Devolution is fine as long as Wales always copies England?

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This week, we were the ‘lucky’ recipients of a 12 page newsletter from the soon-to-be-former Government Chief Whip, Simon Hart. Amongst other things, he tells us that he campaigns against the Labour-Plaid Welsh Government “who are adamant in their desire to downgrade and shut down the hospital”, without specifying to which hospital he is referring, although the leaflet is more explicit when it comes to his plan for Carmarthen, which claims that the Welsh Government “wants to close Glangwili Hospital”. It’s a sort-of-truth, although a more balanced account would point out that the intention is to replace it with a bigger, better, and brand new facility further west. The merits or otherwise of that proposal are fair game for political debate, of course, but presenting it simply as a ‘closure’ isn’t entirely honest.

We are also told that the 20mph default speed limit (or ‘blanket’ limit to use the inaccurate term so favoured by the Tories, including in this leaflet) isn’t working and that “half a million people have said so” by signing a petition. The pedant in me says that the petition may indeed demonstrate that the policy isn’t exactly the most popular ever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t working. Policies can be both unpopular and effective. Unless, of course, the only determinant of the ‘success’ of any policy is its popularity – but only a confirmed cynic would accuse a Tory politician of believing that.

More generally, both of those items reflect the fact that the most striking thing about this leaflet for a Westminster election is the extent to which it concentrates on devolved issues over which the MP (whoever he or she might be) will have little or no influence. I suppose, given the record of the UK Government, fighting the election on the record of a different government of which he has not been part makes a certain amount of sense. The attempt to portray the current government’s record on the economy as a success simply underlines the extent to which such a campaign would have to depend on ‘alternative facts’.

In the same vein, we come to the section on ‘free’ childcare, where he bemoans the fact that Wales is not precisely aping the English scheme, but is instead introducing an income threshold. The first problematic aspect of this is the claim that it will be ‘free’ in England whilst it is means-tested in Wales. In fact, the English government is underfunding the scheme to such an extent that nurseries are going to be charging parents top-up fees, because they are not going to be paid enough to cover their basic costs of staffing and premises (even if we assume that there will be enough places available, which is far from being certain). They’re not allowed to call them top-up fees of course, so they will be billed as things such as “consumables” (and, whilst it’s not wholly unreasonable to charge for things like food, there will be, we can be sure, an element of creativity to maximise the opportunity to make up for the government funding discrepancy; and for the poorest of working parents, it does less than it could to help people back into work). Most parents are likely to understand that a charge of around £2 per hour might mean that the childcare is cheaper, but it won’t fit most people’s definition of ‘free’. Claiming to have delivered the equivalent amount of cash to enable Wales to underfund childcare to the same extent might be ‘true’, but it doesn’t overcome the basic problem of underfunding.

But the hypocrisy in this is that the party which has previously argued that prescriptions should be means-tested so that hypothetical Welsh millionaires can’t get hypothetical free paracetamol is now arguing that those same hypothetical Welsh millionaires should be able to get hypothetical free childcare. I’d like to think that it was a Damascene conversion to the concept of universality in the delivery of public services, but I suspect that this – like much of the other criticism of what the Welsh Government does – is much, much simpler than that. They simply believe that the Welsh government should always use its powers in ways that deliver the same policies as England. Still, the good news is that the soon-to-be-former Chief Whip won’t have to worry about any of this for much longer.

Identifying the extremists

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After several years of trying his damnedest to get expelled, which led instead to his being promoted to posts within the governing party, Tory extremist Lee Anderson has finally managed to get the Tory whips to act against him for his astonishing, not to say ridiculous, claim that ‘Islamists’ have taken control of Sadiq Khan, and through him of the imperial capital itself. This has been adjudged to be one unhinged comment too far. Presumably, his efforts to date have been regarded as merely obnoxious, something which has become de rigueur in his party since it has been largely infiltrated and taken over by Farageists.

In response, the man himself said that he fully understood that “…they had no option but to suspend the whip…”, but refused to retract or apologise for his remarks. It’s probably just the excuse he’s been looking for to lead what he probably hopes will be a mass exit from the Official Farageists of the Tory Party towards the Provisionals of Reform. In what would, in any rational universe, be seen as a not-very-funny attempt at self-parody, but which appears to be instead a deadly serious lack of self-awareness, he said that he would “continue to support the Government’s efforts to call out extremism in all its forms”.  ‘All’ its forms? It would be nice to be able to believe that he is the only one who sees any political view which diverges from his own as being ‘extremist’, but it seems to be becoming the norm for his erstwhile colleagues, given the number of times he’s made extremist statements with the apparent consent and support of his now ex-party’s leader. And despite her own unhinged comments this week about the huge leftist conspiracy being driven apparently by the World Economic Forum, The Financial Times, and the Economist amongst others, Truss has apparently managed not to cross the line between being merely mad and being expellable. Still, given that the man making the decisions on who to suspend and for what, the Chief Whip, has previously suggested that the RSPB is a terrorist organisation, it’s difficult for anyone to know where the line actually is. If there even is one any more.

Canaries and ferrets

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With the possible exception of those Conservative politicians disposed to see membership of the RSPB as a terrorist act, most of us would be hard put to think of a less harmful pursuit than keeping and breeding exotic canaries. Although perhaps the canaries might see things differently. It seems however that this comparatively benign pastime is another victim of the new rules and regulations which are the inevitable result of leaving the EU single market and the customs union. Another of those hard-to-find Brexit bonuses, one might say.

The canary breeder quoted extensively in the article seems to think that canary-breeders as a group are working-class Brexit voters, although the research and polling to back up that assertion, if they exist, do not seem to be referenced in the report. But the tone of his words (“the people who are affected – working-class people, people who voted for Brexit, who voted to leave – are now finding that they can’t actually do anything because they can’t take their birds back and forth to mainland Europe”), along with the demand that canaries should be treated “in the same way as dogs, cats and ferrets*” suggests that the very fact that they were proponents of Brexit should be enough to exclude them from its effects. It's a strange form of logic to argue that people who voted for something should be excluded from the impact of their decision. It is, though, not untypical of the Brexit mindset, with its continued insistence that the UK is in some way entitled to continue to enjoy the benefits without following the rules. The idea that the consequences of Brexit would encourage a change of mind rather than an assumption that they are the result of EU intransigence is obviously one for the birds. In this case, literally so.

*Who knew that ferrets were specifically identified as an exception under the amended Northern Ireland protocol? The wondrous details of Brexit continue to astound.

Ignorance as a qualification?

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Last week, the Welsh Secretary, Simon Hart, told us that he wished Wales hadn’t been able to set its own rules for handling Covid. In itself, the idea that an Anglo-British nationalist wants Wales and Scotland to do as they’re told rather than follow their own paths is about as newsworthy as the revelation that the Pope is a Catholic. In support of his position, he argued that “if you look at all of the measurements of success or failure, … actually there was precious little difference between England and Wales”. It’s one of those statements which has the veneer of truth, but where the situation is actually rather more complicated.

Leaving aside the fact that no-one could have known in advance whether different approaches would lead to different outcomes (which makes his statement a rationalisation after the event, rather than a reason for not allowing differences in the first place), one of the reasons for the differences in outcomes being small was that the English government constrained the ability of Wales to be more different, by, for example, only making furlough available when England needed it. There is also a danger in his use of headline figures, because – as the Welsh health minister has pointed out – a country with an older and often sicker population and higher levels of poverty would expect to lose a higher proportion of its vulnerable people to a pandemic where the death rate amongst those groups is higher. The very fact that the outcome was similar could itself be taken as at least a partial vindication of the Welsh approach. Statistics need to be interpreted with caution, rather than just looking at the headline figure, although, in fairness, Hart is probably just following the cavalier attitude of his boss. But leaving the numbers to one side, one thing which has stood out throughout the pandemic – and I suspect that this is what really irks Hart and his colleagues – is that the approach of Mark Drakeford and the Welsh government has been overwhelmingly supported by people in Wales, who are well able to tell the difference between a government trying its best (even if it didn’t always succeed) to keep people safe, and one more concerned for the profits of its friends and donors.

More shocking to me was the claim by Hart that, despite having been an MP for a Welsh constituency for 9 years before being appointed to the Cabinet, he had never heard of the Barnett formula. That really is an astounding admission to make, although it was probably part of what qualified him – in Johnson’s mind at least – to take on the job. Looking around the cabinet table, it is easy to conclude that ignorance is a qualification under the current regime rather than an impediment. On the other hand it could just be that whatever some of those providing him with cash were after, it wasn’t a detailed knowledge of Wales or its finances.

Missed opportunity

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In what looks like only a minor variation on the customary song that Wales should use its devolved power any way it wishes as long as it does the same as England, the Secretary of State has been complaining that the Welsh government has axed next year’s school examinations. Apparently, he sees some sort of strange equivalence between a devolved body acting entirely within its own powers on an issue which has been completely devolved, and a UK government which ignores the devolution boundaries, in the sense that both, in his view, should be subject to what he euphemistically calls ‘consultation’. It’s another illustration, not that one were needed, of the fundamental problem with ‘devolution’: it doesn’t recognise Welsh sovereignty as being anything other than a temporary loan of power from London.

Whether the actual decision of the Welsh government is the right one or not is another question, and is a legitimate subject for debate, even if it’s a debate in which the Secretary of State has no legitimate role. The problem is that it’s an issue clouded by ideology and prejudice rather than one led by facts and evidence; the question of whether exams are the ‘right’ way to assess pupils seems to be highly correlated with political outlook. There’s no doubt that some children are well-served by an examination process, but neither is there any doubt that others are not – for a variety of reasons, exam performance doesn’t always reflect the progress and ability seen by teachers in classrooms. On the other hand, there is more scope for teacher assessments to contain a subjective element in their assessment of pupils, no matter how hard they strive to avoid that. There is no perfect system.

In the limited circumstances of the pandemic, it is probably better to do as the Welsh government have done and take the decision early, thus giving themselves plenty of time to think through a proper and robust alternative assessment process rather than the chaos we saw last year, and it’s probably reasonable to assume that the approach of the Westminster government of leaving things until the last minute to decide will lead to more chaos in England again next year, unless they get lucky in controlling the virus. (And lucky is the right word, given the obvious lack of any planned approach to anything.) The problem remains, though, that this still looks like a one-off decision to deal with a particular anticipated situation next year, rather than an opportunity for a thorough review to determine what Wales needs from a system of pupil assessment and how such a system can be made fairer for all. It’s in danger of being an opportunity missed.

Getting to the top of the class

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One of the politer descriptions of yesterday’s ‘discussions’ between the UK Government and politicians in Manchester was ‘absolute sh*tshow’, as various details emerged. It seems that the government’s attempts to shift the blame for lockdown restrictions onto local politicians bully local politicians into accepting new restrictions failed mightily when those politicians – including all the city’s Tory MPs – pushed back. It was a strange type of unity with Tories opposing any restrictions on principle (apparently they’d prefer to allow more people to die of Covid than infringe the freedom of others to infect them) and Labour demanding proper financial support for businesses forced to close and their employees, but unity was had nevertheless.

It finally provoked the English Health Secretary into firm decisive action. But not to stop it being a sh*tshow, nor to prevent future sh*tshows from happening. No, instead of either of those things, he announced that he was setting up a leak inquiry, to find out who told the world about this particular sh*tshow. The problem, it seems, is not the government’s numerous and repeated failings, it’s that people are revealing them. We see the same regularly from his leader (a term which can only be applied very loosely to Boris Johnson), when he berates the opposition for drawing attention to the problems instead of wholeheartedly backing the government and taking their share of the blame for government actions. To the world king, the job of the opposition is not to scrutinise, let alone oppose, government actions and policies but to support them enthusiastically and heap world-beating praise upon him.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State for Wales has thrown his own twopenn’orth into the debate about travel restrictions, claiming that it will cause confusion and division. He seems to be one of those Tories who fully support devolution and the right of the Welsh government to make its own decisions, subject only to the proviso that it makes the same decisions as the English government. I find it hard to see what can possibly be confusing or divisive about a simple requirement that people living in an area of high Covid prevalence subject to restrictions on what they can and can’t do should be temporarily prevented from travelling into an area of low prevalence, potentially carrying the infection with them. It’s what most of us would call ‘common sense’. Then I remembered that we are dealing with a politician who is easily confused. I seem to recall him having some difficulty understanding the difference between Al Qaeda and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. In fairness to Mark Drakeford, drawing up regulations which will not confuse even the wilfully obtuse is an impossible ask.

We do indeed have a world-class government in London at the moment, but it’s in the remedial class. It’s unrealistic to expect any government to be best at everything, so any government has to choose its specialist subject. Incompetence is a very brave choice, but it may not be as daft as it looks. It’s easier to come top if there's less competition.

Failing to read the Job Description

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One of the more complimentary descriptions of the current Secretary of State for Wales that I’ve seen could be paraphrased as ‘affable but impotent’. From the reports this week that he only found out about the asylum-seekers being moved to Penally as a result of comments made on Facebook, he seems not even to have read the job description. The role of the Secretary of State isn’t to be consulted over decisions made by his masters, or even necessarily be informed of them, and I’m surprised that he thought that either of those in any way applied. His job is purely to defend and explain decisions when they eventually become public. To suggest that he needs to understand the decisions or be aware of the thinking behind them in order to do that is to suggest that he should be in a more knowledgeable position than the people making them. If he needs ‘facts’, he should invent them, that’s what the rest of the government do.

Implementing 42

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To say that I don’t often agree with what one former political opponent (and now MP for Carmarthen West) has to say would be something of an understatement.  But there is an exception to every rule, and when Simon Hart describes his fellow Tory MPs as devious, self-indulgent and incompetent – well, who am I to argue with that assessment?  I suppose there is room for a slight disagreement about whether he’s right to exclude himself from an otherwise entirely sensible generic description, but let’s not quibble about minor details.

He also managed an effective demolition job on the idea that all 17.2 million who voted to leave supported identical outcomes, saying “… voters I know opted to leave for a range of reasons and with different levels of indignation.   …  the referendum followed the pattern of almost every election that comes our way, and so anybody claiming to speak for 17.2million is more likely speaking for their small circle of friends and a bloke they heard in the pub.”  That goes to the heart of the problem with the referendum – in his utterly mistaken belief that the result was a foregone conclusion, a ‘devious, self-indulgent, and incompetent’ prime minister asked only one simple yes/no question to what was always a complex series of related issues.  The answer, when it came, was not unlike the ‘42’ in Hitchhiker’s Guide, telling us only that we really need to give a lot more thought to what the question is.

I found it interesting that, in his first response to the Chequers non-agreement, Rees-Mogg said that he couldn’t give a definitive response until he’d seen the detail.  Yet the same man argues that the result of a referendum where none of those voting knew in any detail what ‘leave’ meant, and where there were a whole variety of different reasons for supporting that option, is not only inviolable, it is also open to only one interpretation – his own.  He needs the detail to decide; the electorate don’t.

I’m currently not at all sure that a new vote – even a so-called ‘people’s vote’ on the final terms – would produce a radically different result; the underlying problem of people viewing the issue from completely divergent paradigms hasn’t gone away.  But there is surely an increasingly good case for listening to the wise words of Douglas Adams’ ‘Deep Thought’: “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question was”.  Proceeding on the basis of trying to implement the answer '42' could only happen in a fictitious universe, couldn’t it?

Knowing the boundaries

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Early last week, I had a nice little letter from the MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, seeking support for his re-election.  It was delivered through the Royal Mail – that’s an expensive method of distributing leaflets, but it arrived (just) before the deadline for counting expenditure towards election expenses, so probably doesn’t count towards his re-election expenses for the constituency.  Getting it in early shows that he’s probably keen not to add his name to the list of Tory MPs currently still waiting to hear whether they will be charged for election offences following the submission of some ‘interesting’ expenses returns at the last election in 2015.

And fair play, it’s completely bilingual as well (not something one can always count on from the Tories, even in heavily Welsh-speaking areas like this), although something got lost in the translation of “continue to champion the Armed Forces in Parliament” which ended up as “Yn cefnogi ein holl drigolion, p’un ai ydynt yn fy nghefnogi neu beidio, neu yn wir, os byddant yn pleidleisio o gwbl”.  Still, mistakes can happen to all of us, and that looks like a simple case of changing the wording after the original had been sent for translation and hoping that no-one would notice.

However, talking of mistakes, an accidental mistranslation isn’t the biggest one with the leaflet.  The much bigger error is that I don’t live or vote in Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire.  I live in border country, true enough – I can’t leave my drive without entering the Carmarthen West constituency.  But I don’t live in that constituency, which means that he really didn’t need to worry about getting it to me before the deadline after all.  On my understanding of electoral law, he doesn’t have to declare expenditure on writing to random people who don’t live in his constituency.  The question which arises isn’t about the cost, it’s about the rationale.

If the leaflet had been hand-delivered by one of the Tories’ volunteers, it would be an easily understandable mistake.  I’ll admit that it’s a mistake which I’ve made myself in the past when leafletting in rural areas where boundaries can occur in seemingly strange places.  But it wasn’t hand-delivered - it came through the post, and the address has been printed from a database.  It raises a few interesting questions about which database is being used and why: it’s clearly not one which is limited to the constituency boundaries.  Still, I suppose that it helps to keep printers, postmen and those involved in recycling paper in gainful employment.

Avoiding broken promises

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In this story last week about the Chancellor’s little local difficulty over the increase in National Insurance, the Tory MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire came up with a real humdinger of a suggestion; or at least it would be if he followed it through to its logical conclusion.  In essence, as he sees it, the problem isn’t that the Chancellor broke a promise, it’s that the Tories were silly enough to make the promise in the first place.  Matters such as taxation policy are best left vague, so that the government can respond to changes in circumstances.

That needs to be followed through, though.  Clearly, without knowing what any putative government is going to do on taxes, it’s difficult to make any spending pledges either.  And it isn’t only financial circumstances that might change, so perhaps all policies should be left unstated in case the government feels it needs to do something different.  It’s an approach which would lead to very short manifestos.  One sentence would be quite enough:

“We will do whatever we think needs to be done at any point in time.”

I’d like to think that it’s an approach which would never catch on, but it actually strikes me as a refreshingly honest statement of the current government’s approach.  I’ll bet that the PM won’t be overjoyed at seeing the cat let out of the bag.

The Welsh connection

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The Western Mail reports today on the Welsh connection to the Liam Fox affair, in that one Stephen Crouch is one of those who appears to have been funding Adam Werrity’s little jaunts around the world.  The local MP, Simon Hart, is quoted as describing Mr Crouch as a former chair of the Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire Constituency Association.  The MP’s own website, however, still describes him as chairman as of this morning.  (Better get there quick though – I’d expect that to be changed fairly rapidly!  I'm sure it will be archived somewhere, though.).

(In passing, was I the only one to detect ever such a slight whiff of hypocrisy in Peter Hain’s call for Simon Hart to 'come clean'?  Presumably, just like he himself did over the donations to his ‘think tank’ when he was fighting for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party?)

I’ve referred to Mr Crouch previously.  He was the connection which led a rather colourful oil tycoon (and former mercenary boss) to donate £5,000 to the local Tories.  But he’s not a stranger to controversy himself.

In 1995, there were questions raised about his involvement in lobbying for the easing of sanctions against a certain Saddam Hussein, in order to make it easier for British companies to do business with the regime.  Never let anything get in the way of business, I suppose.  (Or perhaps I'm thinking of the Godfather there)

He was also the subject of some ‘fishing’ questions in the House of Commons about the extent of his own contacts with UK ministers (the last time the Tories were in power, as it happens).  It's the sort of thing that happens when MPs suspect that all isn't quite as it should be, but don't know exactly what they're looking for.  It’s an interesting parallel with the Werrity affair.  (And, like Mr Werrity, he seems to have had the ability to turn up in the right places on occasions.) 

I quite liked this one – a masterpiece of a non-answer if ever there was one:

Mrs. Clwyd: To ask the President of the Board of Trade when Ministers or officials of his Department last met Mr. Stephen Crouch.

Mr. Ian Taylor: Neither Ministers nor officials of this Department have met Mr. Crouch in his capacity as director general of the Iraqi British Interests Group.

There is, as they say, nothing new under the sun.

The boy's got form

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A few days ago, I commented on the decision of local Tory MP, Simon Hart, to vote no in the upcoming referendum.  Whether it was an entirely wise thing to do or not, he has chosen to expand on his reasons in this week’s Carmarthen Journal.

He’s also used another opportunity to do the same thing in his weekly column for the same paper – I can’t find it in the online section, so I’ve reproduced it below.  His pearls deserve more attention.

Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start, when faced with quite so many contentious and outrageous statements.  His view seems to be underpinned by some strange paranoid belief that the evil nationalists have far more influence than is actually the case (I wish), and have hijacked the referendum as a means of dragging Wales kicking and screaming into independence.  And surely, his two final paragraphs are a classic example of what happens when a politician gets carried away by his own rhetoric.

Mind you, he has form for seeing sinister hands behind mainstream campaigning.  For all I know, he probably still believes that the RSPB and RSPCA are some sort of terrorist front organisations.

Update:  John Osmond on ClickonWales adds some comments of his own on Mr Hart's departure from reality.

Hart to Hart

Tweet Matt Withers draws attention, rather unkindly I thought, to the communication style of NUS Wales Women's Officer, Estelle Hart, daughter of Health Minister Edwina.

Estelle was at the Trinity Freshers' Fair on Tuesday, where she spent the best part of an hour in what looked like an eloquent, articulate, and animated discussion with Tory candidate, Simon Hart (no relation, as far as I am aware). I can't imagine that they found a lot of common ground though, unless they were discussing the origins of their shared surname. Still, she kept him away from the students for a lengthy period...