How on earth do the others manage?

Tweet It’s the Swedes that I feel sorry for.  And the Danes, and the Norwegians, and the Portuguese, and the … well about half the peoples of the world, to be honest.  After all, they don’t have the ‘failsafe’ mechanism which the House of Lords provides the UK, and which Wales is sadly lacking, according to our former Secretary of State. 

I’m not sure that I’d describe their lordships as a failsafe, and I doubt that anyone else has ever called them that before, but that’s perhaps an aside.  The point which Gillan was making is that the UK Government has an unelected second chamber to obstruct and delay improve on the work of elected representatives and the Assembly doesn’t, which means that there are apparently no checks and balances.

But having a second chamber to revise what the first chamber does at the behest of the government and its whips is not the natural order of things to the extent that she and those who think like her would suggest.  Around half of the world’s legislatures manage perfectly well with a single chamber, and if the House of Lords didn’t exist, it’s hard to believe that anyone in their right minds would actually sit down and invent it.

And having legislation whipped through by the majority party at the behest of the government without proper scrutiny and debate isn’t something unique to the Assembly – indeed, to the extent that it is a problem in Cardiff it’s because the system was designed and implemented by another parliament which operates in precisely that way, aided and abetted by AMs who see aping Westminster as being what a proper parliament is all about.

But my real objection to what she’s saying is that putting a second set of processes and procedures – to say nothing of a second set of politicians – in place to deal with the failings of the first lot is avoiding tackling the real issue – i.e., why the first set isn’t working properly in the first place.  The Tories are usually quite big on pointing to the private sector as an exemplar for most things; but any private organisation which put a whole second set of people in place to correct the problems caused by the first lot rather than resolving the core problem wouldn’t be in business for long.

The problem that she and those who think like her face, however, is that if they admit that the problems can be fixed in one place, it might just lead people to think that they could be fixed elsewhere.  So duplicate what Westminster does, and hope that no-one notices how anachronistic the system is, and how well the rest of the world manages without it.  Abolition of the Lords, anyone?

The reality is obvious

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There are one or two well-used phrases which trip from politicians’ lips when they want to avoid providing any evidence in support of their views.  One of my least favourites is the phrase “The reality is…”.  Long experience tells me that it’s invariably followed by unsubstantiated personal opinion presented as incontrovertible fact.

Cheryl Gillan came out with another one yesterday.  The fact that she’s opposing the creation of a Welsh legal jurisdiction hardly qualifies as news, for all the prominence given to it.  Her reference to the devolution process as a “never- ending conveyor belt of powers transferring from Westminster to Cardiff” was at least a new sound bite – better than the more usual “slippery slope” argument.  But sound bites, however good, do not an argument make.

Indeed, making any sort of argument for the status quo was something that seemed to be distinctly lacking in her comments.  Instead, she reverted to another of those politicians’ phrases; it was, she said, “glaringly obvious” that it was a bad idea.

There we are, argument won in two words, with no need to bother with any little matters such as substance or evidence.  In truth of course, what ‘the reality is’ and what is or isn’t ‘glaringly obvious’ will vary according to perspective.  There’s more to political debate than sophistry.