Forgetting the objective

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On Tuesday, a former Secretary of State for Wales told us that scrapping the pensions triple lock before 2020 would be an act of bad faith, given the promise which he and his party made only two years ago.  My first reaction was that, given Mrs May’s clear and intense dislike of opposition to anything she says from the opposition parties let alone from her own side, Crabb has obviously written off his chances of returning to the Cabinet any time soon. 

There is one thing that he has learned from his leader however, and that is the art of making policy U-turns.  Unless I’m very much mistaken, this is the very same Stephen Crabb who argued strongly  last year, just after the Tory leadership election, that the pensions lock should be scrapped, or at the very least modified, immediately.  Clearly, changing it two years after promising it would be in place for five is ‘bad faith’, but changing it only one year after making that promise is entirely reasonable.  But then, when he made his statement last year, he wasn't expecting to be facing the electors quite so soon, and might have thought that they'd have a bit more time to forget the decision.  The U-turn might suggest that he is from the same planet as May after all, but if he wants to get on, he probably needs to co-ordinate his policy flip-flops so they coincide with May’s, rather than conflict.

There's another aspect to this as well.  If dropping one promise three years early is a sign of bad faith, why is it then OK to drop other promises?  On the basis of that argument, the manifesto for the first three years would have to simply carry forward the pledges made in 2015, but part of the reasoning for holding an election at all is surely so that May can free herself from all commitments made by the Conservative Party and implement the UKIP ones a manifesto more to her liking instead.

Anyway, to the substance of the matter.  My recollection of the reason for introducing the triple lock in the first place was that pensioners had lost ground in relative terms over the period since Thatcher scrapped the link with earnings, and the intention of the policy was to restore their relative position.  There has been some criticism recently that, as a result of the policy, pensioner income is growing faster than income for other people – but that was precisely the intention.  The question should not be ‘are pensioner incomes growing faster?’, but ‘has their relative position been restored yet?’  In any rational world, the question of whether the triple lock should be retained would be related directly to determining a target ratio between pensions and earnings and then establishing whether that has been achieved.

When that point has been reached, it would seem entirely reasonable to me to re-open the debate about how pensions increases should be calculated and how we ensure that the relative position of pensioners should be maintained.  I haven’t done the sums; my feeling is that we’re probably not there yet; but maintaining the triple lock indefinitely would result in a significant target overshoot over time.  But it’s as though the politicians have all forgotten the origins and rationale for the policy.

The policy is promoted as something which will appeal to pensioners, and attacked as something with which young working people are being burdened.  That is completely at odds with reality.  I’m not at all convinced that Einstein ever said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe, but it certainly is a powerful financial force.  And it means that the biggest beneficiaries of a triple lock maintained indefinitely are not current pensioners, nor those about to retire, but those who haven’t even been born yet.

I don’t think that it’s right or sensible to maintain the policy for ever, but it would be helpful to have a more informed debate about the objectives of pensions policy rather than an attempt at point-scoring between those who are targeting older voters and those targeting the young.  It’s another example of the froth of modern politics.

Trashing the (recent) past

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It seems like only yesterday that Cameron and Osborne were telling us that cutting the deficit was an absolute priority, and that we really had no choice.  The rest of the Cabinet duly fell into line, parroting the same phrases on a daily basis.  I don’t remember this imperative being predicated on any particular set of economic or political circumstances; indeed, they even wanted to make it a legally binding requirement on future governments.

Within days of the referendum, the date by which this absolute imperative has to be achieved had been postponed, and now we learn that the Chancellor is planning to cut the government’s income by slashing Corporation Tax (although who knows whether he’ll still be in post long enough to implement the change?).

In the meantime, Stephen Crabb, one of those colleagues who have sat around the Cabinet table with him and duly repeated the mantra about needing to reduce the deficit, has proposed borrowing an extra £20 billion a year for five years – increasing the national debt by £100 billion – to fund infrastructure projects if he is elected as party leader and prime minister.

I don’t actually disagree with the Crabb proposal at all; and in principle, I don’t disagree with cutting Corporation Tax either (my reservations are to do with whether there are adequate controls to make sure that the monies saved are reinvested in expansion and job creation rather than taken out as higher salaries and dividends; something which isn’t at all straightforward to achieve).  The point is, though, that the way in which they can so easily backtrack confirms what some of us have said all along – deficit reduction is an ideological imperative, not an economic one.

There is not, and never has been, a problem with government borrowing, and there is not, and never has been, a magic number at which point borrowing becomes unsustainable.  Sensible pragmatic economic policy borrows when rates are low; it is ideology which dictates that borrowing is inherently bad.  National budgets are not like household budgets.  I’d like to believe that they’ll stop spouting nonsense about repairing roofs while the sun shines or maxing out the national credit card, but that might be a bit too much to expect.  We’ll have to settle for the tacit admission that they were just plain wrong all along.

Political Logic

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Like Military Intelligence, it’s probably an oxymoron, but that doesn’t make it funny.  Both the Tories and Labour seem to be suffering from logic problems at the moment.

On the Labour side, the argument of those trying to oust Corbyn, as I understand it, runs something like this: working people need a Labour Government to protect them from the Tories, and the only way that we can get a Labour Government is to ditch a leader who is likely to try and protect working people from the Tories and replace him with someone who broadly agrees with most of what the Tories say.

On the Tory side, Crabb and his supporters seem to be saying that the best way to keep the UK united is to elect as Prime Minister a man who will be unable to vote in Parliament for any of his own party’s policies on health, education and a host of other issues because in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland these are devolved matters, and in England, his own party has introduced a rule barring him from voting.

Those of us yearning for a seismic change in UK politics should be pleased at the mess that both those parties are getting themselves into, but, outside of Scotland, I worry about the alternative.

My heart bleeds for the lawyers

Tweet The Secretary of State set out in some detail last week his reasons for pessimism about achieving agreement on the proposed Wales Bill.  No surprise at all that the fault for this is being placed squarely on the Labour Party’s reluctance to submissively sign up to exactly what the Tories offer rather than on any reluctance by his own government to negotiate seriously, or even honour the promises that they’ve made before.

His real objection to establishing a legal jurisdiction for Wales is probably based on his previous statements that he will do nothing which might conceivable make it easier for Wales to become independent, at some distant future point, if Wales ever had a political party arguing for such a step to be taken. 

But one of the reasons he gives is even sillier – it seems to boil down to a few lawyers from Wales who’ve had a successful career in London feeling that lawyers might not do so well for themselves working solely in Wales.  I suspect that it is probably true – but I also suspect that the career prospects for lawyers are not the top reason which many people would put forward as a basis for deciding how Wales should be run.

All power to the Crabbs

Tweet The report published yesterday by Richard Wyn Jones and Alan Trench on the content of the new Wales Bill was damning.  An exercise which started out with the stated intention of clarifying and improving the devolution settlement in Wales, and moving to a situation which would be more workable than the present one, looks likely to turn out achieving almost exactly the opposite – adding to the confusion and even potentially rolling back devolution in some areas.

But perhaps the key word in the above paragraph is ‘stated’; sadly, it’s not always the case that the purpose stated explicitly by a minister is actually the real reason for the action proposed.  In what looked almost like a throwaway remark in response to the report – in the very last line of the Western Mail’s coverage of the news – was this sentence from a ‘Welsh Office spokeswoman’: “The Secretary of State has made clear that under no circumstances will he publish legislation that creates a pathway to independence”.  It clearly suggests that the real motivation here has less to do with the effective working of the devolution arrangements than it is with the fear of longer term aspirations, and the need to prevent their realisation.

‘Preventing any move towards independence at all costs’ is, of course, an entirely valid position for a die-hard unionist like Stephen Crabb to take.  And personally, I welcome the fact that he’s trying to achieve his aim in this fashion – not because I agree with his aim, but because I find it harder to think of a more cack-handed way of trying to achieve it.  With unionists like this, who needs nationalists?

It confuses process and structure with aspiration, and assumes that aspiration can be killed off by simply ensuring that the process and structure are ‘right’ for maintaining the status quo, and ‘wrong’ for moving away from it.  The parallel which immediately jumped into my mind was with Catalunya, where the Spanish government is trying to depend on laws made by the former dictator to prevent any move towards independence by simply closing all avenues that might lead to it, rather than engaging in an argument about its merits.  The result is that they are indeed making the path difficult but they are increasing the determination of those who want to take it.

And that’s the point, or it would be if there was a serious movement for independence in Wales.  Those who want to counter moves towards independence need to address the aspiration; they need to convince people that it’s the wrong thing for their country.  Simply trying to ensure that it remains unachievable in practice is ultimately counter-productive; it’s the battle of ideas that needs to be won, not the battle of structures.

Following this approach is even worse from his standpoint – because he’s actually winning that battle of ideas at present (even if that’s largely because the case for the other side isn’t being made).  He doesn’t need to keep banging on about preventing independence, because so few are arguing for it.  Being driven by a need to prevent something that so few of us are asking for merely puts that thing on the agenda in a way that its alleged proponents are failing to do.

So – all power to his elbow.  Let’s have more like him.

Daft and dafter

Tweet Last week saw the great announcement of the ‘St David’s Day Agreement’ – so-named, I guess, because it was neither concluded nor announced on St David’s Day and doesn’t seem to have been agreed by anyone of import outside the Conservative Party.  (Perhaps that last bit is a tad unfair.  From a Conservative perspective, getting Messrs Cameron, Crabb, and Davies to agree about anything probably looks a great deal more significant than it does to the rest of us.)

Cameron claimed that it was one of the biggest transfers of power in the history of Welsh devolution.  That left me wondering what he was comparing it with.  It certainly isn’t as significant as the setting up of the Assembly in the first place; nor as significant as the 2006 Act which, coupled with the 2011 referendum, delivered legislative powers.  What does that leave with which the new proposals can be compared, exactly?  With so few transfers actually having taken place, any new one must be one of the biggest.  Logic decrees, of course, that it must also be one of the smallest.

But perhaps the most sweeping claim was that the proposal to use an unspecified method of setting an undefined floor for funding removes the last obstacle to holding a referendum on the power to vary income tax in Wales.  Only someone a very long way removed from reality could believe that one, because the barrier to holding such a referendum has little to do with fair funding, whatever the First Minister might say.  The real barrier is that holding a referendum on such a narrow issue is one of the silliest ideas ever to be proposed by a government (and unlike in the case of transfers of powers, there’s plenty of competition on this one).

It’s such an uninspiring proposal that a low turnout is guaranteed, and there is very considerable doubt over the outcome.  What First Minister in his right mind would be daft enough to do that?  (Although, having said that, at the time of the last referendum I seem to remember that we had a First Minister who actually was daft enough to suggest that income tax powers could not be transferred without a referendum.  Chickens and roosts come to mind.)

Lee Waters, the Director of the IWA, picks up on the idea that we could avoid a referendum if all the parties in Wales committed to the transfer of the power in their manifestos.  Whilst I think that the idea is technically and constitutionally valid, I don’t doubt that True Wales and those who think like them would cry foul – and given the past statements of a number of politicians, and the cross-party agreement of the Silk Commission on that issue, who could blame them?  Perhaps we just need our politicians to collectively bite the bullet and ignore that outcry, but what we need and what we get aren't always the same.

Or perhaps, as I’ve suggested before, we need to turn the subject of the referendum into something more meaningful.  Parity with Scotland would be a pretty good starting point.

Agreeing with the opposition 2

Tweet Following on from Friday’s post, the second story in Thursday’s Western Mail leading me to agree with a comment from an unusual quarter was this opinion piece by Stephen Crabb.  The devil is in the detail, however.

His core argument – the bit that I agree with – is that we should see major transport infrastructure investment not just in narrow terms about what Wales does or does not get, but as a wider question of vision for the future.  A proper transport infrastructure does not stop at, nor is it confined to, national borders or jurisdictions. 

It’s a pity, however, that he seems to see the issue merely in terms of which borders confine the vision.  He attacks insular politics in Wales but seems to want to replace a narrow focus on Wales with a narrow focus on the UK, seeing everything from a London-centric viewpoint.

The two biggest concerns that I have had about HS2 from the outset are: firstly that it’s been looked at as a stand-alone investment, rather than a first step (HS2 isn’t a network, as he described it, it’s a line – I only wish that it were indeed part of a network); and secondly, that using a different London terminus from that used by HS1 creates an artificial and unnecessary break in a European network.

Whilst Crabb and the UK parties – to whatever extent they still support the project – are looking solely at transport within the UK, the rest of continental Europe is busy building an integrated high speed network allowing direct connections across the continent.  Now that is truly a vision freed of Crabb’s insular politics (using insular in its more literal meaning).  And it recognises that building a line through one country can often benefit another; joint planning is key.

For a nationalist wanting to see Wales taking her place as a European nation, the link to Brussels is every bit as important as the link to London, which from this perspective is merely a stop along the route.  An important stop, sure, but just a stop all the same.