Labour's failure

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Whilst ‘Corbyn’ was a factor in what has happened to the Labour Party in recent years, the real malaise goes much deeper than that.  The party’s origins lie in a belief in a different kind of world, founded on socialist rather than capitalist principles.  Defining ‘socialism’ isn’t easy; there seem to be as many definitions as there are people claiming to be socialists, but if I had to draw out just two key elements of what it means to me, I would say that it is to do with the economic power relationships in a society, and with acting collectively rather than competitively.  I think that the party’s founders understood that, and their mission was as much – if not more – about winning people round to that view as it was about seeking power through elections.

It was a worthy mission, but one in which the party ultimately failed totally, moving gradually instead to a more election and power-seeking approach, under which the implementation by the state of the policies put forward by the party was somehow seen as the equivalent of ‘delivering socialism’, leaving the vision thing down to a vague notion that ‘Labour is for the workers’.  But without a change in consciousness, it could never be equivalent.  Whilst the policies put forward might well have been based (most of the time, anyway – I’m not sure that the same could be said for the Blair years, for instance) on at least a partial vision of an alternative world, they have not made much effort to sell that vision, instead relying on the obviously flawed assumption that people voting for the policies are also bought in to the vision.  That is a partial explanation for a situation where the party leadership seems genuinely surprised that people who have historically voted for them in support of that vague notion hold a range of views which are anathema to the leadership.  Jingoism and an aversion to foreigners and immigrants are just two of the factors which seem to have surprised many in Labour; but as anyone who’s ever knocked doors in an election (and I’ve done many thousands in my time) will know, small ‘c’ conservatism is rife amongst the party’s voter base.  It has been ignored as long as they kept putting their crosses in the right boxes but has created a situation in which a switch of loyalties was always possible.

It has all culminated in recent elections in a largely transactional approach to manifestos – vote for us and we’ll give you ‘x’.  It’s not that the policies themselves have been devised free of all vision of an alternative society, it’s more the lack of any attempt to spell out that underlying vision, leaving voters who want to find one to join up the dots themselves.  But worst of all, encouraging voters to see things in such transactional terms – ‘what’s in it for me?’ – plays into the hands of economic conservatives, reinforcing the notion that people can and should act as individuals in pursuit, at all times, of their own personal interests.  For a party which started out believing in collective action to build a different world to end up promoting one of the essential components of the existing one is quite some fall.

A rock and a hard place

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The anger of many over the re-naming of the Severn Crossing is understandable, and was entirely predictable.  And the disappointment with the First Minister in ‘raising no objections’ is equally unsurprising.  I do though, almost feel a little sorry for him – he was caught between a rock and a hard place.  If he raised no objections, then he was obviously going to get the criticism now being hurled at him by some politicians and through social media.  But, had he raised an objection, I think we can be certain that the Secretary of State would not simply have forgotten the idea and gone away; royal sycophancy is his natural state.  And any objection raised by Carwyn Jones would certainly have become known to the media (anyone really see Cairns missing an open goal like that?), as a result of which he would have been pilloried by the tabloids for a snub to His Royal Charliness and family.  So, weighing up the options – a storm of protest from the usual suspects on social media or a front page tirade in the most widely-read newspapers in Wales - which would you choose?

But that brings me back to the ‘almost’ a few sentences ago.  He either weighed it up in the calculated fashion I’ve suggested above and opted for the quiet(er) life, or he gave it no real thought and went for Labour’s traditional deferential approach to the monarchy.  In neither case does he actually deserve much sympathy; but the latter case looks the likelier, and getting off (comparatively) lightly is just a bonus for him.  The biggest mistake is being made by anyone who ever thought that his response would be made on the basis of any thought about what’s best for Wales.

Merely eliminating the negative

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The Secretary of State for Wales told us at the weekend that cutting just over a pound off the cost of crossing the Severn bridges will ‘power [a] new business boom with Bristol’.  It’s probably just as well that he made no attempt to explain how the one thing leads to the other, although it would be interesting to have seen him try.  It’s simply not credible that such a small change – or even the larger change which is in the pipeline when the tolls are abolished – will have as large an effect as he claims.

It’s certainly true that the tolls have, from the outset, been a disincentive to companies basing themselves in Wales.  It may not be a huge extra cost, but small costs repeated many times can become large sums, and it’s easy to see how that becomes a factor in deciding on location.  But the absence of a negative isn’t the same as the presence of a positive, as my old maths teacher would have said, and the removal of a disincentive doesn’t magically create an incentive.  The idea that a reduction in tolls – or even their abolition – can suddenly create new economic growth is fanciful at best.  During the years that the tolls have been in place, companies have already taken their decisions on location, and they aren’t suddenly going to change those because of this change; creating a more level playing field for future decisions isn’t the same as tilting it in our direction in respect of past decisions.

But when the promised land predicted by prophet Cairns fails to arrive, it will no doubt all be the fault of the Labour administration in Cardiff.  He seems to think that he’s done his bit now.

It's about vision, not process

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When I first read the report yesterday about the speech by the Secretary of State for Wales, it immediately struck me that he was, in effect, proposing that any future regional aid from the UK Treasury to Wales should be managed and controlled from London, not Cardiff, even if he didn’t say that directly.  Today’s comments by the leader of the Conservatives in the Assembly seem to fill in the gap very well.  Not one for a subtle approach to saying what he thinks, Andrew RT Davies has made it very clear that he wants this money managed for Wales not by Wales.  It’s hard to interpret this double-pronged approach as other than the start of a post-Brexit process of removing authority from the Assembly.

They justify it, of course, on the basis of an argument that what matters is not who does it, but that it’s done right.  The problem with that argument is that it means that anything which Cardiff can’t do ‘right’ is fair game for transfer to our masters in London who are apparently uniquely qualified to do everything properly.  By sheer coincidence, there was another story today, reporting on the comments by Professor Richard Wyn Jones including a suggestion that UK institutions have not adapted to devolution.  He said: “… what’s striking about the central institutions of the UK state is they have not changed at all as a result of devolution”.  It occurred to me that the comments by Davies and Cairns sum up fairly well why the UK’s central institutions haven’t adapted, and see no need to adapt, to devolution.  It’s simply that they see devolution not about any recognition of the UK being some sort of partnership of nations (even though they use those words) but about an approach to administration – just another part of local government, in effect.  From that perspective, why should they need to adapt?

Anyway, back to European funding and the Tories’ criticism of the way Labour have managed it.  I have a lot of sympathy with that they are saying in this instance.  It’s perhaps unfair of them to single out Labour alone for their criticism – I don’t remember things being spectacularly better-managed during the One Wales period – but that just underlines that their purpose here is more about political point-scoring than about improving things – and I’ll return to that point shortly.

Over recent years, I’ve been present (as a translator) at a lot of meetings discussing European funding and how to spend it.  I won’t go into individual details, but I have two clear impressions coming out of a range of different discussions.  The first is that European structural funds have spawned something of a consultancy industry in Wales as people line themselves up to help others make applications for funding, and get paid out of those same funds themselves.  The second is of a culture where business plans are written to tick the boxes with the funders rather than as a serious attempt to describe what projects will do – on two occasions, I’ve even heard them referred to as being ‘akin to creative writing’.

In addition to that, I’ve witnessed delays and arguments about the release of funding and a bureaucracy being built up to manage and report on the use of funding.  All of these reduce the amount of funding which eventually gets spent directly on meeting the objectives of projects.

In all those senses, the Tories have a point.  But I’d argue that these are all peripheral points to what I would see as the central criticism, and it’s a criticism that the Tories haven’t even made as far as I can see.  It is this: rather than being seen as special, short-term, one-off funding which the Welsh Government could use to meet a strategic aim of improving the Welsh economy, the money has been seen as a pot of available cash for which people and groups can apply.  This may well have enabled a number of things to be done which would not otherwise have been done – but it has also created a wealth of photo-ops for Welsh ministers and for creating and sponsoring client groups (and I leave it to readers to come to their own conclusion about the relative importance of these things to those involved).  But, and it’s a very big but, there have been no visible underlying objectives or strategy for achieving them.  It has been a massive missed opportunity for Wales.

The problem with the Tories’ position is that in the desire to make a political point about the incompetence of Labour in particular (and by implication, Welsh institutions in general) they have concentrated on the froth and offered only a different process for controlling and managing the expenditure.  They are no more offering a vision or strategy than Labour, and that means that their proposed ‘solution’ is no such thing.

Wales deserves better, but there’s something rather old-style colonial in the apparent belief that better simply means someone doing it for us rather than us doing it ourselves.

Many a slip

Tweet I found myself on Radio Wales' "Called to Order" on Friday evening, just before taking myself off to Trelech. One of the topics for discussion was the little verbal slip made by Alun Cairns a week or so ago.

There can be no doubt that what he said was unacceptable. He should have known better, even in what was a pretty light-hearted exchange, so no defence was forthcoming from this quarter for what he said.

But most systems of justice recognise that there are degrees of wrongdoing; some things are worse than others. In politics, however, it seems to be becoming the norm that any slip by any individual leads to the other parties, and the media, baying for blood; and there is a danger that people will be so afraid of being caught out saying the wrong thing that they will end up saying very little at all, unless it's been carefully scripted by Party HQ.

It is right that political parties should use their disciplinary processes to deal with transgressions; but are there also occasions when the electorate can be left to make their own judgement on an individual? And how should we decide between the two?

In this particular case, it seems to me that both the verdict and the sentence on Alun Cairns will have more to do with the image which Cameron wishes to portray than with any cold and careful assessment of the words actually used, the context, and the degree of offence caused. People may or may not feel that it is the 'right' verdict and sentence; but the process of arriving at it looks rather dubious to me.