There is something quite seasonal about the Labour-Plaid deal
over the Senedd budget. It is, after all, that time of the year when pantomimes
proliferate. In the case of the budget, the Finance Minister knew that he could
not get a budget supported only by Labour through the Senedd, so he presented a
budget with £380
million unallocated to allow him some space to bargain. He knew what he
wanted to do with that money – and he also knew that his priorities just
happened to largely coincide with the demands which Plaid would make. So a
little bit of negotiation and some changes around the detail, and hey presto –
the reserved money gets put back into a budget which ends up looking remarkably
like it would probably have looked in the first place, but now supported by a
majority. Labour claim a win, Plaid claim a win, and the rest can only proclaim
in unison, “Oh no it isn’t”.
Like all good pantos, superficially it’s largely
performative. But, again like all good pantos, there’s a serious side to the
slapstick as well. In a legislature elected partly on a proportional basis –
and which, from next year, will be elected on a wholly proportional basis – no party
can expect to have a majority in the chamber unless they attract at least 50%
of the vote and, in the currently fragmented political world, that looks
vanishingly unlikely in future. Harsh reality says that negotiation and
agreement should be the norm; responsible parties need to be willing to
compromise in order to ensure effective government. The alternative to the
agreement which has been reached was a degree of chaos and the potential loss
of large sums of money to the Senedd – reaching an agreement is sound and
responsible politics, even if some would quibble with some of the detail.
It's a pity, though, that it requires such dramatics
to get there. Maybe, over time, as coalition / pragmatic agreement becomes ever
more normal, we can get to the same place faster without cliff-hangers; maybe,
if the UK ever adopts a more proportional electoral system for Westminster, Wales
won’t look so different from the accepted UK ‘winner takes all’ norm and
compromise will come to be more accepted. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps the driver
of achieving perceived political ‘victory’ in negotiations will always be a
requisite of any agreement in order to try and demonstrate the absence of any
type of sellout. But concentrating criticism on whether something is or is not
a sellout avoids discussion about the detail. And is wholly in line with the
Tory/Reform approach to political debate.
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