Dictatorship is not the answer

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It seems as though Trump’s proposed ‘Peace Board’, initially mooted as part of the ‘peace plan’ for Gaza, is being given a much wider remit by its sole owner and proprietor, one Donald Trump. It looks more like an attempt to replace the UN with a handpicked core membership (to include a chair for life appointed because he’s called Donald Trump, as well as that well-known purveyor of peace, former UK PM Tony Blair, and Trump’s son-in-law, Secretary of State, and special envoy), and a wider membership to be invited to participate by the chair. This wider group includes one Vladimir Putin, a man particularly well-known for his love of peace, and that staunch defender of democracy, Lukashenko of Belarus. Those accepting membership can opt to upgrade to a premium membership in exchange for handing the chair a mere $1 billion (to be spent as decided unilaterally by the chair), whilst anybody who turns down an invitation can expect to be hit with further tariffs (such as the proposed 200% tariff on French wines and champagne which Macron has earned by politely declining. Like any good mafia don, Trump is making people offers that he thinks they can’t refuse.

That there are problems with the UN is undeniable. Reaching a consensus is a difficult and time-consuming task, especially when five permanent members of the Security Council have a veto. It’s not entirely clear exactly how Trump’s proposal overcomes that weakness, although he presumably expects all members to simply accept his ultimate authority on all decisions. Theoretically, that works, but practically it’s problematic even when he’s president of the US; if he remains as chair when (or if) he ceases to be president, by what power exactly does he impose compliance? That problem of seeking and achieving consensus, leading to painfully slow decision-making, isn’t confined to the UN, of course: the EU suffers from the same issue. The question we are faced with is whether we accept that as a cost of seeking consensus and agreement through negotiation, or whether we simply vest all power in an individual – or rather, in Trump’s case, allow an individual to vest all power in himself. For all the frustrations of dealing with a multitude of different parties with different interests and agendas, I’m sure that I’m not alone in rejecting the dictatorship which is what the alternative amounts to.

Here in the UK, another former UK PM has weighed in with his own take on the solution. It’s full of fine words, as in this paragraph: “The democracies of the world should draft a short values statement, echoing the UN charter’s starting point – “We the peoples …” – and this time showing we mean it. Its first section would assert our full support for self-determination and the mutual recognition of nation states*; for the outlawing of war and coercion; and for the primacy of law, civil rights and democratic accountability as the essential means by which human dignity is advanced. A second section would outline the rules that govern the cooperation essential to guarantee food, water and security, economic opportunity and social justice, and climate resilience and health for all, including pandemic prevention”. But it, too, is short on telling us how this can be enforced.

Both Trump and Brown have identified a real problem when it comes to taking international decisions, but only Trump has come up with a ‘solution’ – personal dictatorship by one D. Trump. The reality is that, if we reject the ‘might is right’ approach of Trump, there is no simple solution. Not electing people who are clearly deranged would help a little, but there’s no obvious way of preventing that either.

^* Obviously, Gordon Brown does not intend this to be taken as being in any way support for nations not currently regarded as states – Wales, Scotland, Catalunya etc. – having any right to self-determination. That would never do.

With enemies like these, who needs friends?

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Yesterday, former PM Gordon Brown told us that during the pandemic, “At times Britain has looked like a dysfunctional state”. It’s not exactly a penetrating analysis, especially for those of us who tend to the view that something which looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck probably is a duck. The idea that something which looks dysfunctional might actually be dysfunctional doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind. The suggestion that the problem is merely one of appearances is just another indication of the difficulty unionists have with taking any actions likely to advance their cause – they simply don’t see the need for anything beyond a bit of spin and propaganda.

Meanwhile the third occupant of the post since he departed it has been having a little local difficulty with staffing the unit which he created to promote the union, having seen the departure of two heads within a fortnight. There was speculation that the unit had been scrapped completely, to be replaced by a small cabinet committee consisting of the PM himself, the Secretaries of State for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and a few other randomly selected cabinet ministers. However, reports of the unit’s death have, it seems, been exaggerated, and the new cabinet committee will instead oversee and guide the unit’s work. The fact that the PM is taking such a deep personal interest in the issue is good news for independentistas, and not just because of his own extreme unpopularity in Scotland. No, it’s more that we can expect Johnson to apply his usual degree of diligence to the question, which means that we can be confident that the committee is unlikely to meet. Ever. We know how much he dislikes attending meetings even if there’s a national emergency in progress and if through some unhappy accident it does happen to meet, he’ll probably have more pressing business elsewhere anyway. Like overseeing the important government task of taking photographs of dogs. Or giving Covid a sporting chance of spreading more widely across the UK.

With Brown and Johnson in charge of the case for the union, we hardly need an independence movement at all.

Too little, too late

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If the Tories really, desperately wanted to encourage the Scots to vote for independence, the best thing that they could do would be to raise Thatcher from the dead and send her on a tour of Scotland to extol the advantages of London rule. They’ve reluctantly had to accept the impossibility of that, so they’ve opted for the second-best approach – Boris Johnson is going on a fleeting visit this week instead. Apparently, he’s set to deliver an ‘impassioned plea’ to the Scots to reject something which he refers to as ‘narrow nationalism’ in the hope that they’ll enthusiastically embrace his peculiar brand of English nationalism instead. Leaving aside the tiny little problemette that Johnson has never been known to do passion – lies, bluster and poor jokes with an occasional Latin or Greek allusion may appear to be the same thing, but only in his eyes – it demonstrates a massive failure to understand how much things have changed in Scotland, and how irrelevant his London-centric views have become. And talking (as he apparently intends to do) about how the union can be reformed so that it works better, in the immediate aftermath of passing legislation to undermine the existing settlement and claw back powers, looks like an attempt to pretend that the last two decades never happened.

It isn’t just the Tories suffering this strange failure to comprehend recent history – Labour have their own problems as well. Unlike Thatcher, they didn’t even need to try and disinter their former leader: Gordon Brown still lives. And he’s made another of his increasingly frequent ‘interventions’ in politics, warning that the UK faces a choice between reform and failure. One of the great mysteries of politics in the twenty-first century is why so many Westminster politicians, to say nothing of the London commentariat, believe that Brown has huge influence in Scotland and that the Scots are hanging on his every word, despite the lack of any evidence (or indeed the presence of masses of evidence to the contrary). Maybe it’s because he at least sounds Scottish, something which the Tories’ tame Scots, such as Gove, singularly fail to achieve. Still, if Johnson can do his best to destroy what remains of the Conservative Party in Scotland, it’s only fair to allow Brown the opportunity to do the same for Labour.

There is another potential point of commonality between Johnson and Brown. Brown is calling for fundamental constitutional changes led by a “commission on democracy” that would “review the way the whole United Kingdom is governed”, whilst Johnson is apparently toying with a similar idea – as Martin Kettle of the Guardian puts it: “One minister tells me the plan is for Johnson to announce that he considers the UK’s existing constitutional architecture is not working. Whether these issues are to be remitted to a constitutional commission of some kind … will soon be made clear”. There have been similar calls here in Wales – just a few days ago, Senedd member Mick Antoniw repeated his call for some sort of “Welsh constitutional convention”. There’s nothing wrong with a constitutional convention per se, but there are three big caveats.

The first is about timing and how long it will take. Waiting until the end (of the union) is literally nigh and then demanding a process likely to take some years to come to fruition looks like exactly what it is – an attempt to kick the can down the road. Delaying the inevitable for as long as possible in the hope that something will turn up, or that the Scots in particular will decide that they can’t be bothered any more simply isn’t a viable strategy – it’s about denying their democratic rights, not honouring them.

The second is that none of those individuals or parties have a clue what to do about the huge and inevitable built-in imbalance which England, with 85% of the population, will represent in any conceivable alternative structure. Setting up conventions in the vague hope that either someone will come up with a solution or else that everyone else will come to a consensus view that they have to lump it is a substitute for addressing the issue. And an extremely poor substitute at that. Political parties could and should, instead, just put forward their own ideas – the problem is that they don’t have any.

The third, and most important of all, is about the terms of reference and who sets them. Terms of reference which start from the premise that the UK can and should be reformed (which seems to be what is being proposed) are terms of reference which set out, from the outset, to close off rather than openly discuss all possible options.

Still, the good news in all this is that it doesn’t matter. By the time Johnson has finished selling the advantages of the union to the Scots, everything else will be just a question of the belated locking of doors on equine residences.

The problem isn't just Gordon Brown

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There’s nothing wrong with the idea that the Welsh Government should seek expert advice on how to find a path forward after the pandemic. Indeed, given the lack of expertise in the government, recognising that fact and seeking some from elsewhere is generally a positive, particularly when the UK as a whole is being run by people who think we’ve all ‘had enough of experts’. And if the best advice is to be found outside Wales, then so be it. The question, though, is how those ‘experts’ are chosen and what their ‘expertise’ is.

A lot of attention has focussed inevitably (and justifiably) on the inclusion of former UK PM Gordon Brown in the group. What ‘expertise’ he brings to bear is far from being immediately obvious, to put it mildly, especially given that his main concern seems to be not about how Wales or even the UK gets through the crisis but on how to keep the UK united. Giving primacy to an essentially political objective at a time when the main issues are economic looks like missing the point. Having been both PM and Chancellor certainly confers a degree of experience on an individual, but the relevance of that experience depends on a judgement about two things: the first is the extent to which current circumstances mirror anything that he dealt with before (spoiler: they don’t – the banking crisis was wholly different and treating the two as though they are similar is a category error which condemns us to failure before we even start), and the second is the extent to which his performance in either or both of those roles can be considered successful (and I don’t think I even need to comment on that).

It isn’t just Brown, though – one of the other names suggested concerns me every bit as much. As Richard Murphy has pointed out, Paul Johnson of the IFS is wedded to neoliberalism and the idea that government finances are like those of households, and that increased government expenditure necessarily leads to increased taxation. Whilst I can accept that within the narrow confines of the devolution settlement there is a degree of truth in the analogy – a subsidiary government which depends on being given a grant from a central exchequer does not have the same freedom of action as a sovereign government, which is part of the point of independence – that does not give me confidence that a different future will be seriously considered. If we set out to imagine that the future can only ever be the same as the past, subject to the imaginary constraints and restrictions of microeconomists like the IFS, we won’t exactly be over-taxing our collective imaginations.

One Conservative AM said that “The last thing that people in Wales need during this time of unprecedented crisis is another dose of Gordon Brown”; I think that’s more likely to be merely the last but one thing we need. The very last thing we need is another dose of Conservative neoliberal ideology, but I fear that is what ‘Welsh’ Labour are offering us. Johnson and the IFS, like Brown, are part of the problem, not the solution.

Finding the real culprits

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Demanding that Sir Philip Green should be stripped of his knighthood, as several Labour MPs have done, is an easy way of attracting a headline or two.  It avoids the need for proper discussion about what changes might be needed.  It also fits the prevailing narrative about ‘holding people to account’, and demanding ‘justice’ - although scapegoating seems a better description to me.  It doesn’t actually help the employees or pensioners of the company, though.  Worse, I’m also not convinced that they’re going for the right target, as opposed to the easy one.

As far as I’m aware, no-one has yet suggested that Green has broken any laws – if that situation changes, then clearly he should be brought before the relevant courts and dealt with.  The suggestion is, rather, that he has been incompetent, reckless, greedy, or perhaps lacking in a sense of morality and decency in the way he has treated the staff involved.  All of those things may or may not be true; but the question about how this was allowed to happen stands.

BHS isn’t the only company facing a huge pension deficit; there’s a similar issue facing the employees of Tata and many other companies.  What we should be considering is how these pension deficits have arisen, and what we need to do to prevent more of them.  Pensions is a complicated issue, and expecting our MPs to turn their attention to that instead of seeking easy headlines looks unrealistic; but if pensions deficits on this scale can be so commonplace and entirely legal, surely the people we should be looking to ‘hold to account’ in the first place are those responsible for lax legislation and regulation – i.e. the MPs themselves.

There are a number of different things which have led to the scale of some of the pension deficits.  One of those was the change in the taxation regime for pensions introduced by Gordon Brown, and voted through parliament by – the Labour MPs now demanding action against Green.  The problem with Brown’s changes wasn’t that they were wrong in principle, but that they came without warning and were introduced in a single year.  There was no opportunity for adapting to the new regime or to phase in changes (including increased contributions).

A second issue is the requirement – again imposed by parliament – for pension funds to publish details of their funding situation as though they were about to be wound up.  The logic of this is entirely sound (and it’s a valid basis in the case of BHS), but for most pension funds, this accounting basis is both unrealistic and significantly exaggerates the scale of any likely deficit.

But another, and the most pertinent in the case of Green, is that employers can get away with making inadequate contributions to the fund, sometimes over a long period.  When I first joined a pension scheme, too many years ago, I remember being told that it was really ‘deferred salary’.  That is to say, the contributions being made by my employer were part of my overall salary, put aside to guarantee certain benefits in retirement.  From this perspective, the failure of any employer to make and maintain adequate payments over the long term (accepting that there are sometimes short term issues which can lead to a temporary shortfall) to meet the commitments given to staff is like failing to pay staff the wages due to them.  But the latter is a crime; the former is not.  Why not?  Again, we have to turn to our parliamentary representatives if we want to know who to blame.

Demands by MPs for tokenistic action against an individual may indeed make good headlines – but they also divert attention from the real culprits, the lawmakers themselves, who have consistently failed to ensure that the legal framework for pensions simply does not allow unscrupulous employers to get rich at the expense of their staff and pensioners.

Enemies and opponents

Tweet When senior politicians die or retire, it is traditional that their opponents find something nice to say about them.  It often succeeds in conveying the impression that for all the nasty things they say about each other in Westminster, the place is really a jolly little club, where they all have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us.  Sincerity is an optional extra.  So when David Cameron “leads the tributes” to Gordon Brown, no-one is in the least surprised.

The tribute by Peter Mandelson was rather more nuanced – but what else would we expect from that direction?  My favourite part was that the two big things that Mandelson claimed Brown got right are perhaps the two where history may come to tell quite another tale.  He said that “…he did get the big things right – notably when it came to saving our banks after the financial crisis and saving the union when it looked as though Scotland was going to go independent”.

One of the problems in trying to write history – and particularly the hagiographic variety – too soon after the events is that the longer term consequences of those events have yet to become fully clear.

There is little doubt in my mind that the action taken by the Labour Government under Brown to save the banks was a necessary immediate step at the time.  But the reason that they needed to be saved was down, in part at least, to successive governments’ willingness to turn a blind eye to the risks that were being taken.  I’m not sure that putting out a fire which he was at least partly responsible for starting is much of a commendation.  And taking a purely short term approach to solving the immediate problem has left us with a banking system which is likely to repeat the mistakes of the past.

And if his role in saving the banks is questionable, his role in saving the union is even more so.  Certainly his last minute intervention had a touch of drama about it.  Probably he had a significant hand in brokering the ‘Vow’ which seems to have had an effect on the outcome; although we may have to wait many years before the precise mechanism by which the vow came about becomes clear.  But at this stage, the buoyancy and enthusiasm of the ‘defeated’ side in the referendum is such that it seems likelier that his intervention will come to be seen in the long term as a tipping point which helped to bring about Scottish independence later.  (Which, incidentally, means that those of us who favour independence may yet end up holding a more favourable opinion of him, even if for the ‘wrong’ reasons.)

Given Mandelson’s reputation for spin, it is, of course, entirely possible that he well understands all of this and is deliberately trying to ensure that Brown is remembered for two major events which will turn out to look rather different in the end.  That would serve to remind us all of the dictum that those in the party opposite are merely opponents – it’s those on your own side who are the real enemies.  And it’s opponents who are most bound by the convention of being nice.

From drama to farce

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There was certainly something very dramatic about the way the leaders of the three unionist parties dropped everything and took themselves off to Scotland following one opinion poll showing a lead for the yes campaign.  And the spectacle of a revitalised Gordon Brown coming over the hill like the seventh cavalry was not without its own touch of drama.

Solemn vows were made, irrevocable and guaranteed, they all said. 

But the whole thing descends into farce when the front man (or perhaps that should be fall guy) for the vows has such faith in the rest of them to deliver on the promises that he made that he’s now calling for 100,000 Scots to sign a petition demanding that the three not-so-wise men keep his promises.

The thing that struck me was this.  There were 2 million who voted for further devolution and against independence (although some of them may foolishly have thought that they were voting for the status quo – an option removed from the ballot paper by the Prime Minister).  Why does he only want 100,000 of them to sign his petition?  Could it be that he’s not overly confident that many more than that will follow him a second time?

Nods, winks, and peers of the realm

Tweet I find it hard to believe that Elfyn Llwyd’s call last week for Plaid to have more peers was preceded by a great deal of consultation with his party’s leader, Leanne Wood.  Given her long-standing opposition to the nomination of peers, Elfyn’s call looks a little incongruous to say the least.  Still, not even Elfyn’s best friends or biggest fans would say that always being “on message” was one of his fortes. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your perspective, I suppose.  For party managers, being “off message” is always likely to be a problem, but for most others it probably depends on whether you agree with what he’s saying or not.

Personally, I agree with Elfyn and think Leanne is wrong on this one.  A party like Plaid has to choose between engaging with the institutions of the state and keeping them at arm’s length.  There are sound arguments for abstentionism, which was long a popular position amongst Irish nationalists.  However, there is little history of abstentionism in Wales, and it seems to me that if you’re going to engage with some institutions of the state you may as well engage with all of them and exercise as much influence as you possibly can.

On the substance of the critique of the existence and nature of the House of Lords itself  however, it would be hard to find any difference between Leanne and myself.  The fear is that appointing members serves to legitimise the institution, but a party which claims only to enter the House of Commons in order to secure Wales’ withdrawal from it can surely apply exactly the same argument to any other institution.  

Whatever, the real question which I wish to address here is the mysterious way in which the institutions of the British establishment work when it comes to the appointment of peers of the realm.

When Plaid chose three nominees for peerages (Dafydd Wigley, Eurfyl ap Gwilym, and Janet Davies), their details were passed through the murky “usual channels” to number 10 - and the then prime minister studiously ignored them.  That was, for a while, the end of the story.  I – and I think many others – believed that we had made our nominations, and that Brown was simply blocking them.

It turned out that we hadn’t actually “nominated” anyone at all; the PM was not ignoring our nominations because there were no nominations to ignore.  This only became clear after the election of Cameron as Prime Minister. 

Shortly after Cameron came to power, Ieuan Wyn Jones had an opportunity to lobby him for the appointment of Dafydd Wigley to the House of Lords.  (Although of course Dafydd had by then withdrawn his name, and was no longer one of Plaid’s nominees – but that’s another story).  Nods were nodded, winks were winked, it was made clear that the party would be allowed to submit one nomination, and in June 2010 I found myself presented with a nomination paper to complete and sign (political nominations have to be completed by party chairs - a revelation to me).

I really hadn’t realised that there was a formal channel available for submitting nominations to an allegedly independent panel.  Perhaps I should have known that – it would be a fair criticism of me that I hadn’t even made the effort to identify whether there was a formal process – but I’ll admit that I didn’t.

Anyway, after a brief hiatus while the NEC agreed to reinstate Dafydd Wigley as a party nominee - a precondition to my signing any nomination - the form was duly completed and submitted and, hey presto, three months later Dafydd’s peerage was duly confirmed after the said “independent panel” had given it their careful consideration.  In essence, despite the lengthy period which appeared to be passing from a public perspective, the actual period between formal nomination and appointment was a very short one.

It neatly illustrates the difference between the written-down formal process - which is the submission of a form, consideration by an independent panel, and appointment or rejection; and the actual process – which depends on a series of nods and winks from the right people before you even get to the starting block. 

Perhaps we should have challenged that more strongly at the time.  With the benefit of hindsight – and hindsight is always a wonderful thing – I think we should have accepted the nod and the wink, but pushed the boundaries by making three nominations at that point rather than just the one.  That would really have forced the establishment to either accept or else formally reject our nominations, rather than two of them remaining in a strange and continuing sort of limbo.

However we did not do that, and unless the other two nominations have been formally submitted since I stood down as Plaid’s chair in July 2010 (completing Wigley’s nomination was one of my final acts), I suspect that the party has only ever nominated one candidate.  So whilst I agree with the substance of what Elfyn says, in that Plaid should be more strongly represented in the second chamber, I’m not convinced that Plaid itself could not do more to achieve that if it really wanted to.  But that probably takes us right back to the question of whether Elfyn was speaking for his leader or not…