Unfulfilled expectations

Tweet The more time passes, the more the local government non-reorganisation proposed by the Williams Commission appears to be dead in the water.  The all-party consensus which Carwyn Jones hoped for evaporated before it formed, and the arbitrary “decide by Easter or else” deadline has been shown to be just that, entirely arbitrary.

The First Minister must be wondering how on earth this has happened.  After all, he included representatives of all four parties on the commission and must have expected that their, apparently unanimous, conclusions would be rubber-stamped by their parties.  Was that expectation really so unreasonable?

It seems to me that there are two factors which come into play here.  The first is the extent to which the party representatives were chosen by their parties rather than selected by the First Minister, and the second is the extent to which they kept in touch with their respective parties during the commission’s deliberations.

On the first it was never entirely clear.  It’s part of the way of doing things in the UK – and another of those habits which the Assembly seems only too keen to ape – that appointment processes for such commissions are anything but transparent.  Whether the individuals were nominated “through the usual channels” by their party leaders, or arbitrarily selected by the First Minister is obscure to say the least.  But even if we assume the worst case, that he alone made the decision without consultation, he must surely have expected that in choosing an ex-leader of one-party, an ex-special adviser to the leader of another when in government, and an ex-director of policy for the third, he was choosing people who would, at the very least, have a good “feel” for the likely response of their parties.  That strikes me as a not entirely unreasonable starting point.

On the second, it is hard to believe that the party representatives would have come out so unanimously for their proposals if they had any inkling of the likely reaction from their parties.  One can only conclude that communication has been minimal.  I suppose that the Lib Dems can, almost, be forgiven – it seems that “their” man left the party during the process.  But I’m not sure what excuse the other two can offer.  The whole “all-party” exercise ends up looking like a charade.

For whatever reason, the First Minister’s reasonable expectation has not been realised.  He must surely be left wondering what was the point of the exercise, and where he went so wrong.

How big is big enough?

Tweet In its editorial reaction to the report of the Williams Commission, yesterday’s Western Mail told us sternly that “post code lotteries are intolerable within a country of only three million”.  It’s one of those things that “everybody knows” to be true, but it begs two questions.

The first is this: what is the difference between a ‘post code lottery’ on the one hand and differing service levels based on local democratic choice on the other?  The answer, in essence, is that there is no difference; it all depends on perspective.  Centralists instinctively demand complete standardisation and conformity whereas decentralists accept that differing levels and quality of service are an inevitable concomitant – from those two viewpoints they merely describe the same phenomenon in different words.

The second question is this: if three million is too small to allow differing service levels, how many is enough?  It is implicit in any statement saying that ‘n’ is too small that there is a larger number which is not too small; in this case, what the paper calls ‘post code lotteries’ are apparently acceptable if only the population is large enough.  Why?

Hidden behind this is the way in which supporters of devolution – whom I had long thought to be instinctive decentralists – turn out to be centralists in practice in a Welsh context.  Strangely, I’ve heard some argue that they are in favour both of rigid central standards and powerful local government.  I can only conclude that they’re either confused or dishonest, because, for any given service, we really can’t have both.

Somehow, since the advent of devolution from London to Cardiff, an idea seems to have caught on amongst the politicians and media that there is no need or justification for any differences within Wales, whereas differences between Wales and England are perfectly acceptable.  It’s a valid vision for Wales, but it isn’t the one which many espoused before the Assembly was established.  And it isn’t one which ever drove me.