Being against one thing doesn't mean you support one particular alternative

Tweet

 

One of the features of parliamentary process is that votes on legislation, budgets etc eventually come down to a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Prior debate, both in committee and on the floor of the chamber, offers opportunity for parliamentarians to seek to amend and improve the proposition under consideration, but at the end of the process, nuance, subtlety, and the fact that there may be varied reasons why members choose to support or oppose the proposition are all erased in a simple binary vote.

Whether Labour made the ‘right’ call in this week’s Senedd vote on the supplementary budget is a matter of opinion, and depends on first asking the question ‘right for who?’; what suits the party’s needs may or may not suit the needs of the people. Maybe they were trying to put down a marker about not being taken for granted; perhaps they’re just struggling with the move from government to opposition. Whatever their logic, I’m amongst those who think that they called it wrong on this occasion. Whether the government should have made more effort to get them onboard is another moot point – just as former governing parties need time to adjust to being in opposition, so too former opposition parties seemingly need time to adjust to being in government.

The biggest disappointment for me, however, came not in the vote, but in the aftermath. Voting against the government is not the same thing as voting for the other opposition parties, and Plaid’s repeated criticism of Labour for voting ‘with Reform Ltd’ grates with me. It’s a tactic which has been used by Labour, in particular, against Plaid for decades, especially in Westminster, but it’s a kindergarten approach, and it’s disappointing, to say the least, to see the party which has been subjected to such an approach for so long trying to use the same approach against its former tormentors, rather than demonstrating that the grown-ups are now in charge. There are going to be a lot of votes in the Senedd during the current term, and the combinations of parties voting either for or against a proposition will also vary. Voting the same way as Party B doesn’t mean that the rationale for voting that way is shared, and the suggestion that it does is a dishonest way of avoiding the substance. Resorting to the ‘yah boo’ tactics of Westminster is not a good look.