Equality and equity are not the same thing

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This week’s speech by Plaid leader Rhun ap Iorwerth has been presented by some as a move “…away from the emphasis on future independence that became predominant during the leadership of his predecessor”. Maybe; at first reading the words certainly give the impression of a leader and a party determined to improve the position of Wales within current structures rather than one committed to changing those structures. However, given that two of the five points in the plan ('Scrap the Barnett formula and enshrine into law an Economic Fairness (Wales) Bill to rebalance the wealth of the UK'; and 'Give Wales the ability to set its own tax bands and rates') depend completely on legislation at Westminster which Plaid acting alone has no hope whatsoever of delivering, and which neither potential future UK government shows any inclination to deliver, it sounds like a way of emphasising the weakness of devolution as much as working within its constraints. And what is that, if not an argument for independence?

Whatever, there was nothing with which I could disagree in four of the five points. However, the fourth point of the five point plan concerned me rather more. “Bring forward legislation that ensures an equal share of public spending across Wales” is entirely within the powers of the Senedd (at least, insofar as it relates to Welsh Government expenditure – UK expenditure is, again, outside of that remit), but is potentially something of a double-edged sword. There is – in the speech as reported at least – a certain lack of detail. Is this to be based on spending per head (in which case, the lion’s share will inevitably continue to go to the south east)? Over what time period would it apply – per annum, per decade? If it’s tied to annual spending, that’s a major obstacle to large localised projects.

And what about the entirely valid critique of the Barnett formula (that it doesn’t take account of need): isn’t there a danger here of replicating that approach within Wales? Perhaps the intention is to talk about an ‘equitable’ share of spending rather than an ‘equal’ share. It’s a harder concept to explain, and it isn’t such a simple sound bite, but it is what Wales actually needs. Given the historic under-investment in parts of the country, any attempt at ‘levelling up’ necessarily requires a deliberately unequal pattern of spending if cash is to be directed at the areas of lowest GDP per head, for instance. It is, of course, precisely that requirement (to redirect spending from the wealthiest areas to the poorest) which has been the rock on which the Tory government’s commitment to ‘levelling up’ has foundered. It might have gone down well in the so-called ‘red wall’, but it went down badly in Tunbridge Wells. In Welsh terms, diverting resources to Gwynedd might go down well in the north and maybe not so well in Cardiff, but that's not a good enough reason not to do it.

It is not enough to talk – as Labour in England are doing, for instance – about ‘growth’ as the magic ingredient which resolves the problem. A rising tide, as the saying goes, does indeed lift all boats, but it doesn’t change the relative size of those boats. An uneven distribution of wealth and opportunity is never going to be solved by increasing the levels of wealth and opportunity for everyone; that requires a redistributive element as well. There is plenty of scope within the other four points of the plan for there to be a plan for redistribution across Wales; but a target of ‘equalising’ spending will undermine that. We need equity, not equality.

Institutional amnesia can affect any organisation

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It’s clear that the UK Government’s plan to ditch all EU-originated legislation by the end of the current year has run into significant difficulties. Whilst ideologues like Jake are demanding that the government stick to its original plan, those responsible for actually implementing it are slowly realising that most of the rules and regulations are there for good reasons, and that simply abandoning them without thinking through a replacement is a really bad idea. It’s highlighting an instance of what is known as “institutional amnesia”, an organisation's inability to recall and use historical knowledge for present-day purposes. Whilst the rules are still there, the reasons for putting them there have often been forgotten.

A lot of organisations suffer from the problem. I’ve worked for large organisations, in both the public and the private sector, which have reams and reams of policies and procedures, all carefully developed to respond to some stimulus or other – sometimes external, such as legislation or a problem very publicly hitting another organisation which they don’t want to repeat themselves, and sometimes internal, such as ensuring that something which has happened is never repeated. One potential result, from direct personal experience with one large employer, is that when a situation arises, all those carefully prepared and shelved policies get ignored because no-one remembers what’s in them or is able to find the relevant needle in the haystack of documentation, and those charged with responding to the situation re-invent their own shiny new wheels to address the problem. And then write a new procedure to cover the future. In simple terms, when organisations forget the ‘why’ which lies behind the ‘what’, they tend to ignore the ‘what’ as well.

If that’s a problem for large, well-resourced organisations under full-time professional management, imagine how much bigger that problem might be for an under-resourced organisation run at least partly by part-time volunteers with frequent changes in both its officers and its committees and groups. Particularly where competing egos and ambitions are in play. Like a political party for instance. And that brings me to Plaid’s recent travails and the report of the working party into the allegations of a toxic culture of misogyny, harassment and bullying. When I read some of the report’s recommendations, I couldn’t help but feel that the party was suffering from a bout of that institutional amnesia which eventually afflicts most organisations. Some of the proposed ‘new’ wheels looked extremely familiar to me. I’m well aware that, during my period as Chair, the party’s rule book got ever longer and more complicated – far too long, according to many – as rules were tweaked and new committees and groups established, invariably in response to an actual or perceived problem. One thing that I learned from that experience is that whilst rules, procedures and processes are very good at documenting what should happen, they are a very poor way of documenting the learning and reasoning which led to those rules and processes in the first place, and over time (to the extent that they are followed at all) the rules are followed with no real understanding of the rationale behind them. And then fall into disuse or get thrown into the nearest convenient bonfire of red tape.

It's not a problem to which I had (or have) a solution, and I don’t immediately see a solution to it in the working party’s report either. Plaid isn’t unique in facing the problem, although other parties making hay is only to be expected. As the report hints, the long-term solution lies somewhere in the area of the collective culture of the organisation, but changing and then maintaining a single cohesive culture is easier said than done. Particularly bearing in mind those egos and ambitions.

What are parties for?

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It’s rather more than half a century since I read Bob McKenzie’s tome on British Political Parties, so my memory of the detail is more than a little hazy. My main takeaway from the book was that the Conservative and Labour parties, despite starting from very different places, had ended up, organizationally at least, in a very similar place. The Conservative Party started in parliament as a grouping of members elected as individuals, and only later set up any organisation outside parliament in the form of local associations to support those individuals. Indeed, as I recall, despite the party having been founded almost two centuries ago, for most of that time, only MPs could join the ‘party’; mere plebs could only join their local association. Labour, on the other hand, was founded outside parliament, as a democratic movement, with the aim of achieving the policy objectives defined by its members. Both have ended up, with the brief aberration of the Corbyn years, as parties largely run by their elected MPs; both leaderships see their memberships as being there to serve them, rather than the other way around.

That which has happened in organisational terms has been reflected in policy terms as well. ‘Policy’ has become that which they say to win votes (and is most definitely not to be confused with what they will do if actually elected). It’s an exaggeration (to which I’ve sometimes been prone myself) to argue that there is ‘no’ difference between them, but the difference between vicious uncaring austerity on the one hand and austerity with a caring face and a few minor mitigations on the other is hardly a difference of ideological outlook. The point is that, on all the main points of neoliberal economics, the two parties are singing from the same hymn sheet, even if one is the tenor and the other the bass. For both of them, the only conceivable answer to the question ‘what are political parties for?’ has become ‘ensuring the election of this gang rather than that gang’ instead of presenting voters with any sort of real choice of futures.

It leads to articles like this one from the Guardian, where the author argues that the Labour Party leadership has a duty to restrict the influence of mere members on its policies and leaders. Far better to let MPs be the judge, apparently. There are similar murmurings within the Conservative Party about the dangers of allowing ordinary members any sort of role in selecting their leader. (Although, after the Truss debacle, it’s easy to see why people might think that.) It’s the sort of view of what political parties are about which leads to this sort of nonsense, advocating that the SNP should drop their demand for independence and choose some other mission in the light of their failure to win over a clear majority. It reminds me of Phil Williams’s old story about the man who came up to him and said, “If only you’d drop this nonsense about independence, Plaid Cymru would sweep the Valleys”. Well, yes. Or, perhaps, maybe. It's not something that’s ever been tried, although there have been periods where it seemed that some Plaid figures were at least flirting with the idea. There was another article by Martin Shipton in the Western Mail a week or so ago (unable to find it online) about Plaid’s launch of its new strategy. It contained a number of valid points and criticisms, but one of his points was that Plaid’s new platform looked remarkably similar to the previous one. Both that and the Telegraph miss the point: if a party believes that its proposals are the right ones for the country in which it operates, failure to persuade the populace at large doesn’t make them the wrong ones. Unless, of course, you start from the prevailing Labour-Tory belief that parties are just about getting elected, not about what they do afterwards.

Some argue that we are in a period of post-ideological politics, where minor differences of approach are all that there are. That is testimony to the success of capitalist ideology in convincing enough people that it isn’t an ideology at all. (Spoiler: it is.) And in the case of the UK, an electoral system which polarises people into two main parties, both of which believe that they are fighting for voters exclusively in the so-called ‘centre’, reinforces the expectation that the future will always be much like the past. Breaking through that is never going to be easy, but it’s an absolute certainty that accepting the basic premise is not the way of doing it.

Domestic violence is everyone's business

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A guy I once worked with was utterly shocked (along with the rest of his family) when his sister was killed by her husband; they hadn’t known that there were any issues at all between the pair. I remember his words to me at the time: “No-one ever knows what goes on behind closed doors”. When it comes to domestic violence, there are only ever two people who really know what happened, and even they will have different versions of events. Plaid seems to have got itself into more than a little bit of difficulty in its response to the assault by MP Jonathan Edwards on his wife, and the party’s response seems to have led to some uncomradely comments, not to say bitterness and dispute, amongst the members, judging only from the public comments I’ve seen on Facebook and elsewhere. Bearing in mind the words of that erstwhile work colleague, I don’t know enough about the detail of what actually happened to comment on the original event. There are some general political issues, though.

Firstly, it seems that Plaid’s disciplinary rules don’t actually allow the party to distinguish, in the way that the NEC attempted to do, between re-admission to the party and re-admission to the parliamentary group. From my own past extensive involvement with the party’s rules, that doesn’t surprise me: there are always new situations which those drawing up the rules failed to foresee and allow for. It’s why the rule book ends up as a lengthy and unwieldy document as new rules are invented to plug any gaps identified. In principle, though, expecting higher standards from those representing a party – any party – as a candidate for public office than are expected of ordinary members is not at all an unreasonable position to take. It’s part of the reason parties, including Plaid, use some sort of selection or vetting process to ensure that only suitable individuals get selected as candidates, even if such procedures can never be perfect.

Secondly, society as a whole often seems to apply dual standards to the question of domestic violence. It’s hard to imagine another violent crime in which the forgiveness of the victim (even if later regretted) is considered to be some sort of mitigation which diminishes the seriousness of the initial assault. There are power differentials as well as genuine feelings which can drive 'forgiveness' in  such circumstances. No violent assault by one person on another is ever, or should ever be, ‘just a matter for the individuals involved’. It is understandable that, in a domestic situation where the police believe that reconciliation is possible, attempts are made to resolve the issue by issuing a caution rather than a prosecution in order to spare families the trauma of a court case, but it is wrong to assume that the issue of a caution in itself somehow makes the case less serious. The decision between a caution and a prosecution isn’t simply based on the perceived degree of seriousness of the offence. And a perpetrator doesn’t somehow become a victim if the offence affects his or her future career, although that’s what some seem to be arguing.

Thirdly, parties need to be wary of trying to hold other parties to a higher standard than they expect of their own politicians. Arguing that a man fined for breaking lockdown rules should be forced out of office, but a man cautioned for domestic violence should be allowed to ‘move on’ and get back to normal is not a good look.

There is a debate to be had, of course, about whether someone committing a crime should have that held against him or her for ever, or whether society should be prepared at some point to forgive and allow the individual to return to normal life, particularly where contrition is genuine. I’ve always been in the latter camp on that question, but returning to normal life as an accepted member of society isn’t necessarily the same thing as going back to what the individual was doing before. There are some roles where different criteria are going to be applied, even if those roles aren’t formally identified, and the criteria aren’t written down anywhere. Ultimately, it’s a matter of opinion and judgement, and people will make different judgements. That difference of opinion seems to be at the heart of the uncomradely comments to which I referred above.

I haven’t been a member of Plaid for the last 12 years, and I no longer have any involvement with the rules or processes which the party applies, so there’s a sense in which it’s not my business. I do, though, live in the Carmarthen East constituency (the boundary with Carmarthen West is at the end of our drive) and I, like others, will have to decide at some point for whom to vote. It would be naïve for any party, or any individual, to believe that the events which have transpired will not affect the decisions made by individual electors.

Moving towards a new norm?

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A few days ago, the Welsh branch of the Conservative and Unionist Party blasted the agreement between Labour and Plaid as a “move towards Welsh independence”. I can’t have been the only independentista to read the report and sigh, “If only!”. The rather, how shall I put it, ‘overblown’ claim from Plaid’s leader that this is some sort of “down-payment on independence” can only have added to the Tories’ sense of outrage, a sense which is easily triggered, and seems to have only two settings – extremely high and totally over the top. In reality, of course, the content of the agreement in itself has little or nothing to do with independence, and will advance it not a jot.

There may be another sense, however, in which it is indeed a step along the road, and that is not about the content but about the very fact of the agreement’s existence. It marks a move, initiated by Labour on this occasion in circumstances where some might consider that it wasn’t entirely necessary, to a more mature politics in Wales, one which recognises that in a proportional system (soon to become more proportional, hopefully, as a result of the agreement, although it’s yet to be seen how far Labour will move in practice towards STV), absolute majorities of seats without absolute majorities of votes are at best unlikely, and that some form of co-operation between parties needs to become the norm. Whilst the Tories (and the London leadership of the Labour Party) are stuck in the name-calling ‘we can never work with *separatists / *socialists / *Tories’ (*delete according to your own prejudices) mode of politics, Welsh Labour and Plaid have shown a willingness to move towards the much more European style of politics where post-electoral negotiations and agreements are the mark of a normal grown-up democracy. As Cynog Dafis has pointed out, the idea that everything in the agreement might be delivered in a single three year period is unlikely, underlining the fact that co-operation needs to be seen as a long term norm rather than a one-off fix. It is in that sense of building in more maturity that it might indeed be a step along the road to strengthening the powers of the Senedd and a step further down the long road to independence. The Tories might be slightly right, even if for completely the wrong reason.

It is a pity that both parties (Plaid having been more guilty than Labour on this score) went into the election denying any intention of coming to any agreement with anyone, each party pretending that it could end up forming a government with an overall majority all by itself. The shadow cast by the First Past The Post electoral system used for Westminster elections is a long and dark one. Coming to an agreement after the event can (and will) then be presented by opponents as some sort of U-turn, no matter how the proponents try to finesse the wording. Unfortunately, it looks as though it may yet take some time for the media (and the parties) to understand that the new norm makes trying to rule things out, absolutely, in advance a somewhat silly approach, and that they need, instead, to help the wider public understand the probable outcomes and consequences of proportional voting systems. Obsessing in advance about the precise implications of any particular post-election agreement is unhelpful, because it’s nigh-on impossible to accurately second-guess the outcome of any election and it’s a diversion from a proper examination of the programmes of the respective parties.

The fact that some sort of post-electoral agreement ought to become the accepted norm does not, of course, mean that any particular agreement is necessarily the right thing to do at the right time. My own scepticism in 2007 about both the One Wales agreement and the aborted All Wales Accord was on the details, not the principle. It is entirely to be expected that members of both parties should hold differing views on the detail and be debating those differences. Whilst the current agreement includes a lot of policies which will be acceptable to both Labour and Plaid members and supporters, the degree to which it will be a ‘success’ is hard to prejudge. The detail of the small print in an agreement – to say nothing of the things that aren’t written anywhere – will always leave plenty of scope for disagreement and disappointment in one party or the other. By way of example, one of the biggest running sores within Plaid over the One Wales agreement was over student fees, and it wasn’t because of what the agreement did say (no increase for three years), but because of what it didn’t say (what happens in year four?).

It’s a bold political move for Mark Drakeford and Labour, and a pragmatic one for Adam Price and Plaid. Only history will tell us whether, and to what extent, it actually takes Wales forward.

Predictable Commission outcomes

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The Welsh Labour and Unionist Party must be truly delighted with the way that the two Welsh opposition parties, Plaid and the Tories, have responded to the setting up of a constitutional commission in Wales. They could hardly have hoped for more. Whilst we don’t yet know who all the members of the commission will be, we can be absolutely certain that it will not contain a majority of supporters of independence, whatever the more swivel-eyed faction of the Tory Party might say. A unionist government is simply not, ever, going to appoint a commission full of independentistas to advise it on the best constitutional future for Wales. However, the statement that it will be allowed to ‘consider’ independence as an option seems to have been enough to gain the support of Plaid as well as the entirely predictable condemnation of the Tories. Perfect. For Labour.

For some independentistas, the arguments for independence are so overwhelming that they have a tendency to believe that all they need to do is to present those arguments to impartial observers drawn from those whom the Labour and Unionist Party believe to be the great and the good of Wales, and the argument will have been won. Naïve is an inadequate word to describe that belief, not least because the panel will not be one of impartial observers who have no preconceived notions of the ‘correct’ answer. Whilst including a sprinkling of people who may* be independentistas as members of the panel lends its work a degree of credibility amongst independentistas, there is a danger in transferring that credibility to the entire membership of a panel whose collective conclusions could probably be written in advance, especially considering their remit to consult widely and ascertain Welsh opinion on the matter.

I predict that they will conclude that:

a)   There is only minority support for independence in Wales,

b)   Wales is, in any event, not strong enough economically to be an independent country,

c)    Most people in Wales want devolution to succeed,

d)   The devolution settlement should be tidied up with a few extra powers devolved,

e)   Existing powers should somehow be set into concrete so that they can’t be withdrawn by London on a whim,

f)     Federalism would be a really good way forward, and

g)   All Tories are evil.

OK, the last one won’t appear in the printed report; it will merely be an unstated sub-text. And maybe there will be a minority report distancing itself from the formal conclusions, although I would expect that, in appointing members, the government will be looking for people who will be able to come to a consensus. After its publication, the report will be ignored in London by both the Conservative and Unionist Party and the British Labour and Unionist Party, but the Welsh Labour and Unionist Party will use it to justify continuing to flog its dead federalist horse, and other unionists will join them in emphasising that part of the report’s conclusions which sets out why independence any time soon is a very bad idea.

The point is not that setting up a commission is an inherently bad idea, but that any ‘official’ commission will inevitably be set up by those in power at the time – and the membership will reflect that. A consultant, it is said, is a person you call in to borrow your watch to tell you the time, and that is what this commission will do. What independentistas need to remember is that there are no short-cuts to independence; the only route is by winning the support of the people of Wales. Weighty evidence given to commissions might help them to clarify things in their own minds but it does little in itself to win the support of the mass of the people. A pro-independence government could set up a similar commission composed of different members who would come to a very different set of conclusions, but that government does not yet exist, and more importantly neither does the majority opinion in Wales which would allow such a government to be formed. Until it does, independentistas should be very wary about placing their faith in a process designed from the outset to provide credibility and support for the unionist position, let alone one recommending an impractical and unimplementable form of federalism devised solely to sustain the position of the Labour Party.

*Or may not – whilst I know Laura McAllister, one of the co-chairs, and respect her academic knowledge and experience, it’s a few years since I last bumped into her, and I have no idea of her current stance on the issue of independence; having been a Plaid candidate in the fairly distant past by no means makes someone automatically a supporter of independence today.

Usurping Plaid's role?

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There was a Conservative candidate in the Rhondda in the 1970s who complained that he got fewer votes than there were members of the local Con clubs (that’s Con for Constitutional, the brand that they used to use a lot in areas where the word ‘Conservative’ was regarded as an expletive). It had to be pointed out to him that possession of snooker tables was a bigger drive of membership numbers than any association with a political viewpoint. In fairness to him, though, he did at least recognise that putting his political views into action depended on fighting elections and winning votes.

As this story indicates, that’s by no means something that can be taken for granted amongst the current day crop of Conservatives in Wales. Adrian Mason correctly identifies that, as things stand, the probability of his party gaining power in the Senedd in the foreseeable future is as close to zero as makes no difference. His solution is that the UK government should simply ignore the Senedd and/or work around it, and implement Tory policies in devolved areas in Wales anyway. His dislike of permanent Labour government might well be something that I share, even if we would probably disagree about who should replace Labour, but my starting point is that, if a Labour government is what people vote for, a Labour government – for all its failings – is what they should get. It’s an outcome which could and should be mitigated by a move to full STV, which would make it unlikely that any single party could gain a majority in the Senedd and therefore encourage more searching for consensus and agreement, but getting the representatives you vote for is a fundamental aspect of any democracy. It’s still unlikely to help the Tories much though; even with recent changes to electoral patterns, Conservatism is still very much a minority pursuit in Wales (as a driver of voting behaviour anyway – I suspect that many Conservative attitudes are rather more widely-held than the party’s electoral support suggests).

The idea that a party which accepts that it can win neither a Welsh election nor a majority of Welsh seats in Westminster goes on to claim that it has the right to implement its policies in Wales anyway on the basis of winning a majority of seats in England goes to the very heart of the problem with devolution. As a statement of the legal position, it is absolutely correct – all Welsh government powers are held by dint of the ‘permission’ of Westminster, and that permission can be withdrawn or over-ridden at will. But treating Westminster as the only legitimate source of power, and the majority of the Welsh electorate as a voice which can therefore be ignored (no matter how well that fits with the constitutional position), is a direct incentive to people to consider the alternative, which is independence. There has long been a view amongst some that Plaid Cymru’s role in Wales wasn’t to lead Wales to independence so much as to push Labour into doing that. Is it possible that that role has now been usurped by the Conservative Party, some of whose members seem set on a course, by accident rather than design, which will provoke Labour in Wales into ever more pro-independence positions?

Hoping for the best isn't good enough

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There was a time when a political leader who declared one thing to be true at breakfast time and then said the opposite by tea-time was the preserve of dystopian novels, but in Johnsonian Britain it’s the new normal. And despite him having done the same thing several times already, his loyal sycophants are still gullible enough to defend his first position all morning and afternoon before defending the second all evening. They seem incapable of even realising that they’re being played. The latest iteration of this was on Monday over schools in England, when they were mostly required to open on Monday (having been threatened with legal action just a fortnight earlier if they did not do so), only to be told at the end of the day that they would then be required to shut for at least a month.

In justifying his pivot, he repeated his claim that schools are basically safe, because children are unlikely to suffer serious illness as a result of catching the virus but added what was apparently, to him at least, an entirely new factor – namely that spreading the virus amongst children, even if they showed suffered few or no symptoms, risked transmitting it to their families. Who’d have thought it? Apart, that is, from the scientific community who’d been warning him of this for weeks, and anyone who is able to apply very simple logic to the way in which the autumn uptick in cases began shortly after the September return to schools. In fairness, neither of those categories can reasonably be applied to Johnson, and expecting him to read or understand briefing papers which are not in Latin or Greek and do not heap unmitigated praise upon him is wholly unrealistic.

The question to be asked is not whether schools are ‘safe’ for learners and teachers, it is whether keeping schools open threatens the safety of the wider community. The problem is not the risk to children, which is low (although not zero) or even to teachers which is also low (albeit higher than the risk to children): it is that mixing infectious but asymptomatic children with other children can – and clearly does – spread the virus from one family to another outside the school setting. And, despite the PM’s posturing, the obvious didn’t only become so at lunch time on Monday.

It isn’t only the English Government which labours under a rather narrow definition of what is involved in making schools safe, however. Yesterday, both of Wales’ main opposition parties (Plaid and the Tories), called for the Welsh government to give priority to teachers for vaccination in order to reopen schools quickly. But if the problem is the way in which the virus spreads amongst the children, vaccinating the teachers is never going to be the solution. That’s not to argue that teachers shouldn’t be given priority – if we, as a society, expect people to continue working in a potentially hazardous environment, then it is reasonable to give them as much protection as possible. It’s simply that doing that doesn’t solve the real problem. (And whilst it’s easy enough to call for added priority for one group, it’s a lot harder to decide which group should be deprioritised as a result, despite that being the inevitable consequence of limited availability. No surprise that neither party seemed to be in any rush to go near that one.)

Given the need to be seen to be offering something, it’s understandable why politicians would seize on that which is (comparatively) easy to do, not least because addressing the real problem is far from being straightforward. If we knew that vaccinating people stopped transmission and infection as well as minimising the effects of infection, then vaccinating pupils as well as teachers would be a good starting point. But there is, as yet, no evidence to support that proposition – which means that we could vaccinate every child and every teacher in every school and have no impact whatsoever on transmission within schools. That leaves only two currently viable options. The first is to keep schools closed for as long as is necessary to ensure that the virus is at least as controlled as it was following the first lockdown (and then repeating the process as and when necessary), and the second is to assume that this is going to be a long haul and invest time, effort, and money in setting up alternative approaches to educating children, approaches which it is already clear would be required for at least a year, and possibly longer. The politicians currently in power – in Cardiff as in London – seem to be showing no appetite for either of those approaches, with all effort going instead into finding ways of returning schools to something near normal as soon as possible.

It might, to the extent that we are prepared to give people the benefit of any doubt, be forgivable that an assumption was made after the first lockdown that the situation was under control and education could be resumed in September. But there is no excuse for the time lost since the virus started to take hold again in September for the lack of planning and preparation for an extended period of school closures. And there is even less excuse for the time still being lost today as the politicians continue to seek a quick fix instead of looking for longer term alternatives. “Learning online” is a major part of the answer, but in itself is oversimplistic, since it ignores the lack of equity of access let alone facilities in the home. Jeremy Corbyn’s widely mocked election policy of superfast broadband connections for all looks even more sensible now than it did to some of us at the time, but it cannot be delivered in days or weeks and we also need equipment and facilities in the home. And how do we ensure direct interaction between teachers and pupils? Should teachers give more of their time in smaller groups to the most disadvantaged, rather than simply teaching online groups of 30 or sending out work packs? None of these are easy questions, and it would be naïve to expect instant answers. But the longer we go without asking the questions, the more we are effectively depending on a vague hope that things are going to improve as if by magic. That may be a fair summary of Johnson’s approach for England, but it should not be the approach in Wales. We can and should do better than that.

Is the silliness deliberate?

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Yesterday, both the main opposition parties in the Senedd, Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives, criticised Mark Drakeford for being too timid and too slow in tightening restrictions to control the pandemic. It’s fair criticism. Drakeford is in serious danger of being infected with the procrastination virus which is now rampant in Downing Street, although he is, rather, between a rock and a hard place in trying to both protect the population of Wales and maintain a ‘four countries’ approach. There’s no real surprise in Plaid wanting to see him being more independent of Johnson and England’s lackadaisical decision-making, but there’s something more than a little odd about the Tories apparently seeking the same thing.

It was Harold Wilson who said that a week is a long time in politics, so a fortnight is a very, very long time for a politician. It’s not so long for most of us though, and it really is only a fortnight since both Plaid and the Tories were criticising Drakeford for applying what they saw as excessive restrictions on the hospitality sector. It’s a criticism which hasn’t exactly aged well. Adding a charge of giving out mixed messages to yesterday’s criticism of Drakeford is not a good look in the circumstances.

The Conservatives possibly have an excuse, of sorts, if the guidance issued to party activists in Northamptonshire has been more widely shared than has been reported to date. According to the advice, activists should simply “…say the first thing that comes into your head … It’ll probably be nonsense, but it knocks your opponent out of his stride and takes away his headline. You may get a bad headline saying that you spoke something silly, but you can live that down. Meanwhile your opponent is knocked off the news-feed”. I don’t know whether similar guidance has been issued to the party’s members in Wales. I can only judge by what they do and say, and on that basis it looks at least plausible. But we are not in a good place in the middle of a pandemic if one of the main political parties believes that saying things which are both silly and untrue is a sensible and valid strategy.

Eggs, coffee, pizza, and pints

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The Scotch Egg saga demonstrates how easy it is to pick holes in the detail of the English government’s guidance on the pandemic. I admit that I’m still unsure whether ordering a Scotch Egg with a pint in England and then not eating the egg is a crime or not. And if it is, how much of the egg can be left uneaten whilst still avoiding the danger of prosecution? The story about Manchester’s “f*****g massive” pizza slices is another example. Expecting precise clarity in answer to every such question is utterly unrealistic, although that won’t stop opposition politicians from pretending that they do expect such clarity in order to score a point or two.

Closer to home, we had Plaid’s leader asking yesterday “How can four people from four different households having coffee together be safer than two people from the same household having a pint?”. It looks like a sensible question, but it seems to be predicated on an assumption that in drawing the lines between what is and what is not allowed, the government has carefully considered the safety implications of both (and numerous other) scenarios and come to a conclusion about relative safety. It has done no such thing, of course – nor could it be reasonably expected to do so. I don’t know which of the two is the safer, but I’m sure it’s not the right question to ask. What we do know is that ALL social contact carries a danger of spreading infection, and the important thing is to reduce the level of such contact. Whether the government is outlawing the right things is an entirely valid question to be asking, and one on which people will have different opinions. Perhaps it really would be better to allow the beer and ban the coffee, although that might merely upset a different group of people. But setting one scenario as a baseline and then allowing everything which is considered to be as safe as, or safer than, that is a recipe for greatly extended social contact, and that is what the government is trying to avoid. Having some apparently ridiculous outcomes is probably inevitable.

The concern about the future of the hospitality sector is legitimate, and it is a point which has been made by the Tories as well as Plaid. But seeking to protect that industry by allowing it to open more widely rather than by properly compensating the industry for being forced to limit its operations or even close completely carries a risk of increased transmission. It’s the wrong solution to a correctly identified problem. Identifying and mocking some of the curious outcomes of the current restrictions is easy enough to do. It’s probably even good politics, striking a chord with the public - especially the lockdown sceptical part of the public. It isn’t good infection control though.

Tories' real success is setting the terms of debate

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I mentioned a few days ago the problem with Labour’s increasingly transactional approach to politics, but it isn’t just Labour who suffer that problem.  It seems to me at times that Plaid are suffering from a very similar form of transactionalism.

In Labour’s case, policies which might, in many cases, be based on a socialist view of what the world should be are sold not on the basis of building that better world but on the basis of making individual electors better off.  The result is that people can indeed be persuaded to support the policies, but support for those policies doesn’t lead to support for the political philosophy underpinning them.  And if someone else comes along with a better or more credible offer…

In the same way, many of Plaid’s policies are based, honestly enough, on the sort of society which the party would like to build after independence, but they are, once again, presented on the basis of an appeal to people to think about what might benefit them.  The result is the same – even if the electors support the policies, that support does not translate into support for the underpinning policy, namely independence.

Labour can often sound as if it is offering the benefits of socialism whilst not asking people to buy into the concept, and Plaid as though it is offering the benefits of independence without buying into the concept – what’s not to like about that?  Apart, of course, from the fact that it isn’t credible.  Part of the reason for following such an approach is that many in Labour aren’t socialists at all, just people who believe that the government should provide a few services and act as an occasional referee to the market – and there are, similarly, more than a handful in Plaid who aren’t independentistas, just ardent devolutionists.  But that isn’t the only reason; it’s also to do with the way elections are framed.

The parties do, of course, face a tough dilemma. In an electoral context in which the media are going to present all manifestos as ‘offers’ to the public of what the parties will do for them, it is difficult to move the debate on to a wider question about what sort of society we want to be and how we get there.  For both parties, it would necessarily involve challenging the premise that people are, or should be, driven primarily – or even exclusively – by pursuit of their own selfish personal interests (at best expanded to the interests of their immediate families) rather than by any wider consideration about any greater good.  But failure to challenge that premise serves only to reinforce it, ultimately making the task harder.  The great success of the Tories in modern times isn’t their electoral victories, or the way in which they’ve managed to reverse their predecessors’ policies, but their success in moving the Overton window in their direction.  Parties seeking real change which allow themselves to be constrained – between elections as well as during campaigns – by the outcome of that success have only themselves to blame for their failure.  Real change depends on changing the terms of the debate, not just outbidding other parties.

Will it make a difference?

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Whichever decision Plaid took about standing in the Brecon and Radnor by-election was always going to be divisive for the party’s members and supporters.  There have been those arguing in favour of standing and those arguing against; someone was going to be unhappy either way.

Personally, I’m not sure how much difference it will make.  Doing the mathematics of looking at how people voted in the past and adding up the votes for ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ in a way which gives a majority for a particular outcome is easy enough to do; but mathematical theory isn’t the same thing as electoral fact.  It is by no means certain that people who support a party will vote for a different party just because ‘their’ party asks them to.  And when a party has such a low vote in a constituency as Plaid does in Brecon and Radnor, the probability is that a higher proportion of those voters are committed to the party’s fundamental aim than is the case where the party enjoys much wider support.  That means that asking them to vote for a party fiercely opposed to the stated aims of ‘their’ party may turn out to be counterproductive. 

There are a wider range of policy considerations as well.  If I were an elector in the constituency, I’d have serious reservations about voting for a party which is vehemently opposed to Welsh independence and which supports the retention of nuclear weapons, to name just two policy areas – without even starting to think about how honest and trustworthy they are, having seen their approach to campaigning over many years.  (Not for nothing are they widely known as the Fib Dems.)  Whilst it’s clear what the Lib Dems might gain from the decision, the political gains for Plaid are far from clear, and assisting the party which most threatens one of their own seats to regain some of its credibility could turn out to be a colossal mistake.

And yet…  The looming threat of Brexit is an historic turning point, and I can fully understand why any party which is serious about putting Wales first would seek to act in a way which could help to change the direction of travel on such a defining issue.  And changing the way politics in Wales works necessarily requires an occasional bold decision; there’s no gain without an element of risk.  It’s a pity, though, that an outdated and unfit for purpose electoral system doesn’t do more to facilitate a switching of votes by allowing people to place parties and candidates in order of preference rather than requiring one or more different viewpoints to voluntarily remove themselves from the field of battle.

Whether it’s the ‘right’ decision or not remains to be seen – and it will be many years before that becomes clear, because the implications go well beyond the counting of the votes on 1^st August.  Those claiming that it’s a massive own goal and those claiming that it’s a defining change in Welsh politics are both speaking too soon and projecting their own preconceptions onto the decision.  I rather suspect that it will turn out to be neither of those and will actually make little difference, more’s the pity.

What's the purpose of a confederation?

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There is nothing particularly new in the idea of a ‘Britannic Confederation’ as outlined by Plaid’s leader, Adam Price, last week.  In one form or another, the idea has been around for a very long time – I seem to remember Gwynfor Evans using the same term in the 1960s and 1970s.  It is clear that, whatever paths the different nations of these islands choose, their shared geography and history make it natural and desirable that close economic co-operation should continue.  And as Adam has pointed out, the Benelux model is an interesting one to study.

But – and there’s always at least one ‘but’ – the idea is not without its problems.  Whilst it’s true that Luxembourg is much smaller than either Belgium or the Netherlands, there is not, amongst those three countries, anything like the same disparity in size as exists between the countries of the UK.  One of the biggest obstacles to any form of federal or confederal structure in the UK is that one component – England – accounts for 85% of the population, and an even higher proportion of GDP.  Recognising that fact in voting power in any supranational structure leads to dominance; but failure to recognise it means England having to accept more or less ‘equal’ status with very much smaller nations.  The former looks undesirable from a Welsh perspective and the latter unachievable.

It’s true, of course, (assuming that that not insignificant obstacle could be overcome) that whether the UK is or is not a member state of the EU makes no difference at all to the practicability of a Britannic Confederation, and I understand (and agree with) Adam’s assertion that “…it will be made much more pressing and necessary if Britain were to leave”.  That does, though, highlight what I see as the two biggest problems with the proposal. 

The first is that such a unit can only be entirely in or entirely out of the EU; it cannot have some members in and others out.  A Britannic Confederation of the sort under discussion simply would not work if Scotland (to choose a country not quite at random) were to pursue continued EU membership whilst EnglandandWales chose not to.  It limits our future freedom of choice.  And the second goes to the heart of my concern about Brexit from an independentista perspective: outside the EU, the Welsh economy, it seems to me, is likely to be bound ever more tightly to the English economy and will, in practice, have to follow the same rules and regulations.  Some sort of Confederation (depending on how the population disparity is resolved and which decisions are taken where) might give us a marginally greater role in setting those rules and regulations than simply having a handful of MPs in the Westminster parliament, but the real decisions will still be made by the dominant ‘partner’, and there is a danger that such a confederation reinforces rather than weakens that.  It's a very poor substitute for a Welsh seat at the EU table.

There’s another reason for my agreement with Adam’s contention that the need is more pressing outside the EU - or rather for me agreeing with the corollary, namely that it’s less pressing within the EU.  As a member state of the EU, Wales would have its place and voice alongside the other countries of the current UK, creating a different context in which to maintain close co-operation.  Just as I wonder whether Benelux would ever have been created if it hadn’t predated the EEC, so I also wonder what purpose a Britannic Confederation would serve if all the countries of the UK were full independent member states of the EU.  Why would we need to invent such a structure in that context?  It strikes me as adding a wholly unnecessary extra level of government into the mix.

That, though, supposes that my definition of ‘necessary’ is shared by others, and brings me to the real question about why such a proposition is being put forward at all.  Is it driven (as superficially appears to be the case) by economics and the desire for close co-operation, or is it driven by a political imperative to make the end of the UK look somehow less final?  Is it a way of taking decisions which, for whatever reason, ‘need’ to be taken collectively for a particular geographical area, or is it an attempt to provide a comforting level of continuity by arguing that there is a purpose to a UK level of government after all?  I can’t help but suspect that the driver is more a political nervousness about independence than a real conviction that the UK simply needs to be reimagined.

Interpreting the vote

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The IWA website, Click on Wales, published an article yesterday by the Chair of Wales for Europe, Geraint Talfan Davies, setting out his views on the forthcoming (maybe) European elections.  There was much in his analysis with which I entirely agree, particularly his assertion that Wales has little political leverage as a result of the way we have chosen to vote over the years.  He references particularly the 1979 vote on devolution itself and the 2016 referendum on the EU.  I’d be tempted to add all the times when Wales has voted by a majority to support a Labour Party whose main interest is, and always has been, in gaining power at UK level rather than in winning – let alone exercising – significant leverage for Wales.  I can understand, however, why his criticism of Labour is rather less direct and more nuanced than that.

I also understand, and find myself entirely in sympathy with, the frustration he expresses at the failure of the pro-Remain parties in Wales to find common cause for an election which will surely be fought largely on the issue of future membership or not of the EU.  I agree with his assertion that this is the over-riding immediate issue facing us (albeit probably not for exactly the same reasons) and I share his frustration that a fragmentation of the pro-EU vote will facilitate what he describes, rightly, as “the prospect of a disruptive UKIP/Brexit Party presence in the European Parliament”.  However, despite all that basis for potential agreement with his analysis, I still find the expectation that Plaid Cymru, the Green Party, the Lib Dems and Change UK could somehow arrange a combined campaign for the European elections to be profoundly unrealistic.

It isn’t about what he describes (rather unfairly, I thought) as “the narcissism of small differences” between the parties named; the differences between the parties concerned are rather greater than those between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.  Perhaps many years as a member of one of the parties concerned gives me a different perspective, but what looks like simple logic from the point of view of an organisation campaigning for one single defined aim doesn’t look anything like as logical from the point of view of the leaders of any of the relevant parties.  In this particular context, ‘winning a majority for a pro-Remain position’ is an eminently desirable outcome on election day itself – but how does it translate into the subsequent behaviour of the member or members elected once they enter the parliament?  Such an alliance would almost certainly win one of the four seats from Wales, and maybe even two, but from which party or parties would they come – and what would be the expectation of the way in which they would then try to represent the very different views of those who voted for them in the first place? 

My questions illustrate the difficulties of using an election for members of a parliament to try and answer an entirely different question, and no matter how much I want the same answer to that question, I can see the difficulties of trying to get it via this route.  It isn’t obstinacy or selfishness which drives parties to behave as they do, it is an attempt to express differing perspectives in an imperfect political system, recognising that those elected will serve for up to five years (depending on what happens with Brexit), during which time they will have to ‘choose a side’ in hundreds of debates and arguments on which the parties hold very different views.  We, the voters, would have absolutely no clarity in advance what position our elected members would take on any of those questions if they were elected solely on the basis of an anti-Brexit platform.

Even if it would have been possible in principle to hammer out some sort of minimal agreed manifesto between parties (let alone agree who the candidates would be and how they could be democratically selected by a multiplicity of parties acting in concert), the timescale between the announcement that the elections were to take place and the close of nominations on 25th April simply did not permit the detailed and complex negotiations which would have been required.  What is, perhaps, a more realistic and achievable ambition (and something which, maybe, Wales for Europe could broker?) is to draw up some sort of ‘lowest common denominator’ statement about the way forward for Brexit, which all the relevant parties could sign up to, so that their combined total of votes could reasonably be interpreted as a vote for a particular outcome whilst the pro-Brexit parties remain fragmented.  Failure to achieve even that would be, for me, a much more valid reason for criticism of parties than their failure to agree a common slate of candidates.

Changing who pays the taxes

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In the economic plan which he has produced as part of his pitch for the leadership of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price has put forward a number of ideas for change.  The media coverage has concentrated, perhaps unfairly, on just one of those, his proposals on taxation, with the headline suggestion of a significant cut in income tax.  I find it a little strange that a proposal for an overall increase in total taxation has been seen by some as a tax-cutting proposal (the proposed new land tax would raise more income than the proposed tax cuts), but it is an interesting proposal nevertheless.

There’s a long history to the idea of a land value tax, which is the cornerstone of the proposed changes.  It’s an idea which has been espoused in the past by a range of economists.  There are some practical problems (one of the reasons why it is not widely implemented across the world) which need to be resolved at a detailed level, but in principle it’s an idea I’d support.

As suggested earlier, moving tax from income to land doesn’t per se reduce the total tax take from the economy, but it does, to an extent at least, change who pays the tax.  When it comes to those who own the land on which their house is built, whether income tax or land tax is more favourable to them as individuals depends on the detail and the rates at which taxes are set; there’s no inherent reason why one form of taxation would leave them better off than the other.  But the key point is that, whilst some individuals would be better off and some worse off, overall the suggested plan (given the extra 1p on income tax to fund education) is for an increase in tax, albeit distributed rather differently.  And given the problems facing Wales, I wouldn’t oppose an overall increase in taxation anyway.

In that context, I was more than a little surprised to see the claim being made by Adam that “…cutting the basic income tax rate even to 11% will provide a major economic boost to the Welsh economy through increased spending”.  This strikes me as a very strange claim, since any boost to the economy generated by a decrease in one tax is likely to be more than matched by a hit to the economy generated by an increase in another.  The total amount of money in non-state hands which is available for spending actually reduces under these proposals.

Even supposing that there were to be a net increase in the money available for people, rather than the government, to spend, an assumption that people spending it rather than the government doing so boosts the economy is open to challenge at the very least.  If the government spends £1 billion pounds, that provides exactly the same boost to the economy as if millions of individuals each spend an extra £1 billion between them; at macro-economic level, there is no difference between the impact of private and public spend.  The goods and services being purchased are essentially the same, regardless of who purchases them.  And actually, it might be worse than that; the theory that more money to spend = more spending only really applies in a theoretical world.  In the real world, people who have gone into debt or run down their savings may prefer to pay down that debt or top up their savings rather than spend.  And even those who do spend may opt for an extra foreign holiday, providing a boost to someone else’s economy rather than Wales’.  Such factors mean that, in practice, government spending may well provide a bigger boost to the economy than private spending under a particular set of circumstances.  And it would certainly be on different priorities.

I can understand a political desire to present the proposal as a tax cut for working people, but that doesn’t strike me as an entirely honest presentation.  I simply don’t accept the premise that leaving people with more money in their pockets after tax can, of itself, provide an economic boost; the other changes have to be taken into account as well.  There’s a danger that it provokes a political debate about who can keep taxes lowest rather than about who should be paying which taxes and on what basis.  Taking a basically sound idea and presenting it in a way which plays to the Tory agenda of low income taxes doesn’t look particularly radical to me and misses an opportunity to debate who should be paying which taxes in order to raise the revenue required to provide government services.

Planning for independence

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As part of his campaign to lead Plaid Cymru, Adam Price announced a ‘seven step plan’ at the weekend, setting out the route to independence as he sees it.  It’s pleasing to see someone making an attempt to set out how we get from here to there, but when I read the detail, it looks more like a rehash of Plaid’s existing position (that independence is an aspiration for the future and anyway Wales is currently too poor) and a plan for a political party to seek power within the existing institution without frightening the horses than a realistic assessment of the next steps.

The plan places a dependence on Plaid winning two Assembly elections before holding a referendum.  That is a wholly artificial dependency.  For sure, it took two elections ‘won’ by the SNP before Scotland held a referendum, but that was because they formed only a minority government in their first term and there was no majority in the Scottish Parliament for a bill calling a referendum.  The real dependency here is that question of a parliamentary majority – it requires only one election victory for a party or group of parties committed to holding a referendum to be legitimately able to call one.  It could be, of course, that Adam is assuming that any election victory by Plaid in 2021 would be as a minority administration rather than a majority.  It’s not an unrealistic assumption, and if that were to be the case, then it would, of course, be necessary to postpone any referendum bill until there were a majority.  And it’s equally true that a minority government committed to a referendum would probably reflect, at best, a lukewarm public attitude to independence.  But if a party commits to not holding a referendum until it has won at least two elections, then it ends up with no legitimate mandate to hold such a referendum even if it were to win the first election overwhelmingly. 

There’s nothing to disagree with in the suggestion of ‘building new Welsh media’, although it’s something which is easier said than done, and there is an inevitable lack of detail about the ‘how’ at this stage.  And whilst it’s clear that the lack of such media at present hinders any meaningful debate about independence, placing a dependency on building that media before moving to argue for independence looks like placing an unnecessary obstacle on the route.  The real obstacle is that people in Wales are unpersuaded; simply blaming the media for the failure of independentistas to convince people of the case is disingenuous.  It’s the responsibility of independentistas to find the means of convincing people, not to blame others.

Nor is there anything to disagree with in the desire to ‘grow the Welsh economy’ as such.  However, placing a dependency on ‘closing the fiscal gap’ is another matter entirely, and is my main point of disagreement with this ‘plan’.  In the first place, the so-called ‘fiscal gap’ exists only as a result of a particular set of calculations based on a particular set of assumptions, one of which is that Wales remains part of the UK.  Not only is that not a good starting point for any independentista, it demonstrates a subservience to UK-based thinking and the sort of economic theory which gave us ‘austerity’; and it’s completely the wrong way of assessing how wealthy Wales is.  A much better basis is to look at an international comparator such as GDP per head and assess where Wales stands compared to other independent countries.  I’ve posted on that before, but without going through the detail again, an objective assessment of Wales’ relative wealth puts us in the top 30 world wide (out of around 190 countries) and right in the middle in terms of member states of the EU.  There’s work to be done in terms of setting alternative policies, creating the institutions and so on, but economically, there is no obstacle to independence other than those created by following a UK mindset.

We can be independent any time we want to be – the only real obstacle is that we independentistas have not created that desire for independence.  And I don’t see how the seven step plan addresses that.

'News'?

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Various news outlets have given prominent headlines to the fact that Adam Price is supporting independence for Wales as part of his bid to become leader of Plaid Cymru.  No problem with that at all (although I might quibble with some of the detail, such as the wholly unnecessary dependency on Plaid first winning two elections).  But am I the only one reflecting on how we have reached a situation where a would-be leader of Plaid supporting independence for Wales is regarded as being ‘news’?

Facing two ways at once

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I agree with those campaigning against the dumping of ‘nuclear mud’ off the cost of Wales that we should not allow Wales to become a dumping ground for waste created by others.  There’s some question over the extent to which the waste is, in fact, radioactive, but whether it is or isn’t is irrelevant to the question of whether we should be accepting it or not.

We need to be wary, though, of double-edged swords.  If the starting point is that a country or territory creating toxic (including nuclear) waste needs to find its own method of disposal within its own territory, then it follows that anyone supporting the construction of a facility likely to create such waste must be willing to retain and dispose of the waste created once that facility is completed and operational.  Assuming that the waste is a problem for ‘somebody else’ to resolve is simply hypocrisy.

In Wales, and in the case of nuclear waste, this is a particular problem for Plaid.  Whilst some members of the party are actively campaigning against the dumping of mud from Hinkley off the coast of Wales, others are openly arguing for the construction of new nuclear power stations in Wylfa and Trawsfynydd, without ever seeming to say anything about what happens to the radioactive waste which will be produced.  But if it is wrong for England to dispose of its problem in Welsh waters, it is surely equally wrong for Wales to assume that the waste arising from any new nuclear power stations in Wales can simply be exported – whether to England or to anywhere else.

Those who support the construction of new stations – and I include in that category those who try to argue that extra facilities built on new sites are somehow not ‘new’ at all – need to be prepared to explain to people how and where they intend to dispose of the waste.  Anything else is just dishonest.