Electoral change might be boring, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant

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With the dust settling on last week’s Senedd election, it’s opportune to review how well the new system of voting actually worked. No doubt the academics are already hard at work on a detailed analysis of the results and the factors which led people to vote as they did. One obvious weakness is that the system ended up favouring the largest parties, encouraging a degree of polarisation between them, just as first past the post has long done. And for all the talk of ‘every vote counts’, clearly some votes did not count; the lack of an opportunity to express a second or third choice meant that the votes of those whose first choice was rapidly eliminated ultimately counted for nothing. And then there’s the argument about voting for a party rather than a person – I’m personally not convinced of that, although many others are, because years of campaigning told me that most people vote for the party anyway. Overall, it’s produced a more proportional result than the previous system, but it’s not ideal.

Some have criticised Labour and Plaid for introducing the new system, describing it as some sort of stitch-up. Criticism of Labour is fair, but I’m not convinced that the same is true of Plaid. Multi-party politics with no overall majority requires compromise and agreement, and had Plaid not agreed to support Labour on this detail, we probably wouldn’t have had the other changes to the Senedd. With a super-majority required for such a change, it looked like a worthwhile compromise – provided it doesn’t become the norm for the longer term.

Most supporters of Proportional Representation tend to favour the Single Transferable Vote. Looking at the new Senedd, that’s true of Plaid, the Lib Dems, and the Greens – but those three parties together do not have the votes for a supermajority on this issue, and Labour and the Tories are generally opposed. Enter, stage right, Reform Ltd. It’s always hard to know what the company’s policy is on any issue because it keeps changing, but Farage (the ultimate determiner of all policies, as the owner and proprietor) has in the past been supportive of a move to STV. Whether he still supports that (given how well his company did in England under FPTP) is an open question, but if he does, there is a clear supermajority in favour in the new Senedd. It creates a potential opportunity for a change with long-lasting effect.

It’s clearly not going to be the top priority for the incoming government. There are far more urgent priorities in areas such as health and education, where visible change is urgently required. Electoral Reform is top of few people’s lists. I hope, though, that the new government will find time to discuss this with other parties – yes, including Reform Ltd – during the current Senedd term, while the door might be at least ajar. Thursday’s results were historic, there is no doubt about that. But historic isn’t the same as irreversible. Sometimes phoenixes do rise out of the ashes, and the Labour and Conservative parties in Wales might not be quite as moribund as they currently appear to be.

Gift or grift?

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The owner and proprietor of Reform Ltd claims that no rules were broken by the £5 million gift made to him prior to his decision to stand for election again in 2024. The gift, he claims, was entirely personal and not related to politics at all. It’s hard to believe that a gift of that magnitude to pay for security had no impact on the decision to stand for election of a man who had been reluctant to do so for reasons of security. The gift was described as ‘unconditional’, with no requirement to spend it on security, and it’s also hard to believe that a sudden windfall of £5 million had no impact on the spending of the recipient on things other than security, even if only by leaving him more of his own money. Given that Sir Starmer was obliged to declare donations for new suits and spectacles, it’s hard to see how the same rules allow undeclared donations of £5 million. Perhaps the various bodies looking into the donation will reach the same conclusion as Farage, although many might think that that would tell us more about the rules than about the gift or the individuals involved.

The donor’s generosity didn’t stop with the party’s owner and proprietor; he also became the largest individual donor in political history with his largesse to Reform Ltd. There’s no corruption involved, apparently, because he didn’t ask for anything in return. That’s probably true – but he didn’t need to. The Reform Ltd stance on cryptocurrency was already well-established. He doesn’t need the party to change any policies for his investment to pay off, he just needs the party to win power. And therein lies a gaping hole in the rules concerning donations to political parties. Giving donations to parties to buy a favourable change in policy is unlawful; giving donations to a party in an attempt to buy an electoral victory which will allow it to implement an already-adopted favourable policy is entirely within the rules.

The difference between gift and grift turns out to be a lot smaller and harder to define than many might think. What we need isn’t one or more enquiries into whether or not rules have been broken, but a change in the rules themselves. Most particularly, we need a cap on the amount anyone can give a political party – or an individual politician – in any financial year. And it needs to be a low cap – a figure in thousands rather than tens of thousands, let alone millions.

Reform Ltd are using a curious form of logic

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Maybe, as some have suggested, the proposal by Reform Ltd to site internment camps for migrants in constituencies which vote for the Green Party is just a wind-up, an attempt to provoke outrage. Maybe, maybe not. There’s certainly something very Trumpian about it, aping the way violent immigration enforcement is used differentially in the US depending on whether a particular state did or did not vote for Trump. Some have suggested that it might be illegal, but if the UK ever got to the stage of electing a majority Reform Ltd government, such a government would have no trouble legislating to remove any legal obstacles. There is certainly something very ‘un-British’ about it, curiously enough from an overtly British/English nationalist party.

Perhaps we’ll never get there. After all, the ability of Reform UK to actually implement such a policy depends on a party led by Farage not imploding for another three years, and then winning a majority of seats in the Westminster parliament. History suggests that the former is unlikely, and the latter depends on the former, but we shouldn’t be complacent. I suspect that they actually mean what they say. Whether they would be able, as they claim, to hold detainees for only a short time before deporting them is an open question. It sounds simple, but in practical terms I suspect that people would need to be held for months rather than weeks, and the total number of detainees at any one time would be very much higher than they are claiming as a result.

Leaving aside the questions of both practicality and probability, the logic, even on their own terms, is a little ‘fuzzy’ to say the least. Setting up the camps is presented as a consequence of voting for open borders, and therefore something which those who vote for open borders should welcome, but that’s a complete logical reversal. Setting up camps is actually a consequence of voting for closed borders and a mass deportation policy; those who should welcome the camps are those who vote to set them up (Reform Ltd voters), not those who vote against them. On the other hand, and they probably haven’t worked this through themselves yet, they’ve actually given us a clear way of stopping their deportation policy in its tracks. They have guaranteed that no Reform Ltd-voting constituency will get a camp, so if every constituency elects a Reform Ltd MP, there would be nowhere to site a single camp. It’s not an action I’d encourage, of course – but ‘Vote Reform to stop Reform’ has a certain ring to it. Logic, like arithmetic, isn't exactly one of their strengths.

It's the vision that matters

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The demands and counter-demands about costings from the various parties contesting the Senedd elections are not just a red herring, they’re a diversion from the substance of the debate between the parties. The media may be provoking this, but the parties seem to be falling in. There are three good reasons why no party will ever convince another party (or any objective observer) that their costings are ‘right’.

Firstly, any set of costings is necessarily based on estimates and assumptions – it cannot be otherwise. Those estimates and assumptions will always be open to challenge – with no shared basis, there can never be a meeting of minds.

Secondly, one of the few things which seems certain about next week’s results is that no party will have an overall majority. Whether we have a coalition government or a minority government, the party leading that government will not be able to get its full programme through the Senedd without negotiation and compromise with one or other parties. No programme, no matter how ‘fully costed’ it is, will survive intact as a result.

Thirdly, even if there were to be a party with an overall majority, able to attempt to implement its programme in full, circumstances will always conspire to obstruct it. The generals say that no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy – much the same is true when a manifesto meets the reality of government.

That doesn’t make manifestoes irrelevant, and it doesn’t invalidate making at least an attempt to show how they might be implementable, but debating the financial minutiae diverts attention from the one thing that manifestoes should give us – a sense of the priorities and values of the varying parties. Reducing the debate to the level of ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’, or arguing abut the credentials and eminence of the economists who’ve given the numbers a detached nod tells us nothing about the various parties’ visions for Wales. Or, rather more worryingly, perhaps it actually speaks volumes about their visions.

Enforced poverty is no answer

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The political parties of the neoliberal right (Reform Ltd, the Tories, and Labour), aided and abetted by the majority of the media, continue to push their agenda of cutting the bill for benefits and pensions. The current most popular rationale which they give is to divert money into armaments, but if it wasn’t that, it would be something else. It’s easier to sell the anti-benefits message if it can be presented as a binary choice, even if that presentation is a complete nonsense.

It may even be a popular policy, given that the debate around benefits has been slowly and insidiously polarised over recent years in such a way that many people have come to believe that anyone receiving benefits is a freeloader on the efforts of the rest of us. They just don't think it will affect them. The turkeys have been sold on the argument that promoting the virtues of stuffing somehow means that they will be spared the Christmas chop.

There is, of course, no doubt that some savings can be made. Complex rules could be simplified to reduce administration costs, benefit fraud could be targeted (although the costs of doing that will eat into any savings, and targeting tax fraud and evasion would be a more productive use of resources). But such savings are on the margins: the only real way of generating large financial savings from the benefits bill is to cut the amounts being paid. Reducing payments is one approach, cutting eligibility is another; but whichever approach is chosen, one inescapable consequence is that the spending power of some real people in the real economy would be reduced. How many, and by how much, are debateable questions; the underlying fact of a reduction in spending power is not.

Even if it were possible to identify accurately and precisely which people are ‘choosing’ not to work as opposed to which are unable to (and the reality is that that is very difficult to do – real people, in real families, in real communities have a complex mix of circumstances which mostly lie in grey areas rather than black and white ones), the bottom line is that the number of them is much lower than popular sentiment might suggest. Savings on the scale being demanded by some require a much less targeted approach under which many more people lose access to funds. They will include older people, sick people, children – are we really going to push them into poverty in an attempt to starve someone in the household into a probably non-existent job?

‘Cutting the benefits bill’ looks to be an easy task if we look only at the number of pounds and pennies being spent by government. It looks very different, though, if we start to look at the people involved. It challenges our perceptions of the sort of society we are or want to be. Yes, of course, we want those who can do so to make a contribution, but is being employed really the only way of doing that – and is enforced poverty for those who don’t really the best answer? For the neoliberals – for whom everything boils down to pounds and pennies – the answers might be in the affirmative; for those who believe that there is more to life and the human experience than money and economics, jettisoning that narrow approach and starting with people is the essential first step.

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.

Are the parties fighting the last war?

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It’s difficult to know how seriously we should treat any individual opinion poll. Different organisations use different methods, particularly when it comes to ‘weighting’ to try and ensure that the sample is representative. But when multiple polls by different organisations over a lengthy period show broadly consistent trends, it’s reasonable to suppose that they are telling us something about what is happening. In the case of the upcoming Senedd elections, I’m still struggling to believe how well in the one case, and how badly in the other, Reform Ltd and the Labour Party are doing. Whilst I can’t simply ignore the data-driven evidence in front of us, I’ll admit that, for someone who spent decades campaigning door to door, the extent and speed of the change is something I’m struggling to understand and accept. It somehow doesn't 'feel' right, and evidence which contradicts experience is always a difficult thing.

Once we get to a situation where there are two obvious front-runners, it’s probably inevitable that those two will start trying to ‘squeeze’ the votes of the other parties by presenting the outcome as a binary choice. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t intensely disappointing. In most of the campaigns I ever fought, I was more of a squeezee than a squeezer, left trying to convince people to vote for what they wanted most rather than against what they wanted least. So-called tactical voting is harder to determine under the new voting system for the Senedd elections, since it will probably only really have an impact on the sixth, or at best fifth and sixth, seats in any constituency, and it’s really hard to predict what will happen as we get down to that level of vote counting. Some of the politicians try to tell us that the new system makes every vote count, but it really isn’t true. Anyone voting for a party (or independent candidate) receiving less than around 10-12% of the vote in a constituency will effectively be, in the eyes of those trying to use the squeezing tactic, ‘wasting’ their vote; such votes will have no impact on the outcome of the election. Denial of the opportunity to register a second or third choice is my main criticism of the new system.

The question isn’t just about the mechanics and technicalities, however. I’ve long wondered just how effective the pressure to choose between Labour and Tory has been or, rather, to what extent the polarisation of electoral politics in the UK between the two largest parties was down to this tactic as opposed to other factors. Purely on the numbers, more recent elections show an increasing tendency away from a two-party polarisation – if it did work in the past, it hasn’t worked so well recently. Not only is it essentially a negative approach, but to the extent that it did work at all, it was never based on any careful analysis of opposing manifestos before choosing the lesser of two evils – it was far more visceral than that. A hatred of ‘the Tories’ on the one side and of ‘the Socialists’ on the other was always a substitute for proper debate between alternative visions for the future. Perhaps the fact that the ‘alternatives’ were generally not that different when analysed more objectively helped that framing. Whether either Plaid or Reform Ltd attract that sort of folk history-based hatred to a sufficient degree (outside the bubble in which the political anoraks live) is surely an open question. 'Stopping Reform' may not be quite the killer line that some seem to think.

They say that generals always prepare to refight the last war rather than the one that might actually happen, and I can’t help wondering if adopting a tactic based on what has historically believed to have been the case and trying to apply it in an entirely different scenario isn’t acting in a similar manner.

"The markets won't allow it"

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Faced with rising energy costs, largely as a result of Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, the former Tory Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, told us that: “The markets wouldn't allow the kind of intervention I was able to do in 2022”, and suggested that any assistance to households would have to be far more targeted. There are, of course, good arguments both for and against targeting of assistance, and that’s an argument which will continue for the foreseeable future, whether in relation to energy costs or any other policy. Governments will make choices; the question, however, is whether they will make those choices on the basis of their own judgement as to what is right, or whether they will follow the neoliberal line that ‘the markets’ have such a stranglehold on policy that they will make the decision. Sadly, the current Chancellor seems to be as much in hock to that neoliberal argument as her predecessor.

Markets, as argued here previously, are an effective way of matching buyers and sellers, and can perform a highly valuable role in any economy. But markets which constrain, or even determine, government policy have ceased to be a tool of society and have set themselves up, instead, as our masters. ‘Markets’ are not objective arbiters of right and wrong, they don’t come out of nowhere with rules set entirely by themselves. They are, rather, a human construct, designed and built by people with the aim of facilitating economic activity. They are not impersonal forces which react in a considered way to events in accordance with predictable rules – market movements are the agglomeration of a large number of individual bets about the probable direction of future movements or, rather, bets about the way in which other participants will bet on those future movements. The idea that governments should allow their policies to be determined by markets which have been captured by gamblers and speculators is a complete abdication of responsibility, and a capitulation to vested interests.

Giving credence to the idea that ‘markets’ can and should control what governments can do comes naturally enough to those who support neoliberal economics and the obsession with abiding by arbitrary fiscal rules. The problem that we face is that the government and the official opposition are united in swallowing the lie – Reeves and Hunt are interchangeable. Austerity and economic inequality are two sides of the same coin – we’ll only escape from both when we re-establish the role of markets as servants rather than masters.

Protecting citizens doesn't mean impoverishing them

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Whether a US major actually said “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” in justification of the destruction of Ben Tre during the Vietnam war remains a matter of conjecture. That it describes the more-than-occasional absurdity of the military mindset is less open to question. It’s reflected in Donald Trump’s apparent belief that bombing the whole of Iran back to the Stone Age is a way of freeing Iranians from an oppressive regime: the difference is more a matter of scale than of substance. UK politicians aren’t immune to the same way of thinking, as Tory leader Kemi Badenoch demonstrated a day or two ago. According to her, the way to prepare for war with Russia is to cut benefits, pushing more families into poverty in the process. ‘It is necessary to starve them in order to save them’, apparently.

Politicians and military chiefs seem to delight in telling us that Russia will be ready to attack us in five years’ time, a ‘truth’ which underpins their obsession with increasing military spending at the expense of anything and everything else. Whilst it is true that the loss of soldiers and equipment in Ukraine over the past 4 years means that Russia is hardly ready today to launch a major attack on the rest of Europe, and that it would take time for them to rebuild their forces and replace the losses, the evidence that they will be ready to launch said attack in five years’ time is not exactly obvious. And, in any event, it assumes firstly that the losses in Ukraine stop rather than continue, and secondly that Russia’s leaders will have learnt nothing from the cost of invading a single country which will in any way influence their thinking about attacking an even larger ‘enemy’. It rather looks as though ‘five years’ has been selected as the timeframe of choice by NATO’s political and military leaders because it’s close enough to sound imminent, but far enough away to allow people to believe that a huge redirection of resources into military hardware might make a difference. A betting man might suggest that, five years from now, the alleged threat will still be five years in the future. But the demand for more resources will continue to grow.

But here’s the other side of that five-year coin, as it were: it’s also enough time to pursue an alternative course of action, aimed at preventing a war rather than preparing to fight one. The warmongering politicians and military leaders demanding the impoverishment of the population in order to be ready to fight another major war in Europe may well sincerely believe that the best way of preventing a war is to convince ‘the other side’ that they would lose and lose heavily if they attempted it, but the danger of such an approach is that that ‘other side’ instead sees every improvement in equipment, and every deployment of troops, as a sign that an attack on them is being prepared, and reacts accordingly. Whilst I really don’t believe that NATO’s eastward expansion was an intentional precursor for an invasion of Russia (one of the concerns allegedly underlying the Russian invasion of Ukraine), I can understand that things might look different when viewed from Moscow.

With a major war raging on European soil, and with the White House and the Kremlin both occupied by madmen, seeking to de-escalate and build trust instead of planning a war isn’t going to be easy, but it’s the only rational approach for Europe to follow. Those who would lead us into war are fond of telling us that the first duty of any government is the protection of its citizens, but there’s an unspoken addendum: ‘even if it means impoverishing them’. I wouldn’t phrase the ‘first duty’ like that. It takes a very narrow view of the meaning of ‘protection’. If we rephrase it to say that the first duty of any government is to maintain and improve the wellbeing, welfare, and living standards of the population, priorities start to look very different. And they don’t include pushing people into poverty in order to fight a war.

Who's checking what the US are doing from UK bases?

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A few hours before Trump’s deadline for Iran to surrender, it was reported that heavily-laden B52 bombers were taking off (or at least attempting to) from RAF Fairford, presumably en route to Iran. Whether they were armed with conventional weapons or nuclear weapons we may never know, but we can only assume that the jets were turned back in flight after Trump agreed, instead, to negotiate the terms of his own surrender, based on an Iranian document which Trump described as “a workable basis on which to negotiate”, and which would require, amongst other things, the payment of reparations to Iran and the removal of US bases from the region. Trump clearly blinked first, although under what pressures from within his own administration remains uncertain.

Whether it’s really a sound basis for a lasting peace is another unknown at this stage, but the use of a UK base for launching those B52s is an issue which shouldn’t be allowed to go away. Starmer has taken what appears to be a very principled and legalistic stance in demanding that UK bases only be used for ‘defensive’ actions to protect British and allied lives in the Persian Gulf, and he has banned their use for offensive bombing campaigns against Iran. But here’s the question: does anyone really believe that those B52’s, whose take-off was timed so that they would arrive over Iran at about the time that Trump said he wanted to destroy an entire civilisation, were in any way involved in a ‘defensive’ mission rather than part of his planned attacks on civilian infrastructure?

When a bomb falls on an Iranian hospital, school, bridge, or power plant, who in the UK government knows whether it came from a plane flying from a UK base or not? Is anyone checking the mission details and flight logs of all US military aircraft departing from the UK to see whether the US is abiding by Starmer’s rules or not? Starmer has banked a certain, albeit limited, quantity of kudos for setting strict rules, but if adherence is not being monitored (even Starmer, surely, couldn’t be stupid enough to take Trump’s word about what he is doing), then those rules are meaningless. Accepting the word of the US president and then turning a blind eye to what happens in practice would not be the principled stance as which it is being presented.