By-election significance isn't about competing brands of vanilla ice cream

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With the votes counted and the dust settling, Andy Burnham won yesterday’s Makerfield by-election by a large majority. To what extent this was a personal vote for the man rather than the party (‘vote Labour to get the Labour PM out’ is an unusual campaign strategy, to say the least) is not clear. I’ve always tended to the view that personalities don’t have a huge impact on election results at parliamentary level, but all rules have their exceptions and the circumstances and extent of coverage in this case may have enhanced the impact of the individual. If individuals really do make a difference, then it certainly helped that Reform Ltd chose a walking car-crash as their candidate, a man whose past comments made him an easy target. A cynic might even suggest that Farage would prefer Labour to stick with Starmer. Whatever, the fact is that Burnham is now in Westminster, and expectations are high that the starting gun will soon be fired on either a Labour leadership contest or else a coronation for the man from Manchester. Whatever gloss attaches to the Burnham name now may well be tarnished by the forthcoming mayoral by-election, which Reform Ltd have a reasonable chance of winning based on the local council elections, even if the bookies currently narrowly favour Labour; but maybe he’ll have staged his coup before that can happen.

The media are painting the Burnham bandwagon as a virtually unstoppable force, ushering in a new government and a new era. I’m not so sure. Burnham is undoubtedly a better communicator than the incumbent, although that isn’t exactly a high bar. The question is about how different he will be in practice. On that score, the omens are not good. He has already committed to maintaining the arbitrary fiscal rules drawn up by Rachel Reeves, and the appointment of a set of deeply conservative financial advisers to support him augurs badly. It looks as though the neoliberal agenda of continued wealth concentration is likely to continue unabated, and he is tying his own hands to do little more than tinker at the edges. Those sunlit uplands aren’t getting any closer. Burnham vs Starmer is politics as ice cream flavours, except the choice is limited to different brands of vanilla.

To my mind, the more significant, not to say worrying, by-election result yesterday was the one in Aberdeen South, where the SNP lost a seat to the Tories. The significance isn’t in the SNP losing, although that’s unwelcome, or even in the Tories winning, although that goes against the run of play. It is, rather, in the basis of the political upset, which is all about the oil and gas industry. It’s an issue that the SNP have not handled particularly well, but the outcome suggests that voters in Aberdeen have fallen for the snake oil being peddled by the Tories (as well as other parties of the ‘right’), namely the idea that we can both secure the planet’s future for coming generations and at the same time use all available resources with no concern for tomorrow. It isn’t just a problem in Aberdeen. Those who would deny the evidence of anthropogenic climate change have seen an opportunity to persuade voters to support them: after all, what’s not to like about a politician who tells you that you can do what you like today and you don’t need to worry about future consequences? Aided by a dumbed-down and lazy media which reports the debate as a “he said, she said” question rather than seeking out facts and scientific consensus, alongside echo-chamber social media, they are pushing against an open door.

Perhaps our end will come not with a bang or indeed any type of sudden event, but in the fug of a long drawn-out party.

When is a benefit not a benefit?

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‘Cutting the benefits bill’ is an answer often trotted out by politicians when asked how they are going to pay for something. They don’t often spell out precisely how they will do that – identifying who will go without food or shelter isn’t exactly the most certain way of winning electoral support. Far better just to leave people with the impression that it will affect someone else, not them, and that it’s a painless way of saving money. There is a question, though, of how we define what a benefit payment is. It’s obvious which side of the benefit/ not-benefit line some payments fall, but rather less obvious in other cases. Pensions are a case in point – whilst some see them as a benefit payment, others see them more as a contractual obligation in return for the NI contributions made over many years.

Yesterday, the Tories in the Senedd proposed a new payment for grandparents to look after their grandchildren. Superficially, it’s presented almost as though it’s a payment for work done. Whether it would be taxable or not is unclear, but added to the full state pension (and non-working grandparents able to do child care are quite likely to be pensioners), it would push most of the eligible pensioners into paying income tax unless it were to be exempted. If it is, in effect, a non-taxable payment for care provided, then that would surely make it a benefit payment (not dissimilar, perhaps, to Attendance Allowance) in the views of many – and a universal (paid regardless of other income or ‘need’) one at that. And even if it is not regarded as a ‘benefit payment’ to the grandparents concerned, if the objective is, as the Tories claim, to improve childcare provision for working parents, isn’t that simply a backdoor form of benefit payment to those parents?

I raise these points not because the idea is inherently a bad one. On the contrary, good affordable childcare is a problem and this is an interesting proposal for a fairly cheap extension, although there is a lot of detail not yet spelled out. And I’m not opposed to benefit payments either. The point is, though, that it is more than a little hypocritical for a party which has spent years bemoaning the fact that a millionaire can theoretically get a 35p packet of paracetamol for nothing to propose to give any millionaire who happens to be a grandparent a couple of grand a year for doing what they may well be doing for free currently. It’s difficult to avoid concluding that the benefit payments they’re against are those which go to people unlikely to vote for them (usually the poorest), whilst they support a new benefit which is likely to go to those more likely to vote for them.

Peas in a pod

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Yesterday, the owner and proprietor of Reform 2025 Ltd revealed that he thinks the national minimum wage is too high for younger people and should be cut.  He has also previously talked about cutting benefits. With their shared determination to reduce the income and spending power of those on the lowest income in society, in purely economic terms Reform, Labour and the Tories are increasingly looking like peas in a pod. There is another thing they all share as well – a belief that the answer to everything is economic growth. How they reconcile that desire with the desire to reduce the purchasing power of millions of people is one of life’s great mysteries. Because here’s the thing – if you want consumption-led growth, people have to be able to consume, and that means having the wherewithal to buy goods and services.

Instead, they share a strange belief that enabling employers to reduce wage costs and freeing them from regulatory concerns will enable them to cut prices, thus making their goods and services more affordable. They simply don’t understand that making the lives of more people more precarious is a restraint on growth. They also seem to be blind to the experience that shows that employers reducing costs are more likely to simply declare larger profits than to cut prices.

It goes to the heart of one of the big contradictions of capitalism itself. Whilst individual capitalists want to keep their labour costs as low as possible to maximise their own profits, they also need other employers to keep wages as high as possible so that people can buy those things from which the cost-cutting capitalists wish to extract their profit. The idea, which seems to be deeply imprinted into the capitalist brain, that workers and consumers are two entirely separate groups and that impoverishing one of those groups has no impact on the other is sheer madness. It’s also what drives UK economic policy.

Backdating laws is a dangerous precedent to set

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It seems unlikely that Katie Lam, who is, apparently, a ‘rising star’ in the Conservative Party, gave even a millisecond’s thought to Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland when she called for deportation on a scale which would restore a sufficient degree of ‘cultural coherence’ to the UK. It’s hard to interpret ‘cultural coherence’ as meaning anything other than ‘white, English-speaking’ though. It’s racist through and through, but then perhaps what gives her that rising star status is an ability to find new words to express racism without explicitly referring to race. It’s pretty clear that any minority which doesn’t fit her definition must be kept as small as possible, and can never be truly ‘British’, even if she really means English.

One aspect of what she had to say is particularly concerning, in her call for people who followed all the rules, and have been living in the UK entirely legally, to be deported on the grounds that the rules were wrong at the time. The immediate impact would be felt by large numbers of families which would be torn apart if one member were to be deported – unless, of course, she’s also planning to deport UK citizens who were born and raised here along with one or both of their parents. The secondary impact would be the loss of productive workers across a number of sectors of the UK economy, including in particular (although not limited to) health and care.

There is also a third implication of her proposed approach. If it were ever to be implemented, it would mean that none of us could any longer be certain that what we did legally 10, 20 or even 30 years ago is not retrospectively considered to be a criminal act. Changing immigration rules retrospectively might well appeal to those of a racist bent, but it’s a dangerous precedent to set. That it is official Tory policy to backdate rule changes by decades underlines just how far that party has moved from its traditional respect for the rule of law.

The danger hasn't gone away

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As the dust settles in Caerffili, there is widespread relief that the threatened victory for Reform Ltd didn’t happen, despite what some of the polls suggested. But whether it really signifies a victory for ‘progressive’ views over conservative ones is rather harder to determine. One simplistic analysis I’ve seen suggests that adding the Plaid, Green, Labour, and Lib Dem vote percentages together and comparing that with the total of Reform Ltd, Tories and UKIP gives a ratio of 61% to 38%, a very comfortable margin. (It’s not entirely clear where Gwlad fits in this analysis, but at 0.3% of the vote, it’s hardly a significant factor. Where the Lib Dems sit is another variable, it may depend on who you speak to and whether there’s an ‘R’ in the month, but again, at 1.5% it’s not a huge factor.)

Everything depends, though, on whether those who voted for the Labour candidate can really be seen as ‘progressively minded’ voters. On matters such as immigration, climate change and economics, Sir Starmer’s Labour is moving ever closer to the Reform/Tory position; in policy terms they don’t deserve to be included on the same side of the balance as Plaid/ Green. If their 11% gets moved from one column into the other, the result looks very different. Plaid and Green on 48.9% compared to Reform/Tory/UKIP/Labour on 49.2% is no longer a victory of any sort, let alone a sweeping one.

We don’t know what exactly happened to Labour’s traditional vote, but we can assume that some stayed at home, rather than voting at all. Of the rest, the more ‘progressive’ elements may well have switched to Plaid as a block on Reform Ltd. But we also know that there has been movement from Labour to Reform across the UK; there’s no good reason to assume that some of that didn’t happen in Caerffili. Not all Labour voters are as ‘progressive’ as myth and wishful thinking might suggest. Those who were left are probably Labour’s hard core – ‘My party, right or wrong’ – and are, at the least, generally content to go along with Starmer. That gives no reason to place them in the ‘progressive’ column.

There is a danger of complacency – because Caerffili sent Reform Ltd packing, maybe they’re not the threat many feared. But that complacency is based on an outdated and romantic view of the average Welsh voter as inherently ‘left’ of the average English voter. The views of Reform Ltd, whether expressed directly by them, or by the Tory and Labour parties rushing to ape them, have taken root more than we might care to admit. The danger hasn’t gone away.

What is racism if not judging on skin colour?

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When I look at current leaders of the Tory Party, I don’t see a single white face. It’s a stupid, racist comment to make, of course. But is it really more racist than Jenrick’s comment that he didn’t see another white face on a visit to an area of Birmingham? How many people did he see, and in how big an area, over that fateful 90 minutes? Without such statistical context, it’s impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions about what it means for integration. How much bigger was his sample than the sample of one in the first sentence above? It’s worse than that, though. Suppose all the faces had been white, but they’d all been Poles or Romanians? How would he have known? And why would that have been more acceptable to him?

Both Jenrick and his party leader claim that his remarks weren’t racist, but leaping to a conclusion about the extent to which people are, or can be, ‘integrated’ into UK society (whatever that means – and other than dispersing them more widely geographically, it’s not at all clear that Jenrick knows what it means either) based purely on one visible characteristic, skin colour, is about as close to a textbook definition of racism as one can get. Maybe he really, genuinely isn’t a racist himself, but he knows that more than a few voters are, and he knows how to appeal to their prejudices.

By a curious coincidence (?), Handsworth, the part of Birmingham dishonoured by Jenrick’s presence, just happens to be next door to Smethwick, scene of an infamous electoral battle in 1964 which the Tories won on the basis of a campaign based on the number of non-white faces in the area. The Tory candidate that time round denied being racist too. It’s probably being excessively charitable to suggest that Jenrick might simply be too young to remember how well that worked for his party.

Where's the ideological response to Tory nonsense?

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Accusing the ‘Welsh’ Tories of possessing principles of any sort would be a foul calumny, but lacking any basic principles isn’t the same as lacking certain fundamental ideological beliefs. One of those is that tax cuts are axiomatically a good thing, and they are at it again today in the Senedd, calling for a cut in income tax and the abolition of business rates for small businesses. These changes, they claim, will put more money in peoples’ pockets and boost economic growth.

The Welsh government (and the Welsh budget) are fundamentally different creatures from the UK versions, and don’t have the same freedoms. It’s a consequence of the difference between devolution and independence: an independent government in control of its own currency and with debt mostly denominated in that currency can spend as much as it wants to as long as the physical resources are available, and that spending isn’t constrained by the availability of money through taxation. The Welsh government has no such freedom: it’s budget, and its ability to borrow or transfer money between financial years are limited by external dictat, and over a period, it must balance the books. It means, in essence, that whilst it’s not true that a UK tax cut must be balanced by spending cuts, it is very definitely the case that a Welsh tax cut must be balanced by spending cuts. And the Tories know it, even if they didn’t spell it out.

What that translates to in practice is that, whilst the tax cuts proposed by the Tories may make individuals and small businesses feel better off initially, they will either have fewer (or worse) services delivered by the Welsh government (and by the local authorities who receive large transfers from the government in Cardiff), or find that they have to pay more for the same services out of the ‘extra’ money they gained from the tax cuts. More people will end up paying for private health care, or private tuition, for example. There will be those who argue that that is a ‘good’ thing, and that those services can be provided better or more cheaply by private providers. Whether that is true or not (and I’m not at all convinced by the arguments) is irrelevant to the economics here – a subject for another day. The point is that those who gain most from the tax cuts will be better able to afford such things than those who gain least – and that is especially so for those who earn so little that they pay little or no income tax already.

Whenever a tax cut is proposed which leads to cuts in what the government can do, it necessarily promotes a further disparity between those who can afford to bridge some or all of the gap and those who cannot. Some won’t be able to do so at all and will suffer as a result; others will see all the gains from their tax cuts swallowed up by extra costs; and the luckiest few will end up banking the difference. It goes to the heart of the argument for funding some basic services in society collectively, through taxation and public bodies, as opposed to leaving individuals to find the money to pay themselves or go without. Concentrating primarily on the financial effect on the Welsh government and its budget – which seems to be Labour’s response – is to miss the underlying ideological point. For too long, the argument about collective provision rather than individual provision has gone largely unmade, an omission from the debate which helps only the Tories.

No rules were broken

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That scratchy old record was being played again last week by supporters of the deputy PM, Angela Rayner, over her purchase of an apartment in Hove. And they’re right, of course. As far as anyone can see, no laws were broken, no rules contravened, no tax avoided. Some might find it strange that she would buy a home – the only home she owns – in Hove, around 250 miles from her constituency, but there has never been a requirement for MPs to live in the constituency they represent, and there’s plenty of history of MPs who don’t. The Tory attempts to make some great scandal out of it are little more than a pathetic bit of mud-slinging, but about par for a party which no longer pretends to have any positive policies about anything.

And yet… It’s also another example of the way in which politicians in their little bubbles are happy to outsource any question about what is right and what is wrong to whoever makes ‘the rules’, as though slavish responsibility to the rules is the only criteria on which they should be judged. The criticism is unfair, pathetic, reminiscent of kindergarten politics … and totally predictable. Did she, and those around her, really not stop to think, just for a moment, about how it might be perceived, particularly by anyone wanting to make mischief? It is, of course, wholly unfair to hold politicians to a higher standard than the rest of us, but it comes with the territory. She has done nothing ‘wrong’, but the inability to anticipate the likely response is staggering.

Badenoch's alternative suggestion is no better

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The leader of the Tory Party seems quite exercised about the idea that anyone could believe that she has only got to her current position because she’s a black woman. In fairness, the suggestion that there is a sufficiently large group of Tory MPs and members prepared to vote for her out of some desire to pursue a policy of positive discrimination really isn’t credible. That just isn’t the Tory Party as we know it. It’s much simpler to accept the obvious alternative explanation, that those MPs and members who elected her really did believe that she was the best person to be the leader of the opposition and the party’s candidate for PM. Or the even simpler explanation that she actually is the best that they have to offer. I’m happy to accept either of those explanations, but I’m not at all sure that they paint either her or her party in a better light than the suggestion that it’s a result of positive discrimination.

Holding up a whole civilisation

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Perhaps it’s inevitable that a person elected to the leadership of a major political party starts to believe that the whole world is hanging on his or her every word. It’s a heady position in which to find oneself, with access to media coverage all but guaranteed. An exaggerated sense of self-importance comes with the territory. But there’s the ordinary, everyday exaggerated sense of self-importance – and then there’s Kemi Badenoch. In her case, it’s not just an inflated sense of the importance of what she has to say; she genuinely seems to believe that the whole future of Western civilisation is now hanging on her ability to renew the English Conservative and Unionist Party. ‘Renew’ is another of those ‘interesting’ words which means whatever the person using it wants it to mean, but is intended to convey some sort of revival. In her case, it seems to include the elimination of dissident thought, another of those British values which seems to have passed me by.

Uniquely, it seems, in her deluded understanding of world events, the values that make the West what it is – or at least, her interpretation of those values, which just possibly, maybe, might not be the same thing, although it would be a brave person that might try and tell her that – are now uniquely to be found amongst those in that party who think like her. And she seems not even to realise the extent to which she is carving out a minority status for herself, even amongst the dwindling ranks of her party’s membership.

The thing is, it’s actually difficult to discern from what she says what her understanding of those values is. Certainly it seems to include the right to hold and express racist or misogynistic views, to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t conform to ‘the norm’, and to believe that some entire cultures are inherently inferior to the one to which she thinks that she belongs (although, whisper it quietly, at least some of those to whom she is seeking to appeal might just harbour some doubts as to whether she can ever fit into their own definition of the superior culture). The problem with banging on about British or Western values is that they are pretty poorly defined. What the term actually means seems to depend on the perspective of the person banging on about them at the time. But to the extent that there are some underlying shared values, I had thought that they included things like the rule of law, fairness, equality, compassion and tolerance, none of which actually seem to shine through her words on the issue. Perhaps the values changed at some point and I just didn’t get the memo.

Anti-homeopathy: could it be fatal?

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It could simply be that I haven’t properly comprehended it, but my understanding of homeopathy is that a substance known to be harmful is added to water and then repeatedly diluted until there’s no trace of it left, at which point the water somehow retains a memory of the substance, and that memory, by being drunk, cures the original problem. It would be fair to say that opinions differ as to its efficacy. Science has, to date at least, been unable to explain how water retains a memory of a substance, let alone how that memory can then cure anything. Others swear by it.

The UK Labour government seems to be adopting a form of reverse homeopathy, whereby repeatedly strengthening the dose of the poison is deemed to be a cure. They are committed, for instance, to getting rid of the blight of child poverty, but their approach so far has been to increase the number of children in poverty by retaining the two-child cap on benefits, and now talking about withholding benefits from people deemed able to work, whether work is actually available to them or not. They are also opposed to pensioner poverty, and are tackling it firmly by deliberately reducing pensioner income. The scientific basis for the assumption that increasing poverty is the route to reducing it is even less clear than that for homeopathy, but at least drinking water, with or without a memory, isn’t actively harmful in itself.

The belief in what we might call ‘anti-homeopathy’ isn’t restricted to the governing party. The current main opposition party is suffering from its own version of the same affliction. In their minds, the best way to cure the problem of people not voting for them is to double down on all the reasons why people rejected them. The dose of ideological fervour on offer from Sunak simply wasn’t strong enough, apparently. There were reports yesterday that an opinion poll conducted by Electoral Calculus showed that a Conservative Party led by Robert Jenrick would win rather more seats than one led by Kemi Badenoch. Some foolish commentators have interpreted this as a boost for Jenrick, but they are not taking account of the anti-homeopathy which is currently rife amongst the dwindling number of party members. If what he has to offer might increase the likelihood of people voting for his party, then the dose he’s offering isn’t strong enough. It will surely be Badenoch’s chances which were boosted yesterday.

As to the real cure for this strange affliction currently infecting both parties, it appears there isn’t one. It will just have to work its way through the bodies of both parties until it reaches its conclusion. If we’re lucky, it might even turn out to be fatal.

Waiting for the next bus?

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It's tempting to see the result of the latest ballot among Tory MPs to choose a new temporary leader as being just another display of the inherent duplicity of the species. But, whilst there certainly is an element of that involved, it seems that the reality on this occasion is that it’s an even bigger demonstration of their incompetence. Their complete absence of trust in each other has meant that they couldn’t even stich up an election where the electorate is only 120 strong. The ‘explanation’ for the result is apparently that some supporters of James Cleverly – the walking, talking demonstration of the inapplicability of the theory of nominative determinism – were so confident that he was going to be in the last two that, instead of voting for him, they voted for the one that they thought he'd best be able to beat.

They think that they’re such a clever and sophisticated electorate that holding multiple ballots eliminating one candidate each time enables them to use all the low cunning which they possess to game the system so that the final run-off is between the one they want to win and the one that (s)he stands the best chance of beating. But here’s the thing: if we look at the very first round of voting back at the beginning of September, the order in which four were eliminated precisely matches the result achieved just over a month ago. And if they’d used the first-past-the-post system, which they insist is the only democratic way of voting, to select the final two they would have ended up with the same two that they’ve actually got. A month of political manoeuvring, Machiavellianism and dissimulation has got them exactly where they could have been a month ago.

It's hard to say whether the use of STV would have produced a different result. I suspect that having to rank six candidates in order of preference might have been too big an intellectual ask of many of them, but it would certainly have been much harder to game. Maybe the result would have been the same anyway, just achieved a lot more quickly. What is clear is that, whether by accident or design, an overwhelming majority of Tory MPs have opted for a final contest to select the candidate who can do the most to wreck what remains of a once-formidable election-winning organisation. And all the signs are that the aging, white, wealthy, south-east England based membership will enthusiastically assist in that aim. But Tory leadership campaigns are like buses: there’ll be another one along shortly.

Strong opposition is not an end in itself

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Some analysis of the so-called beauty parade at the Tory Conference this week has been based on the assumption that democracy requires that any government needs a strong opposition to perform this magic function called ‘holding to account’ and that, in current circumstances, that requires a functioning Tory Party. What anything in that last sentence actually means is generally left unexplained on the basis of another assumption: that we all know what it means. But do we really?

If ‘holding to account’ simply means automatic gainsaying of anything the government says, regardless of any evidence, is it actually performing any useful function? In the Senedd, we have a whole opposition party utterly dedicated to simply disagreeing with everything the administration says – even if, in the process, they find themselves obliged to contradict either what they themselves have said in the past or else what their masters in London are saying – in pursuit of a headline or two, the more lurid the better. But the degree of luridity and the number of column inches thus gained is no measure of the usefulness of the process. Some might argue that it’s useful in keeping lazy journalists employed, although many of us might just doubt the value of that as well.

It might be argued that democracy is best served by presenting voters with alternative views of the world and allowing voters to choose between them, but that isn’t the same thing as presenting the same view of the world and merely offering a choice of implementation teams, which is where UK politics currently operates. That’s not to underestimate the value of replacing an incompetent team with a competent one, although recent events suggest that the last election didn’t even achieve that, however much it might have appeared in advance that almost anyone would be able to do a better job. Turns out that ‘almost anyone’ didn’t encompass the main opposition party.

Even if it were true that the UK’s semi-democracy is stronger where there is a strong and clear opposition party, it doesn’t follow – as much of the speculation around the next leader of the English Conservative Party seems to assume – that that opposition must be composed of the party that was last in government. Maybe, even in the case that having a strong opposition is always and necessarily a good thing, it would actually be better to sweep the last lot aside and build anew around another option which actually offers something different. Choosing the least worst new leader in the expectation that (s)he would be capable of replacing the current government with a revamped version of its predecessor and that we would be better off as a result would be another triumph of hope over experience.

There’s more to strengthening democracy than simply preparing the Conservative Party to return to power the next time the pendulum swings. Abolishing the House of Lords, implementing an electoral system which doesn’t give absolute power to one party on the basis of one third of the votes, and further devolution of power would all be better first steps. Ensuring that a party committed to none of those things can only ever be replaced by another party committed to none of those things is a recipe for continuation politics and economics. Rather than being what we need most – which is what the talk of a strong opposition seems to assume – it’s really what we need least. We should be asking ourselves whose interests are being served by restricting the choice.

Not outrageous enough?

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It takes a very special kind of delusion to look at an electoral defeat and claim that what it actually shows is overwhelming support for the losing party. Donald Trump has it in spades, of course, and is clearly keen to apply it to the results of elections in countries other than his own. Last week, as part of his ‘welcome’ for Keir Starmer, he praised the ‘real winner’ of the election, one Nigel Farage, bizarrely claiming that Reform had won more seats than they were allowed to have. From a man whose one and only election victory (to date) was achieved under an electoral system in which he won fewer votes than his opponent, a degree of confusion is perhaps to be expected.

But we have our own adherents of the idea that a defeat is really a victory much closer to home. Wales’ very own RT Davies, for example, declared this week that Wales is ‘inherently Conservative’, the evidence for which is presumably to be found in the number of seats won by Conservatives in the General Election in July. Zero is, I suppose, a nice round number, and the beautiful roundness of it can easily distract attention from its mathematical significance. He also said that, “The Welsh people reject the extreme liberal ideology of Labour, Plaid Cymru nationalists and the Lib Dems”. I’m struggling to identify which part of the mainstream Tory ideology so enthusiastically swallowed by at least two of the named parties is ‘extreme’, but that’s an aside. The evidence for this rejection is clearly to be found in the fact that the remainder of Welsh constituencies, after deducting those taken by the Tories, were won by the three parties he named. Zero for the Tories and a total of 32 for everyone else is the clearest rejection of everyone but the Tories that a Tory leader could wish for.

Perhaps he’s not mathematically-challenged at all, he just believes that election results are like some strange form of double-entry book-keeping, where every debit has to be balanced by a credit somewhere else, and the rest of us are simply looking at the ‘wrong’ side of the balance sheet. After all, a number which looks like a debt to a customer always looks like an asset to the bank. I’m not sure that I’d want him as a banker, though. Even when it isn’t rhyming slang. It’s more likely that he comes from that school of thought which believes that if you repeat an untruth often enough it ends up being believed. It’s an approach which has a long and disreputable history, but as Trump demonstrates, daily, the more outrageous the statement, the more effective it can be. Maybe RT’s problem is that he simply doesn’t have it in him to be outrageous enough. Everyone, or so they say, has at least one redeeming feature – being insufficiently outrageous could be his.

Spotting the fatal flaw

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Apparently, there is a plot afoot to change the policy of the self-styled ‘Welsh’ Conservatives to support abolition of the Senedd. I wonder when or even whether they will spot the fatal flaw: the Senedd doesn’t have the power to abolish itself. It doesn’t matter one iota what the ‘Welsh’ Conservatives think, because the issue is reserved to Westminster, meaning that only the English Conservative and Unionist party could enact abolition (assuming they ever get back into power). A ‘Welsh’ party asking its English masters to abolish the Senedd wouldn’t exactly be a good look, even if that probably wouldn’t worry them greatly.

If they’re serious about this, they should probably start by demanding more devolution – specifically that the power to abolish the Senedd be devolved to the Senedd. However, they may find that that would accidentally confer a range of other additional powers on the Senedd, albeit that they might in consequence receive a surprising degree of support from pro-Senedd parties. Otherwise, ‘all’ they need to do is (1) ensure the return of a Conservative government in England and (2) persuade the people of Wales, with their consistent and repeated pattern of rejection of the Tories, to vote to abolish their own parliament by electing a Tory majority to the Senedd under an electoral system which makes a single party majority highly unlikely. It’s probably not the sort of cunning plot over which we should lose a great deal of sleep. But Tory self-destruction might make for a good spectator sport.

Not criminal enough. Yet.

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With the elimination of Priti Patel from the Tory leadership race, the party has lost what, on the face of it, appeared to be one of their best chances of continuing the run of selecting only the naughtiest of candidates for the top post. Being sacked for conducting her own foreign policy and being found to have bullied civil servants (even if let off by her then boss) are the sort of misdeeds which ought to have elevated her to the top of the list given her party’s recent predilection for rogues and rule-breakers. She might have been pretty nasty in her period as Home Secretary and rather too fond of Farage, but amongst the Tory Party membership those were supposed to be assets.

Whilst May’s naughty doings – or at least the ones she owned up to – were limited to running through a farmer’s wheatfield, her successor set the bar high for those who would follow. And Johnson, of course, did indeed set a really high bar. Being sacked for lying – twice – being involved in a (failed) plot to beat up a journalist, making up stories for newspapers, to say nothing of being fined for breaches of his own Covid regulations: it was a tough act to follow. Whilst his successor, Liz Truss, had what has subsequently been revealed to be a somewhat tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of a weird obsession with cheese, she really couldn’t compete. That was probably one of the factors in the brevity of her tenure in the role. Sunak did rather better, being fined for both breaching the Covid regulations and the seat belt law, even if his household benefitting from non-dom tax rules didn’t amount to a crime in the eyes of the law (I wonder who made, or failed to change, the law?).

Given Jenrick’s past record in relation to the Covid regulations (even if he somehow escaped a prosecution or fine) and granting what some might think was dodgy planning consent to a Tory donor, he is justifiably leading the field after the first round of voting. It’s not exactly on the Johnsonian scale, and may owe more to the so-far apparently clean character of the competition. But if any of the other four are serious about wanting the job, they need to either come clean about any past misdeeds, or get out there and start committing some. They can hardly expect the diminishing Tory membership to vote for someone who might turn out to be a fine upstanding citizen after all. Any expectation that they can win on that basis is showing a colossal misunderstanding of the values of the party they seek to lead.

Who's asking 'why'?

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In another sign of the extent to which the Labour government is engaged in continuity politics rather than facilitating real change, it was announced this week that London City airport would be allowed to expand its number of flights, and that the government was ‘open’ to bids from other airports to increase the number of flights as well, and expand their facilities to permit that. It’s true, of course, that expansion of aviation will add to GDP growth (at least, to the extent that it doesn’t simply redirect expenditure from other sectors), but it highlights the danger of setting GDP growth as an over-riding objective, with no consideration as to whether it’s the ‘right type’ of economic growth, i.e. growth which meets other objectives, such as environmental ones. Balancing growth with meeting environmental obligations and targets is much, much harder. So hard, in fact, that it appears that they’re not even going to attempt it.

Here in Wales, the Welsh government seems to be similarly minded when it comes to Cardiff Airport, with its plans to pump in hundreds of millions of pounds in the coming years in an attempt to grow traffic from the airport. Interestingly, the Conservative opposition in the Senedd opposes this expenditure and proposes instead that the airport should be transferred back to private ownership. Given past experience – the airport was only taken back into public ownership because it was failing badly under its private owners – just how putting private owners back in charge would help is unclear, and the Tories’ proposal was remarkably light on detail in respect of that. There is only one way that I can think of in which private ownership of such a prime piece of land on the outskirts of Cardiff could turn a decent profit in the short to medium term, and that’s to close the airport and develop the land for other purposes. Perhaps that’s what the Tories want, but a call for a sell-off isn’t an entirely honest way of calling for closure.

What Wales needs in terms of airport coverage is something of a taboo subject. Because of the airport’s location, and the population distribution in Wales, it’s never likely to be able to compete with Manchester or Liverpool for travellers from the north of Wales, or with Birmingham for travellers from the Welsh midlands. And in the south-east of Wales, passengers have a realistic choice between Cardiff and Bristol, meaning that the only real ‘captive’ market, for which using Cardiff if flights are available will almost always make more sense than going elsewhere, is Glamorgan and most of Dyfed. It’s not a large market, but experience shows that it’s enough to sustain regular holiday flights to a range of popular destinations. Based on population growth, and assuming an increased level of affluence which has not exactly been visible recently, there is potential for slow but solid growth in the number of such flights and the range of destinations served.

However, a strategy based on a large and rapid increase in passenger numbers depends on rather more than that. Effectively, that means persuading carriers to use Cardiff instead of other airports (such as Bristol and Birmingham), either for existing flights or for any increase in flights in the future – and then persuading passengers, including those from outside Wales, to use those flights. The proposition that it could become a significant international airport with a large range of destinations being served depends on an increase in scheduled flights, rather than flights by holiday operators. It seems that the prestige of becoming that sort of international airport is what drives the Welsh government, and there are plenty of others as well who will argue that without that, Wales is somehow not a proper nation. But the extent to which becoming such an airport will drive wider economic growth is arguable at best; the idea seems to be based more on blind faith in ‘the markets’ than any real analysis of potential. For the foreseeable future, at least, it would also depend on an ongoing level of public subsidy – whether to the airport or to the carriers is irrelevant here – about which there is a lack of honesty and transparency. The latest £200 million will not be the last.

How do we measure ‘success’ for the airport? For UK Labour, it seems to be in terms of turnover and the contribution that makes to GDP; for Welsh Labour it’s the number of passengers and flights; for the Tories it’s eliminating any cost to the public purse, even if the logical conclusion is complete closure. None of those seem to be based on any thought-through assessment of whether Wales needs an airport in Cardiff, and for what. Yet the answer to those questions provides the only sound basis for assessing success. We are a small country – having pretensions beyond our capabilities is merely aping the UK’s approach. Maybe slow, organic growth serving the needs of passengers in a limited area of Wales should be enough.

Could we get that lucky?

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It’s long struck me as being a curious aspect of the world of football that a manager who leads one team to trophy after trophy turns out to be an utter failure when he transfers to another team, and that a manager who has a hopeless record with one team goes on to have a huge run of success with another. It’s almost as if what matters is whether the team is functioning well or not rather than the attributes of the manager. If the team is dysfunctional, it doesn’t matter how good the manager is, the team will continue to fail.

None of that only applies in football, of course; and that latter point about appointing a new manager not making any difference to an utterly dysfunctional team is one which the English Conservative and Unionist Party has already tested to destruction. Although that hasn’t deterred them from seizing the current contest as an opportunity to add further proof to the theorem.

There is another strange parallel between the two worlds as well. No matter how badly a manager does with one team before being sacked, there will always be some fans who believe either that he should be brought back to try again, or else that, despite all the evidence, he is the obvious candidate for any management job which comes along. And that brings us to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Having wrecked what rather likes to call itself “the world’s most successful party”, he is still being suggested and promoted for other jobs, where he would be free to wreck other organisations. Last week, we were told that he was being lined up to wreck the Daily Telegraph. Don’t get me wrong here – wrecking the Torygraph would be almost as big a favour to the UK as wrecking the Tory Party – it’s just that I somehow doubt that that is quite what his backers have in mind. Although, given his demonstrated propensity to swing between giving Johnson his total support and then pulling the rug from under him, perhaps Zahawi is really planning to sack him a day or two after taking control.

Ten months ago, it was reported that Johnson was going to become a presenter on GB News, although he has yet to make his debut performance. I don’t know whether he’s been paid for that ten months, but it’s at least possible that GB News would prefer to pay him for not turning up and wrecking their channel. It would almost be a sign of intelligence amongst channel bosses. And taking the money without doing very much for it isn’t exactly new. Johnson was, apparently, paid an advance of £88,000 for a book on Shakespeare for publication in 2016. The publishers are still waiting. Fortunately, he’s found a different publisher for his memoirs, who have apparently stumped up £510,000 for the privilege of publishing the tome, if it’s ever finished. That last may turn out to be another triumph of hope over experience.

Throughout it all, his long-term fans and sycophants still hold on to dreams about him returning to once again take the reins of a party in crisis, forgetting his role in creating that existential crisis in the first place. Perhaps their dreams will come true in the next or next but one leadership election (they can surely fit at least two more in before the next election) – but could we really get that lucky?

Cutting pensions is a deliberate choice

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Those of us lucky enough to be in receipt of an occupational pension understand that the pension is money that we earned while working, but with the payment deferred. Occupational pensions are paid for partly by contributions made out of salary and partly by even larger contributions made by the employers. I remember the Chief Accountant of one company for which I worked selling the idea of making additional contributions on the basis that, ‘for every pound you pay, you catch the company for another two pounds’. The pension isn’t a generous benefit paid for out of the goodness of the heart of former employers, it’s part of the salary we earned, set aside for the future. And no-one ever, as far as I’m aware, has suggested that it should be means-tested to ensure that it only goes to those who ‘need’ it.

From the point of view of the government, the state pension doesn’t work that way at all. From their perspective, National Insurance is just another tax (hence the way the Tories presented a NI cut as a tax cut) added to overall revenue, and the state pension is just another costly benefit paid for out of current revenue. That perspective is, though, simply a result of the way in which governments choose to deal with the money. From the perspective of state pensioners, they contributed throughout their working lives, and their employers paid even more, in order to ensure a pension when they retired. In essence, the employers’ contribution – just like that made to occupational pension schemes – is part of the salary of the individuals; the difference is about accounting, not the underlying principle. From that perspective, it should no more be subject to any form of means testing than an occupational pension.

Whether the winter fuel payment should be considered as part of the state pension is a moot point. I’ve never been a fan of it, and have always thought that, if the pension is inadequate to cover living costs, the solution is to increase it, not supplement it with random amounts. There’s something rather patronising about assuming that all pensioners are incapable of budgeting for higher costs of fuel in the winter: lots of costs vary over the year, not just fuel and not just in the winter. And to the extent that some people do struggle to pay a peak in costs at one particular time of the year, that struggle isn’t restricted to pensioners, nor to fuel. A one-off annual payment for fuel is, at best, a partial solution to an entirely different problem, a major part of which is that people’s incomes are inadequate in the first place. In addition to that, the payment was made non-taxable, meaning that not only did it go to everyone (like the pension itself) but, unlike the state pension, the increase in earnings it gave to those receiving occupational pensions as well was untaxable. Nothing was recovered in tax from those who didn’t ‘need’ it.

If we see the fuel payment – as I believe we should – as having been part of the state pension, then what the Chancellor did yesterday amounts to a cut in the basic state pension and an increase in the pension credits paid to the poorest pensioners - a transfer from an earned entitlement to a 'benefit'. We shouldn’t be surprised at that. Coming back to occupational pensions, most of us understand that if we pay less in while working, we get less out after retirement. The Tory cut in NI works the same way – contribute less to pensions and get lower pensions. They didn’t spell it out like that, of course; but the reduction in government income nominally intended for pensions was always likely to manifest itself in a reduction in the government expenditure paid for out of that income (especially for any Tory/Labour government wedded to a silly fiscal rule about balancing the books).

That doesn’t let Reeves off the hook, though. Nobody compelled her to cut pensions rather than restore the level of NI contributions; nobody compelled her to cut pensions rather than increase taxes on the wealthiest. Those are choices she – and the Labour Party – are deliberately making. The Tories may have created the problem through unfunded NI cuts, but it is Labour which is choosing to impose part of the consequences on pensioners.

According to Sunak, 60% of the remaining Tory MPs are unfit for office, even as shadow ministers

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He didn’t put it in quite those terms, of course, but he might just as well have done so. The reduced number of Tory MPs left after the election earlier this month means that more than 40% of them now have shadow minister responsibilities, and the group is so short of talent, in Sunak’s eyes at least, that some of them have been given two or even three shadow jobs. It's a pretty damning indictment of the nearly 60% who have not been given jobs at all.