Electoral change might be boring, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant

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With the dust settling on last week’s Senedd election, it’s opportune to review how well the new system of voting actually worked. No doubt the academics are already hard at work on a detailed analysis of the results and the factors which led people to vote as they did. One obvious weakness is that the system ended up favouring the largest parties, encouraging a degree of polarisation between them, just as first past the post has long done. And for all the talk of ‘every vote counts’, clearly some votes did not count; the lack of an opportunity to express a second or third choice meant that the votes of those whose first choice was rapidly eliminated ultimately counted for nothing. And then there’s the argument about voting for a party rather than a person – I’m personally not convinced of that, although many others are, because years of campaigning told me that most people vote for the party anyway. Overall, it’s produced a more proportional result than the previous system, but it’s not ideal.

Some have criticised Labour and Plaid for introducing the new system, describing it as some sort of stitch-up. Criticism of Labour is fair, but I’m not convinced that the same is true of Plaid. Multi-party politics with no overall majority requires compromise and agreement, and had Plaid not agreed to support Labour on this detail, we probably wouldn’t have had the other changes to the Senedd. With a super-majority required for such a change, it looked like a worthwhile compromise – provided it doesn’t become the norm for the longer term.

Most supporters of Proportional Representation tend to favour the Single Transferable Vote. Looking at the new Senedd, that’s true of Plaid, the Lib Dems, and the Greens – but those three parties together do not have the votes for a supermajority on this issue, and Labour and the Tories are generally opposed. Enter, stage right, Reform Ltd. It’s always hard to know what the company’s policy is on any issue because it keeps changing, but Farage (the ultimate determiner of all policies, as the owner and proprietor) has in the past been supportive of a move to STV. Whether he still supports that (given how well his company did in England under FPTP) is an open question, but if he does, there is a clear supermajority in favour in the new Senedd. It creates a potential opportunity for a change with long-lasting effect.

It’s clearly not going to be the top priority for the incoming government. There are far more urgent priorities in areas such as health and education, where visible change is urgently required. Electoral Reform is top of few people’s lists. I hope, though, that the new government will find time to discuss this with other parties – yes, including Reform Ltd – during the current Senedd term, while the door might be at least ajar. Thursday’s results were historic, there is no doubt about that. But historic isn’t the same as irreversible. Sometimes phoenixes do rise out of the ashes, and the Labour and Conservative parties in Wales might not be quite as moribund as they currently appear to be.

It's the vision that matters

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The demands and counter-demands about costings from the various parties contesting the Senedd elections are not just a red herring, they’re a diversion from the substance of the debate between the parties. The media may be provoking this, but the parties seem to be falling in. There are three good reasons why no party will ever convince another party (or any objective observer) that their costings are ‘right’.

Firstly, any set of costings is necessarily based on estimates and assumptions – it cannot be otherwise. Those estimates and assumptions will always be open to challenge – with no shared basis, there can never be a meeting of minds.

Secondly, one of the few things which seems certain about next week’s results is that no party will have an overall majority. Whether we have a coalition government or a minority government, the party leading that government will not be able to get its full programme through the Senedd without negotiation and compromise with one or other parties. No programme, no matter how ‘fully costed’ it is, will survive intact as a result.

Thirdly, even if there were to be a party with an overall majority, able to attempt to implement its programme in full, circumstances will always conspire to obstruct it. The generals say that no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy – much the same is true when a manifesto meets the reality of government.

That doesn’t make manifestoes irrelevant, and it doesn’t invalidate making at least an attempt to show how they might be implementable, but debating the financial minutiae diverts attention from the one thing that manifestoes should give us – a sense of the priorities and values of the varying parties. Reducing the debate to the level of ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’, or arguing abut the credentials and eminence of the economists who’ve given the numbers a detached nod tells us nothing about the various parties’ visions for Wales. Or, rather more worryingly, perhaps it actually speaks volumes about their visions.

Experience of failure is not the killer qualification as which some see it

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Experience is an odd commodity. As a generalization, most of us might expect that someone who has a lot of experience of doing something will be better at it than someone who has none, but it doesn’t always work that way. One of the reasons why some people end up doing the same job for many, many years is that they really aren’t very good at it. Peter’s Principle (“In a hierarchy individuals tend to rise to their levels of incompetence”) applies. I once interviewed someone for a job who claimed to have twenty years’ experience, but when we questioned him it turned out that he really had one year’s experience repeated twenty times. Experience is not only about duration – it’s also about depth and breadth. And experience of repeated failure without learning from mistakes made is a handicap, not a qualification.

The First Minister claimed this week that Labour should stay in power because it is the only party with previous governing experience in Wales. Even if it didn’t effectively amount to an argument that Labour should therefore enjoy perpetual power (because no-one will ever be able to gain that experience if we accept the argument), it’s a curious claim to make. In the first place, whilst some of the lessons learned from experience can be passed on after a fashion, ‘experience’ itself is personal to the experiencer. In the second place, ‘parties’ don’t have experience of government, it’s the ministers (who are often in any post for only a comparatively short time) who do; parties, as institutions, tend not to be very good at passing lessons on, which is one of the reasons why new generations of politicians often repeat the mistakes of the past. In the third place, many of those within Labour who possess this magical experience are either standing down in this election, or else at risk of defeat anyway. In the fourth place, whilst not everything that the Labour Government has done can fairly be described as a disaster (whatever their opponents might say), and there are often mitigating arguments based on relative incomes, ages and health, the objective evidence surely means that there are very few who would look at the last 27 years and see nothing but outstanding success; experience of failure may not be quite the qualification as which the First Minister apparently sees it. Finally, the institution which is supposed to be the guardian and repository of experience and its lessons isn’t the party, or even the ministers, but the apolitical civil service – which will still be there after May 7 to serve the new ministers.

I’m not sure that “desperate” – the headline accusation lobbed by Plaid – is an entirely fair description of the tactic by Labour. The subtext is surely a much more powerful condemnation: Inability to comprehend any alternative approach, complete failure to understand that voters in Wales want ‘change’ (even if they don’t all want the same change), and a general weariness with the apparent inertia of our political systems and structures. Our best hope for the outcome on 7 May is a government composed solely of independence-supporting parties. It’s hard to envisage any government which includes the attitudes currently being displayed by Labour having the vision and the energy to do anything sufficiently different.

Are the parties fighting the last war?

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It’s difficult to know how seriously we should treat any individual opinion poll. Different organisations use different methods, particularly when it comes to ‘weighting’ to try and ensure that the sample is representative. But when multiple polls by different organisations over a lengthy period show broadly consistent trends, it’s reasonable to suppose that they are telling us something about what is happening. In the case of the upcoming Senedd elections, I’m still struggling to believe how well in the one case, and how badly in the other, Reform Ltd and the Labour Party are doing. Whilst I can’t simply ignore the data-driven evidence in front of us, I’ll admit that, for someone who spent decades campaigning door to door, the extent and speed of the change is something I’m struggling to understand and accept. It somehow doesn't 'feel' right, and evidence which contradicts experience is always a difficult thing.

Once we get to a situation where there are two obvious front-runners, it’s probably inevitable that those two will start trying to ‘squeeze’ the votes of the other parties by presenting the outcome as a binary choice. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t intensely disappointing. In most of the campaigns I ever fought, I was more of a squeezee than a squeezer, left trying to convince people to vote for what they wanted most rather than against what they wanted least. So-called tactical voting is harder to determine under the new voting system for the Senedd elections, since it will probably only really have an impact on the sixth, or at best fifth and sixth, seats in any constituency, and it’s really hard to predict what will happen as we get down to that level of vote counting. Some of the politicians try to tell us that the new system makes every vote count, but it really isn’t true. Anyone voting for a party (or independent candidate) receiving less than around 10-12% of the vote in a constituency will effectively be, in the eyes of those trying to use the squeezing tactic, ‘wasting’ their vote; such votes will have no impact on the outcome of the election. Denial of the opportunity to register a second or third choice is my main criticism of the new system.

The question isn’t just about the mechanics and technicalities, however. I’ve long wondered just how effective the pressure to choose between Labour and Tory has been or, rather, to what extent the polarisation of electoral politics in the UK between the two largest parties was down to this tactic as opposed to other factors. Purely on the numbers, more recent elections show an increasing tendency away from a two-party polarisation – if it did work in the past, it hasn’t worked so well recently. Not only is it essentially a negative approach, but to the extent that it did work at all, it was never based on any careful analysis of opposing manifestos before choosing the lesser of two evils – it was far more visceral than that. A hatred of ‘the Tories’ on the one side and of ‘the Socialists’ on the other was always a substitute for proper debate between alternative visions for the future. Perhaps the fact that the ‘alternatives’ were generally not that different when analysed more objectively helped that framing. Whether either Plaid or Reform Ltd attract that sort of folk history-based hatred to a sufficient degree (outside the bubble in which the political anoraks live) is surely an open question. 'Stopping Reform' may not be quite the killer line that some seem to think.

They say that generals always prepare to refight the last war rather than the one that might actually happen, and I can’t help wondering if adopting a tactic based on what has historically believed to have been the case and trying to apply it in an entirely different scenario isn’t acting in a similar manner.

There's more to coalitions than mathematics

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For those of us who favour independence for Wales, yesterday’s opinion poll showing increased support for both Plaid and the Green Party is clearly good news. The fact that the larger of those parties has declared that independence is not on the agenda for the next Senedd term, even if there is a majority in favour amongst Senedd members, takes a little of the sheen off; although, in practical terms, getting to that point as a result of the sheer difficulties of persuading London to allow a referendum is little different from getting to that point by not trying. Nevertheless the apparent willingness of a full 50% of the population to vote for independence-supporting parties is a dramatic turnaround in Welsh politics. It’s a huge step forward, which would have been hard to believe just a few years ago.

It is, of course, just one poll, and things could change between now and May. I’ll admit that, after having spent the 40 years from 1971 heavily involved in Welsh politics, the idea that the Labour Party could really be relegated to equal fourth place on 10% of the vote is still a little hard to believe, no matter how many polls suggest it, and no matter how attractive it might be as an outcome. Previous polls had suggested that a Plaid-led government was the likeliest result in the new Senedd, as long as Labour either participated in some way or at least acquiesced, but this latest poll suggests the possibility of a Plaid/Green coalition without Labour’s involvement – a much more significant break with the past.

Certainly, there is a strong policy crossover between those two parties, probably stronger than that between Labour and Plaid, if policy statements can be taken at face value. That crossover is not total, however, and there is a danger in performing simplistic mathematics to predict a government without considering the differences as well as the similarities. One of the most obvious areas of potential difficulty, it seems to me, is over energy policy. A pragmatic approach to politics has sometimes led Plaid politicians to oppose new nuclear power stations only in the places that no-one wants to build them, whilst supporting wind and solar projects only in the places that no-one wants to build them.

The stand-out question in this context is whether a Plaid/Green government would be for or against Wylfa Newydd? Energy policy itself is not a devolved matter; to the probable relief of both parties, the next Welsh Government won’t have to take the yes/no decision on the project, so perhaps the parties would be able to come up with some sort of fudge. That might be more difficult if the First Minister himself takes a clear view in favour, and there are a host of other ancillary decisions which could either facilitate or frustrate the project where Welsh ministers might well need to take a position. The implications of new nuclear power for a future independent government are significant either way. I’m sure that I’m not the only voter who will be wondering, when it comes to putting the cross on that paper in May, whether I’m voting for or against expansion of nuclear power in Wales – and at the moment, we don’t have that certainty.

Understanding what winnng means

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What ‘winning an election means is not as straightforward a question as it might appear. It’s easier to answer in an individual constituency or ward than it is overall: under first-past-the-post, (FPTP) it’s whoever gets the most votes, whether that amounts to an overall majority or not, and under any of the various alternative systems used in different places, the winner(s) is/are the candidate(s) who come out on top after the various rounds of counting. Looking at the situation overall, however, it’s too easy and simplistic, especially for those whose understanding is based primarily on FPTP, to conclude that the party with the highest number of seats or votes is ‘the winner’. It is on that flimsy basis that some polls are suggesting that Reform plc could ‘win’ the next Senedd election.

There is, though, no serious suggestion that Reform plc will win a majority of the seats – and nor will any other party on the basis of any polls taken to date. Though neither party will particularly thank anyone for pointing it out, the likeliest outcome of the next Senedd election is some sort of arrangement between Labour and Plaid, even if they are the second and third placed parties (whichever way round) in terms of seats. Surely, the real ‘winners’ of the election will be the party or parties that form the next government rather than the one with the numerically largest number of seats? The only way that Reform plc can be part of any government in the Senedd is by coming to some arrangement with one or more other parties. And there is only one other party likely to countenance that. It’s not entirely impossible, based on current polling, that Reform plc and the Tories between them might garner enough seats for a majority, but it stll appears vanishingly unlikely. Talk of Reform plc ‘winning’ the election is somewhat overblown in that context.

Whether it’s right that the largest party should be excluded from participating in government purely because they cannot – either alone or by working with others – conjure up a working majority will be perceived (and presented) by some as some sort of affront to democracy, but it really is not. It is an inevitable possible consequence of a more proportional system of voting under which more parties are enabled to have representation for their viewpoints. And the simple fact is that Farage and his crew are unable to command a majority for their views in Wales. The fact that a party representing only a minority viewpoint cannot end up with a majority of the seats is a positive feature of PR, not a flaw or bug. It’s just a pity that England insists on keeping a system which does allow that to happen and imposing it on us when it comes to government at the UK level. It’s a mistake – albeit one made by plenty of political commentators – to allow our thinking to be constrained by English norms into believing that the party with the largest number of seats is always the ’winner’, and talking in such terms only emboldens those who would wish to cry foul.

Tories, the NHS, and meaningless gimmicks

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The Conservatives have come up with what they seem to think is a wizard wheeze to convince us that they’re serious about their support for the NHS: in the highly unlikely event of their forming a government in Cardiff after the Senedd elections, they will pass a law guaranteeing that the NHS stays in public ownership. It doesn’t take a genius to identify that there are a few minor little problemettes with this proposal, since implementing them also requires:

·        passing a law preventing any future government from reversing their NHS protection law, and

·        passing a law forbidding the government in London from over-riding their new law (which probably also requires a law removing the power of the Supreme Court to over-rule Welsh legislation).

The first represents a huge change to one of the fundamental principles of constitutional law in the UK, and the second a huge step towards establishing the principle of uniquely Welsh sovereignty over devolved issues. Not bad for a party which is also simultaneously promising no changes to the devolution settlement, no more constitutional tinkering, and no ‘unnecessary’ (a word which they usually seem to interpret as equivalent to ‘any’) divergence from what is happening in England. Indeed, if they’re truly serious about it, it’s as radical a proposal as anything to be found in Plaid’s manifesto.

On the other hand, it could be either that they’re too stupid to understand the implications of their own proposals, or else that they think the electors are too stupid to realise that it’s a meaningless gimmick. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Blackmailing Labour would be counter-productive

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Before the last Senedd election, Plaid Cymru announced with great fanfare that they would hold a referendum on independence in their second term of office as the government of Wales. It was always an odd statement to come from a party which claimed to be committed to obtaining independence for Wales. The stated rationale was that that was what had happened in Scotland, but the comparison was a specious one. The only reason that the SNP didn’t call for a referendum in their first term of government was that they were a minority government; there was simply no majority in the Scottish Parliament for holding one. The determinant of whether a referendum on independence should be held is not how many times a majority has been elected on such a platform but the simple fact that such a majority exists. Plaid’s position looked more like an attempt to woo voters opposed to independence by promising not to do anything about it for the five years of a Senedd term than a means of advancing the cause. The announcement last month that Plaid would call such a referendum if it won a majority in the Senedd in the forthcoming election was a welcome correction to a strange stance.

However, the suggestion this week that Plaid would make the holding of a referendum part of any coalition discussions with Labour would be a step too soon and too far. I agree with Mark Drakeford that the route to holding a referendum is to secure a majority of members of the Senedd pledged to holding such a vote. Trying to blackmail those elected on a platform of opposing a referendum into supporting one in order to be able to form a government isn’t at all the same thing.  Drakeford’s agreement that if a majority of members of the Senedd are elected on a platform of holding a referendum then a referendum should be held strikes me as entirely reasonable.

It sometimes seems as though the aim of holding a referendum on independence is in danger of eclipsing the underlying aim of gaining that independence. I entirely accept that, whilst a referendum isn’t the only possible or legal route to independence, in the particular circumstances of Wales in the twenty-first century a legally recognised referendum is the best way of ensuring both a smooth transition and rapid international recognition for the new state. But such a referendum will work best if it is a means of expressing and legitimating an opinion already widely-held – the job of winning it has to be done before calling it, not after announcing the timetable. Holding a referendum under a coalition government, the larger party in which only allows it to be held in order to retain power and then proceeds to campaign for a ‘no’ vote, looks more like a way of setting the cause back than advancing it. If parties supporting the calling of a referendum cannot even win a majority of seats in the Senedd, then it is highly improbable that a year or so later they will find a majority of the whole electorate for the substance of independence.

I can see why Plaid would want to mobilise all supporters of independence behind one party. After all, polls suggest that a majority of Labour supporters are at least open to the idea, and there’s no doubt that the idea is gaining ground. To succeed in that objective, though, requires that all of those who support independence will see that as their main priority and the key issue in the Senedd election, and will therefore vote with that aim uppermost in their minds. ‘Optimistic’ is one possible word to apply to that (I can think of others); there’s a lot of groundwork to be done first. To date, independentistas haven’t even succeeded in normalising debate on the subject, although Yes.Cymru have done a good job of laying the groundwork. There are, though, no short cuts: winning hearts and minds comes first.

The Tory mindset isn't complicated enough for conspiracy

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It’s often said that there are always two possible explanations of events – the conspiracy theory and the cock-up theory.  Conspiracies are much more fun for pundits and soothsayers, but observation, experience of life, and judicious application of Occam’s Razor have long since led me to the conclusion that there are very few actual conspiracies in the real world.  The alternative explanation is much more probable.

That brings me to the curious statement by Paul Davies, leader of the Conservative group in the Senedd, today that if he becomes First Minister (and it’s not even the 1^st of April yet), then he will clamp down on the Senedd ‘gravy train’, a euphemism which appears to be a reference to having the resources to do its job properly.  Ifan Morgan Jones, over at Nation.Cymru, suggests that this is evidence that Davies has realised that his only hope of being a part of any government is via some sort of arrangement with Plaid and that such an arrangement is so unlikely that he can ignore the possibility and concentrate on trying to get the Tories into first place so that they can label the inevitable Labour-Plaid government which would follow as a “losers’ coalition”.  Alternatively, it could be an even more cunning plan in which “Paul Davies loves devolution so much that he’s willing to sacrifice any hope of government in order to preserve the Senedd, by becoming a safe repository for anti-devolution votes”.  They’re both good and interesting theories and speculation is always good fun, but as an attempt to read the mind of a Tory in 2020, I wonder whether they might both be overcomplex and wide of the mark.

My alternative hypothesis would be that he’s identified a pool of disillusioned voters who, if he could get them all to support his party, could potentially give that party its best ever result, and that he hasn’t even begun to think beyond that about what happens after the election.  But then, why would he bother to think that far ahead?  If there’s one thing that the EU referendum, Trump’s victory, and last December’s election have taught us, it is that politicians don’t need to worry about any conflict between what they say to win a vote and what they do afterwards; not even their own core supporters will expect that of them.

Compromise is inevitable

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The BBC’s St David’s Day poll isn’t the first to suggest that the Conservatives are attracting more support in Wales than has traditionally been the case. It has now happened several times in the past few years, most often in polls taken a long way before elections, but the apparent surge in support has ebbed away to some extent when people have to put crosses in boxes. According to the latest poll, the next Senedd elections could see something akin to a three-way dead heat.  That doesn’t look like an impossible outcome to me, although history suggests that it may not be quite as close as that in the end, and that Labour may end up with more of an edge than the polls currently indicate.

I’m not convinced that that amounts to the sort of ‘turmoil’ which would rapidly lead to an election re-run, as suggested by Vaughan Roderick in the BBC’s report, although that depends on the extent to which the parties are prepared to behave like adults rather than children in responding to any election result remotely resembling the outcome of this poll.  Despite two decades of a devolved administration elected by a more proportional system than that used for Westminster, the parties still seem to want to behave as though the outcome of an election should reflect the Westminster model and lead to single party government, and as though elections are some sort of polarisation between ‘us’ and ‘them’.  But that isn’t the reality of even the current proportional system, let alone an even more proportional system such as STV.

In support of his prediction of turmoil, Vaughan states that “Plaid Cymru would be unlikely to support a newly-humbled Labour Party while supporting a Conservative-led administration would be all but politically impossible for both Labour and Plaid.”  It’s not an unreasonable supposition from which to start based on the currently displayed attitudes of all three parties, but it doesn’t say anything good about either Plaid or the Labour Party.  It paints one of them as arguing that the party which comes out on top has somehow lost all right to lead a government just because it’s lost a few seats, and both of them as rejecting the right of the chosen representatives of around one third of the electorate to play any part in government.  It’s almost a case of both saying that ‘our one third of the electorate is more important than someone else’s one third’. It almost implies that in some vague sense the combined two-thirds who vote for Labour and Plaid are in some way collectively voting against the other third – and I wonder if that isn’t, at some level, the thought process which is at work.  It certainly fits the anti-Tory rhetoric of both parties.

Many of us might prefer that the Tories didn’t attract anything like one third of the votes in Wales, and there are plenty of people prepared to blame inward migration or media-driven anglicisation.  Both of those might well be contributors, but we cannot and should not overlook the fact that there has always been a more significant level of Tory support in Wales than results of a first-past-the-post electoral system have generally suggested.  And in a proportional system, unless an alternative party can persuade those voters to switch (and treating their current choice of party as some sort of pariah doesn’t immediately strike me as the most productive approach to doing that), then that party is going to remain a significant player in the Senedd.  That in turn means that, unless either Plaid or Labour can land a knock-out punch on the other (as the SNP have done to Labour in Scotland, but which currently looks highly unlikely to happen in Wales), then any alternative to including Labour in any conceivable government of Wales requires some sort of accommodation imvolving the Tories. 

Whether that’s through a coalition or some other sort of arrangement is a more open question, but a non-Labour government without such an understanding looks impossible on the current polling numbers, and it’s hard to see what is suddenly going to change those numbers. Parties which rule things out too forcibly in advance of an election (although I well understand the electoral imperative for doing that) will only find that they either have to do the opposite after the election or else leave themselves with no room for manoeuvre. Post-election negotiations boil down to one of two things – the detail of a programme for government, or the grubby business of securing power at whatever the price may be.  In a mature proportional system, the necessity for coalitions or arrangements would be accepted in advance and parties would be talking about what compromises they might be willing to make in relation to their own manifestos and what compromises they would expect from others. For all parties to fight the Senedd election as though an outright victory for each of them is a credible outcome is a sign that we have some way to go before we reach that level of maturity.