinced that’s an entirely good thing.  Some adapt well, but others can sometimes appear to be stuck in a rather more simplistic approach to politics, and, as Adam suggested, lack that broader background which comes from outside experience.

That cult certainly affects Plaid Cymru.  When Ieuan told me in June that he did not want me to be a candidate for next May’s Assembly elections, my age was one of the issues he raised.  It was his view that, with Ron Davies likely to be selected in Caerffili, the party simply couldn’t afford to have any other old men standing as candidates where we might win, because that would send the wrong message about what sort of a party Plaid Cymru is.

It’s a valid viewpoint, but it owes more to getting the right image than the right mix of skills and experience, it seems to me.  In that sense, I’m not sure that Plaid’s response to Adam’s comments was quite as complete as it could have been. 

I very much doubt that Plaid is the only party which is concerned to choose candidates who project the ‘right’ image, and in an increasingly policy-lite style of politics it’s probably an inevitable development.   It adds weight to what I think is the very valid point which Adam raised.  It would be better, though, if his comments were to be interpreted as a criticism of parties and their selection criteria, rather than of the individuals selected as a result.  Otherwise, his comments will not receive the consideration which they deserve.

The Other Resignation

Tweet The departure of Mohammed Asghar from Plaid's ranks was a surprise, in that the timing, method, and destination were all unexpected; but I can't honestly say that it was a shock. It had been obvious to myself and many others for some time that his views were, to put it mildly, at variance with the mainstream of Plaid on a range of issues, including our core aims and principles.

Some have asked how we could be in a position where someone who disagrees with the raison d'être of the party could be propelled into such a prominent position. At one level, the answer is quite simple - all members sign an application form declaring their support for the party's aims and objectives, and from that point on, their support for those aims is taken as read. We don't use polygraphs to test their sincerity, nor would I want to.

That, however, would be too glib an answer. Our processes for adding members' names to the approved central list of candidates have been proved wanting. Even that's no great surprise to me; NEC members in particular know that I've been banging on about that for some time. Yesterday's events merely emphasise the need for the internal discussions we are currently having about the way in which we select, train, and prepare our candidates.

Those who say that we need to look again at our selection processes are right; but change was on the way anyway. The reality has been that our attitude to selection has, in some aspects, not moved on from the 1960s and 1970s, when we had to twist people's arms to get them to stand in hopeless seats, and greeted any volunteer with open arms. On a personal level, I've been at both ends of that twisting process myself. One of the problems of success is that we cannot afford to take that approach any longer - but I'd still rather be dealing with the problems of success than those of failure.

Should members who cross the floor resign? In principle, I think that they should. It's more obvious in the case of a list member than a constituency member, since the list election is based on voting for a party rather than an individual, but even at constituency level, the idea that people win because of who they are rather than the party which they represent is something of a convenient constitutional fiction.

It's true that candidates have a 'personal' vote as well as a party vote, but by and large the extent of that personal vote is greatly exaggerated. As a long time canvasser for candidates other than myself, I can say from experience that every candidate (even some of Plaid's highest profile politicians), also attracts a personal 'anti-vote'. That is to say, whilst there are people who will say, 'I'm not normally Plaid, but I'm voting for X', there are others who will say 'I normally vote Plaid, but I'm not voting for X'. Any experienced canvasser, for any party, will understand that point, even if the candidates don't necessarily hear the same message when they knock doors themselves.

In truth, party candidates get elected because they are party candidates, not because of who they are. And whilst they are entitled to change their views, changing party after being elected means that the electorate are no longer being represented by that for which they voted.

Of course, some people end up changing party not because they've changed their views, but because they've held to the views on which they were elected, whilst the party has gone off in another direction, but that's a wholly different can of worms. A story for another day perhaps.

In this case, the situation seems to be perfectly clear – we have an elected member effectively saying that he never agreed with the platform on which he was elected. Of course he should resign.

Defining merit

Tweet Interesting report published this week by the IWA on the effect that women have had on the development of the National Assembly, and the likely changes in the representation of women in the next Assembly. Both Labour and Plaid took particular measures to try and ensure fair representation for women, and those measures are what led to such a good gender balance in the Assembly.

The Tories did nothing to achieve such balance -- and it shows in the overwhelming number of males in their group. The Lib Dems say that they took no special measures but didn't need to, because a process of selection purely on merit gave them an equal balance anyway. It seems to me that they are deluding themselves rather; their 'balance' may well be largely the result of electoral failure. They weren't really close enough to winning any other seats to assess how the balance might have changed had they done so, but I suspect that the apparent balance may be more sensitive to electoral fortune than they realise.

And ultimately that's the sort of analysis which led me to a change of view on the system which Plaid has used to date. In simplistic terms, a system of using the top place on the regional lists to try and achieve balance -- instead of dealing with the question of constituency selections -- works only at a particular level of electoral success. Winning more seats leads to a greater male preponderance. As just one obvious (and very close to home) example demonstrates: had I won 251 extra votes, the Plaid team would have been 9:6 instead of 8:7. And had we won, say Clwyd West, it would have been 10:5. From near equality to gross inequality for less than 2,000 extra votes; and all without changing the total number of seats won.

Recognising the need to address constituency selections is, of course, not the same thing as actually doing so. The biggest advantage of the approach adopted by Labour (twinning) was precisely that it did address that issue. But it was an approach imposed from the top; a democratic party like Plaid was simply unable to do that.

The main argument against having a mechanism for achieving something like a numerical balance is the idea that selection should be based entirely on 'merit'. If women have the same level of merit as men, then they will get selected; if they don't then there's nothing wrong with having an unbalanced slate. It merely reflects the spread of merit within the party.

At its simplest, it is an argument which is difficult to refute; who can seriously argue that we should deliberately field a team which is other than the strongest available? But it is a seriously flawed argument, since it is based on the fundamental, and usually unstated, assumptions:

a). that 'merit' is a defined and clear criterion;
b). that 'merit' has been defined in a gender neutral way;
c). that the selection processes employed by parties do actually assess 'merit'; and
d). that they make that assessment in a gender neutral fashion.

If all four of these assumptions were provably valid, then I for one would be entirely happy to support a selection process based solely on merit. But, actually, I think all four are probably invalid, and parties actually operate selection processes which indirectly favour men, and use assessment criteria under which men are more likely to succeed than women.

It's not easy to correct this. In fact it is so difficult that we have largely avoided dealing with it to date. I'd go so far as to argue that, by going for some sort of artificial process to try and achieve numerical balance, what we have done (and Labour too, in my view) is to address the symptom rather than the disease.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind -- most over-the-counter flu treatments do exactly the same thing, and as long as the objective (i.e. the alleviation of the symptoms) is achieved, we accept that approach.

However, short-term alleviation of symptoms, even when it works, doesn't mean that we should stop working towards identifying a cure. The same should be true of the historical under-representation of women as well. Plaid are working on that -- using external support to try and define what 'merit' is, and how we can more accurately assess it through gender neutral processes. I honestly don't know at this stage whether the approach will work; but I think we're entirely right to try it.

No impositions here

Tweet Not for the first time, I found myself yesterday reading a story about internal events in Plaid which is significantly at variance with reality. "A Plaid source" has given a story to the paper which contains a number of things which are, at the most charitable, misleading.

The most obvious example is the suggestion that the party centrally might try and 'impose' a candidate on Carmarthen East and Dinefwr constituency. As our rules (available on the party's website for anyone who wants to wade through them) make perfectly clear, the party's NEC couldn't impose a candidate even if we were minded to do so. The selection will be made by the members in the constituency, on the basis of one member, one vote.

The NEC cannot even tell the constituency who they should or should not include on the shortlist - shortlisting too is entirely a matter for the members in the constituency. The only rôle the party centrally has is in maintaining a list of approved candidates - a list which any member may apply to join.

Conclusion? "A Plaid source" is either woefully unaware of the party's own rules and processes, or else is using the Western Mail to deliberately spread inaccurate and misleading information in pursuit of his or her own agenda.

The most surprising aspect to me was that a normally perceptive journalist should have been so easily misled.

Selecting the team

Tweet Nick Bourne's attempt to recognise the serious deficiency of female candidates and elected members in his party was met by a pretty ferocious response from one of his party's parliamentary candidates. It would be wrong, of course, to see that as a rebellion within the ranks; on my understanding Bourne is not actually the leader of the Conservatives in Wales (although he's often inaccurately described as such) - he's only the leader of his party's group in the National Assembly. His authority, such as it is, does not therefore include the party's MPs, parliamentary candidates or councillors in Wales; they answer only to Cameron.

The spat does highlight one of the problems faced by Bourne in his attempts to adapt his party to a Welsh context, namely that the real authority lies elsewhere. That was certainly one of my concerns about the much touted 'rainbow' coalition - were we dealing with someone who had any real authority to speak for his party? Could he really deliver?

Back to the issue of imbalance amongst candidates, however. Although his authority in the matter is very limited, I do give Bourne some credit for realising that his party has a problem. Only one of their twelve members in the Assembly is a woman (and even that was something of an accident - their expectation was that they would retain Glyn Davies' seat, giving them an all-male team), and they look very much more male-dominated than any of the other parties.

In Plaid, we've had our own problems on the issue, of course. Although the team in the Assembly has a reasonable gender balance at present as a result of a decision we took to prioritise women for the list seats (which is one of Bourne's proposals for his own party), the reality is that if we had done even better than we did in the constituency results, then the balance would have looked very different. Any party that wants to end up with a balance in the Assembly must address both parts of the electoral system, not just the one.

There seems to be no real debate – either within parties or between parties – about the desirability of reaching a position where the make-up of the team of candidates put forward is more similar to the make-up of the population as a whole; the argument is more about the means by which that is achieved. That argument mostly revolves around the question of a formal mechanism to address imbalance - and the most common counter argument is that put forward by Guto Bebb, that candidates should be selected entirely on 'merit'.

For me, there are two major problems with the simplistic 'merit' argument. The first is about how we define and measure 'merit' in a way which is fair and equal – far too many aspects of the selection processes concentrate on a fairly narrow range of skills which are, in my view, indirectly discriminating in favour of a particular type of candidate. And the second is that parties need to think in terms of selecting teams - and 15 brilliant outside halves do not usually make a winning team.

(And that isn't just about achieving a gender balance. It has also to do with a range of other talents, skills, and abilities.)

It means treading a difficult line between taking a more centralised, strategic view of candidate selection, and retaining a strong element of local democracy in the process. I'll admit that Plaid haven't got it right yet; we're still struggling to find the right balance. I think that Bourne faces an uphill battle in his party on the issue – but I'm certainly not going to criticise him for at least trying.