Policy and process

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After being appointed as Transport Minister last week, Llanelli AM Lee Waters said that he had agreed that it would be ‘inappropriate’ for him to have any say over the decision on the M4 relief road because he had taken such a strong position on the proposal in the past.  This is the second time that I have heard a Welsh Transport Minister referring to the decision on the M4 as being some sort of quasi-judicial process in which having a strong opinion one way of the other disqualified the individual from taking a decision.  This time, having an opinion means that the minister can’t take the decision; last time – under the One Wales government – the minister argued that as he was responsible ultimately for taking the decision, he couldn’t have an opinion at all.  It was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now – it’s a case of confusing policy with process.

What is true is that if a government has a policy of building a large infrastructure project such as the M4 then there is a formal legal process which must be followed in which all the relevant parties have an opportunity to present their case and an expectation that all their evidence will be considered carefully and impartially before a final decision on the precise location or route and on any conditions or caveats is taken.  That part of the process is certainly quasi-judicial and being seen to have pre-judged the issue will potentially be prejudicial to due process.  But the policy – whether to build or not – is independent of that process; the process concerns only the proper and lawful implementation of policy.  Policy – to build or not – is quite properly the prerogative of the politicians, not the judges or planning inspectors.  And policy can be changed by political decision at any time.

So, what we have here is, in effect, a politician who is responsible for making policy, and who clearly believes that the policy currently being pursued by his government is the wrong one, excusing himself from having any input into what is probably the most important single policy decision in his portfolio and hiding behind a legal process in order to do so.  It could be, of course, that the First Minister takes a different view on the policy (as far as I’m aware, he has yet to express a view), and the real reason for the Transport Minister being excluded from this policy decision is that the First Minister doesn’t want the policy changed.  It’s a legitimate position to take but hiding behind public enquiries and planning inspectors in the hope that they will provide some sort of cover for politicians to avoid accepting their responsibilities is just a cop out.

Being syncretic

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There was a review last week on Nation.Cymru of a book telling the story of the foundation of the new political party, Ein Gwlad.  In principle, having more than one political party in Wales advocating independence is to be welcomed; independence isn’t a concept owned by one particular part of the political spectrum, and having a range of parties arguing for different visions of what an independent Wales might be like would be considered entirely normal in most of the other European nations where there is an independence movement.  The reason why it hasn’t happened here is, first and foremost, an electoral system which favours unity rather than disunity, and I suspect that will be the rock on which Ein Gwlad eventually founders.  Electoral reform is long overdue and would probably be a game-changer for political debate in Wales, but things are as they are.

Having said that, I’m highly sceptical of any party which claims to be ‘syncretic’, not occupying any particular place on the political spectrum but able to pick policies, a la carte, from all parts of that spectrum, selecting whatever is best for Wales.  There are, as I see it, two main problems with that approach.

The first is that it assumes that the ‘spectrum’ is actually quite narrow.  If it is possible to mix and match policies from, say, Labour, Tory, Lib Dems and Plaid, then that is because, in essence (and perhaps excluding the constitutional question), the policy differences between them are, by and large, much smaller than any of them would have us believe.  It’s true that the degree of consensus which seemed to be growing in the post-war years has reduced, but broadly the mainstream politicians of all those parties differ mostly in emphasis and degree rather than in principle.  There are people with rather more radical views in all parties, but mainstream debate in UK politics revolves around a fairly narrow axis.

The second problem is how and who decides what is ‘best for Wales’.  The idea that anyone can make such a judgement independently of their own priors is simply not credible, even if the role of those priors is restricted to determining the criteria to be used in making the decision.  What is really ‘best for Wales’ is not something which is either self-evident nor objectively determinable, it is open to a range of differing opinions based on different criteria.  I suspect that syncretism is generally more of a euphemism for populism than a viable political philosophy and amounts to selecting those policies which are most popular amongst the electorate.  But it can never be as easy as that – low taxes and high-quality public services would both be popular, but they don’t combine terribly well.  Oh, and independence isn’t terribly ‘popular’ either.

I believe that it would be ‘better for Wales’ to have multiple parties arguing for independence from different political perspectives (entirely accepting that that belief is based on my own priors rather than on demonstrable proof), but I’m not at all convinced that pretending not to have a political perspective is the way of achieving that.

Different types of democracy

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Years ago, the Labour Party’s version of internal democracy included taking policy decisions at conferences where all members had a direct vote in determining party policy.  In theory, anyway – the crucial decisions were usually taken by ‘card vote’ where each delegate cast the number of votes which the organisation (s)he represented was allowed.  So leaders of the big unions could and did cast a million or more votes each at a time.  And the number of votes available to them was the number which the union chose to register as ‘members’, without those ‘members’ ever needing to be named.  That number was usually based on a calculation of the balance between the cost of registering them and the influence thereby purchased, and bore little relationship to the actual political views of the ‘members’ concerned.

Still, it was democracy, of a sort, and it gave the members some sort of feeling of ownership of policy.  Mind you, if the leadership didn’t like the policy that the members voted for, they simply ignored it.  Sometimes people think that this is a peculiarly Blairite tendency, but I can remember Harold Wilson happily ignoring conference votes half a century ago.

Over the years, the right of the party’s membership to determine policy through an annual conference was slowly whittled away, and that process certainly came to a peak in the Blair years, leaving members with little real ownership of anything – and I’m sure that that has been a factor in the falling membership numbers of the party.

Yesterday, Owen Smith declared that he would, if elected leader, seek to restore the right of members to determine policy, and that he would then abide by decisions taken by the membership.  That’s certainly in line with what many of Corbyn’s supporters would like – but is he really serious?

What would happen, for instance, if a Labour Party conference voted for nuclear disarmament?  It’s happened before (and was duly ignored by the leadership), and with the influx of Corbyn-leaning members, it must be highly likely that it will happen again.  Is Smith really saying that he would suddenly drop his support for Trident renewal, and admit that he was wrong all along, because the members have now spoken and that must therefore be his new position?  And would all the other rebel MPs fall in line behind him, in a way that they have not done for Corbyn?

That seems an unlikely scenario to me, which leads me to a rather different conclusion.  It’s easy for someone to commit to something if he believes that he will never be called on to deliver on any promise.  The game is no longer about winning, but about trying to reduce the gap in order to provide a ‘justification’ for running the process again in the next year or so (and again thereafter if necessary) until the members finally take the ‘right’ decision.  It’s a form of democracy that he’s supporting, but it’s not democracy as we know it, to adapt a phrase.

Not following the leader

Tweet For reasons best known to themselves, and certainly not shared with me, some UKIP press officers have recently taken to sending this blog copies of their press statements.  It surely can’t be in the hope of securing a favourable mention, at least not if they’ve ever actually read anything written here.

Whatever, on Tuesday, before I’d even heard about Farage’s latest comments on replacing the tax-funding of the NHS with an insurance scheme, an e-mail dropped into my inbox containing a statement from the party’s “Health Spokesman” (who turns out to be a she rather than a he – the inaccurate title is where an over-zealous aversion to political correctness leads, I guess) distancing herself and the party from its leader.  In effect, she appears to be saying that UKIP is so democratic that members can hold any position they like on anything. 

It’s an interesting approach, but doomed, I suspect, to fail. 

As readers with a long memory may recall, I’m not without a certain amount of form myself in the department of trying to distance a party from the views of its leader.  I certainly didn’t feel that my efforts in that direction were terribly successful.  I’m sure that some would argue that that’s just because I wasn’t very good at it, although (and I would say this wouldn’t I?), on the basis of that experience I’m more inclined to the view that the task is an impossible one. 

Ultimately, and whether parties like it or not, the electors will believe that a party’s elected members will follow their leader on most issues, regardless of what the rest of the party actually says.  And the empirical evidence suggests that that tends to be a more reliable guide to the way that parties in power behave than any manifesto or policy statement, and that the electors are therefore justified in that belief. 

In UKIP’s case, though, it will probably make little difference what their policy on paying for the NHS is.  Most of their potential voters are only interested in one subject anyway, and that’s immigration.  They probably can get away with saying whatever they like on every other subject.

Who selects the evidence?

Tweet It has become something of a mantra for politicians over recent years that decisions should be “evidence-based”.  It all sounds fine and dandy, with its unstated implication of a rational and logical process leading to an inevitable conclusion.  But reality is rather different.

One of the problems with it is that “evidence” comes in many different flavours.  Whilst some is in the form of hard facts and figures, some is mere opinion.  Expert opinion in some cases admittedly, but still opinion.  And even the hard evidence can sometimes be interpreted in more than one way.  Interpretation is key; and interpretation is largely a subjective rather than an objective process which involves not only weighting the different elements but can also include deciding which evidence to collect in the first place.

Two recent examples of evidence collecting underline the problems.

The first is this report (Peter Black drew attention to the story a week or two ago).  The UK government commissioned a report into the effects of immigration.  Unfortunately for them, the “evidence” didn’t support their viewpoint, so they had it rewritten.

The second was the decision to build the M4 black route.  The Minister certainly had plenty of “evidence” from consultation exercises to take a decision, but some might feel that the decision simply flies in the face of much of the evidence.  Certainly the Minister has chosen to put the emphasis on a different place than I would have done in deciding how to evaluate that evidence.

Quite apart from the practical difficulties of following a truly “evidence-based” approach, there is a question of principle which concerns me more.  Do we really want key policy decisions to be taken by people who have no opinion of their own until the civil servants have collected, collated and evaluated the evidence and then told the minister what his or her opinion is?  What scope does that leave for political differentiation?  After all, the civil servants would give the same advice to any minister regardless of party.

I have heard ministers in the past saying, effectively, that they don’t and can’t have an opinion on an issue until they’ve heard all the evidence, and even arguing that their role is quasi- judicial.  Whilst in a small number of cases that is true, on the whole I prefer to have politicians who are willing to drive things in a clear direction and to say so in advance, rather than ministers who see the job as more a case of sitting in judgement on alternative policies.  I want to be able to choose which policies are followed, not simply which group of people are going to pretend to be impartial judges.