With friends like these...

Tweet In the last county council elections, Plaid made gains across Carmarthenshire, but the most stunning progress was made in the Llanelli area, largely at the expense of the Labour Party. All the reports that I get tell me that our campaign to get Myfanwy Davies elected as a Plaid MP for Llanelli is also going well, and that the party is continuing to advance in the constituency.

No surprise then to hear that the local Labour Party are getting increasingly worried that the party is "haemorrhaging support". Given that, it's not really a huge surprise that the local party has written directly to Gordon Brown, calling for a reversal of a range of policies.

What perhaps is a surprise is that they've issued the letter to the local newspaper, the Llanelli Star, in order to start a very public process of putting as much distance as possible between them and their own party's government. It smacks of desperation to me. With friends like these, Gordon Brown doesn't really need any enemies.

Lies, Damned Lies, and UKIP statistics

Tweet In a letter to the Western Mail this week, Wales' UKIP MEP repeats the standard line that '75% of laws' come from 'Europe' as though it is a proven fact. Indeed, this figure seems to have been bandied around quite a lot, but it is far from being as much of a 'fact' as opponents of the EU suggest.

There's quite an interesting analysis of the claim here, in a piece which also looks at a range of other claims as to what the percentage actually is. The real answer depends on a number of factors, not the least of which are what we define as 'laws' and 'regulations', and whether we count laws and regulations made by devolved parliaments in the UK and elsewhere.

It also seems that all attempts to calculate the percentage are based on a straight count of 'items' of legislation, such that one long and complicated act of parliament is treated as being equivalent to 1 one-page regulation or directive (and, of course, vice versa). It's a pretty meaningless way of comparing.

The '75%' claim, in particular, seems to be based on a complete misinterpretation of a point made by an MEP, who was actually talking about the proportion of EU-wide law made by the European Parliament as opposed to the European Commission. It's a completely different thing, and was never intended to refer to the difference between European and National law.

I don't pretend that I've done anything like enough research to be able to quote an accurate figure, but it is probably somewhere in the range of 10% to 30% - a very long way short of the figures being quoted by the Euro-sceptics, or even the 'nearly 50%' quoted recently by David Cameron. Law affecting individuals is likely to be at the lowest end of the range, whilst law affecting companies and competition is likely to be at the higher end. And, in terms of the volume of law which actually applies to what we do on a day to day basis, it's probably lower again.

But then UKIP are also fond of claiming, time after time, that moves to establish a National Assembly only started after joining the EU, and are part of a ghastly European plot, as though 80 years of nationalist agitation from within Wales can just be written off completely. Can we believe anything at all that they say?

One swallow...

Tweet I can understand why Plaid's political opponents are making so much fuss about this month's rise in unemployment in Wales, given that a number of my colleagues were so quick to seize on the good figures for the previous two months.

It was, perhaps, a bit premature for people to read too much into one month's figures, or even two months' figures, and I held back from doing so. Not because I don't think that Re-Act and Pro-Act are good schemes, nor because I don't think that the One Wales Government is, on the whole, doing a good job during the recession. In fact, there's a general consensus that One Wales is doing pretty well, within the limited economic powers available to it, and Plaid can take some pride in the performance of Ieuan Wyn Jones on the issue.

But a recession, and the recovery from it, is a complex business. Progress will never be smooth and even, and we should expect bad months as well as good ones. Those seizing on one month's bad figures as are misguided as those seizing on one month's good figures. The real test is in overall performance, and how well Wales fares over the whole period compared to the rest of the UK.

On that score, so far, One Wales seems to me to be successfully tackling the issue.

Asking the right questions

Tweet I was not in the least surprised at the results of the recent opinion poll about whether people would prefer to plug the budget gap by raising taxes or by cutting public spending. But I'm not convinced that the survey has added much light to the debate. It seems to have proved, mostly, that the answer you get depends on the question you ask.

If the choice people were given had been between modest tax rises and closing half the country's hospitals, I'm reasonably certain that the headline could equally have read - 'people demand tax increases'. That alternative question is not a fair or realistic way of framing the question, of course; but my point is that neither was the question which was actually put to people.

'Cutting public spending' is always likely to prove popular; it's only when people are asked more specifically about what to cut that they have to give the question a bit more thought. Far too often, some politicians (of all parties, sadly) lead people to think that the answer is as simple as 'eliminating waste and bureaucracy'. There's a danger that that simply avoids facing up to the real question.

That's not to say that there isn't any 'waste and bureaucracy' in public expenditure. No organisation can be as big as the public sector without having some scope to improve its efficiency; but it is wrong and misleading to suggest either that such improvements can be achieved as a result of simply cutting their overall budgets by an arbitrary percentage, or that the level of savings likely to be achieved will be enough to plug the budget deficit without any cuts to services.

There are some big programmes which could and should be chopped, of course. There's a developing consensus that ID cards and the replacement of Trident are in that category. I'd add illegal wars to the list as well, although bringing involvement in those to an end will not be a simple task.

Even after taking such obvious steps, the gap between government income and current levels of expenditure remains a large one. And, for a variety of reasons including the need to spend on something else in some cases, and the costs already committed, the savings are not likely to be as large as the headline costs of the projects.

The cost of bailing out the financial sector has been a phenomenal cost which has led to a hugely increased level of government debt. (As an aside, I'm far from convinced that enough is being done to ensure that the same cannot happen again in the future. That's not directly relevant to the argument about how we get out of the current hole, but it's vital that government tackles that issue, and does so soon.)

Plugging that gap will be the major economic task facing the next government, and for all the attempts by Labour to try and paint themselves as being different from the Conservatives on this issue, it seems to me that whichever of the two leads the government after the election, there will, in reality, be a mix of both service cuts and tax rises. That will pose a particular challenge in Wales, for two main reasons.

Firstly, we are more heavily dependent on the public sector, and secondly, under the current devolution settlement (and even after the changed situation which will pertain after the referendum which is to be held in the next two and a half years) we have no tax-varying powers. Cuts in English public expenditure will lead to an automatic reduction in the block grant – and the Welsh government will find itself forced to cut budgets in some areas.

LIke most other people, I find discussion of Barnett incredibly boring – but the issue of fair funding for Wales has never been more important than it is right now. The current unfair funding system means, effectively, that those parts of the UK which are underfunded on a needs basis will suffer disproportionately from spending cuts – the exact opposite of what any needs-based approach would suggest should happen.

The One Wales government will be faced with some difficult choices in the near future - but we should surely start by trying to ensure that we have a fair allocation of funding in the first place, rather than by rolling over and accepting the situation.

Of leaders and speeches

Tweet In an attempt to sow discord where there is none, Peter Black suggests that what has been widely acknowledged as a superb speech by Adam Price at the Conference is in some way irritating or embarrassing for others in the party. (As an aside, it's interesting that his authority for criticising the speech by Ieuan Wyn was – er, another Lib Dem blogger…). Let me say clearly that I'm not in the least embarrassed or irritated by the fact that he's a better speaker than myself and most of my colleagues. Au contraire.

Adam is a powerful and effective speaker – probably the best we currently have in the party. It's a talent which he deployed to great effect on Saturday, and there's no doubt that the party benefited greatly from his performance. When a party has a talent like that, making the best use of it is absolutely the right thing to do. The alternative, of not allowing him to perform at his best in case he is compared with someone else, would be a pretty stupid way of proceeding.

In a more thoughtful, and considerably less partisan, piece on Wales Home last week, a former Labour spin doctor talked about how Labour in particular could learn from the way which Plaid uses different people with different talents to perform different roles. Working as a team is generally more effective, in any organisation, than expecting the leader to be the best at everything. And you don't choose a leader solely on the basis of his or her ability to deliver the best speech.

Onward and upward

Tweet Another year and another highly successful conference. I suppose it's natural for any party member attending his or her own party's conference to feel positive about both the experience and the outcome - and having chaired most of the formal sessions as well as taken part in one of the less formal sessions on Thursday, I'm hardly the most objective judge.

I've been going to them for long enough, though, to understand the difference between the marginal feel-good factor of being among friends during a difficult political period - probably 1979 was about the lowest point for me – and the buzz of a successful well organised conference when things are generally going well. 2009 was definitely a 'buzz' year. I can't imagine that many members of the Labour Party will be looking ahead to their conference this year in the same way that I was before ours. And I doubt even more that they'll come away with the same upbeat feel.

We may or may not fit in our Spring Conference before the next Westminster elections; but this will certainly be our last annual conference before those elections. All the polls are still saying that there will be a change of government in London before then. And the polls also suggest that we'll see a growth in support for both Plaid and our colleagues in the SNP, with both parties likely to return a record number of MPs. How much of an increase depends not simply on how well we or the other opposition parties perform, but, as much as anything, on exactly how badly the Labour party collapses.

Prediction is a difficult game, but it looks to me as though the electoral pattern in a number of constituencies is changing. We've already seen that in Aberconwy, for instance. Not so long ago, the constituency moved from being seen as a Labour-Tory fight at Westminster level to a three-way Labour-Tory-Plaid fight. Increasingly it is looking like the real fight is between Plaid and the Tories, with Labour now out of the running.

I see similar signs locally as well. Prior to the Assembly election in 2007, most people saw this constituency as a Plaid-Labour struggle. The Assembly elections saw three parties – Plaid, Labour and Tories, all finishing within 1% of each other. Until recently, most people were regarding the Westminster election as a straight fight between Labour and the Tories – but things are changing on the ground – I really think it could yet turn out that the real fight is between ourselves and the Tories.

In a very hard-hitting speech at Conference, Adam rehearsed extremely well the reasons why people faced with that sort of choice should choose Plaid. Now, how to put that message across locally...

PS - If I really deprived Ordovicius of his place in the food queue, it was both entirely unintentional, and almost entirely unrewarded in terms of the nourishment obtained. By wholly inadequate way of reparation, many thanks to Ordo for the job he did at conference as resident blogger!

Whose heads?

Tweet There's been some debate recently as to whether the UK should ape the US approach of having head to head debates between the party leaders in the run-up to the general election. The reaction from the party leaders has been pretty predictable – oppositions always support the idea; the incumbents always reject it.

I'm far from convinced about the idea myself. It's not simply the fact that my own party is likely to be excluded, although I cannot deny that that is a factor – and a special 'Welsh' debate is hardly the same thing. Even leaving that issue aside, I still have major doubts.

In the first place, I think that the US debates are somewhat over-rated. The early ones, Nixon-Kennedy, say, were quite dramatic, and people remember that. But in recent years, those taking part have been coached, scripted, and rehearsed to such an extent that the debates have become pretty meaningless in reality. It's more a comparison of acting skills than of fitness for office.

Secondly, there is a real question over who should take part. In the US, they are electing a president – the head of government. The US is very much a two-party system – in the legislature as well as in the presidential contest - so it is easy to reduce the field to two contenders. A UK general election, on the other hand, is about electing the whole legislature, not just the Prime Minister, and there is an increasing plurality of parties.

It might be fairly easy to predict that the next prime minister will be one of two people – but it's a lot less easy to be certain about the make-up of the House of Commons. There's an argument that only the two obvious contenders should take part, but the very act of doing that would be to polarise attention on just two of the parties contesting the election, and to marginalise others – and that gives an unfair advantage to those two parties.

In theory, the leader of any party contesting more than half the seats in the House of Commons could end up as PM, however unlikely that might seem. Should broadcasters be allowed to 'second-guess' the result and exclude them – and if so, on what basis? And it isn't just the Lib Dems who are likely to be in that position.

If the election of a government was a separate matter from the election of the legislature, I might come to a different view; but as long as the government is drawn from the legislature, the introduction of such 'debates' would serve to change the nature of politics in a way which favours two parties in particular. And I really don't like the way in which one broadcaster is trying to force the issue.

Useless bankers

Tweet Lord Turner's criticism of "much of the City's activities" as being "socially useless" is something with which I can disagree only in the sense that it is too mild. "Socially useless" suggests only that it doesn't achieve anything of value to the wider society; I think that it is positively damaging to the wider society, and the phrase which I have used repeatedly is that the activities are the high finance equivalent of anti-social behaviour - except it typically gets rewarded rather than punished.

Still, given the background and role of Lord Turner, it's a pretty stinging criticism, even if he doesn't go as far as I would.

Even if the activities themselves are 'merely' "useless", the fact that so many people are involved in activities which contribute nothing of any social value is in itself damaging. But it's actually much worse than that, for those activities have contributed to undermining, and eventually came close to destroying, the whole economic system. Whilst a few have enriched themselves through gambling and irresponsible risk-taking, they have done so at the direct expense of those who depend on pension funds and stability.

The response of some of those involved was pretty predictable. But I don't understand why they expect us to be frightened by their threat to go and destroy someone else's economy if we don't let them destroy ours. It sounds to me like the most socially useful idea that they've come up with to date. My biggest problem with it as a solution is that I wouldn't wish them on anyone else either.

Paradise for Lord Ashcroft?

Tweet As an update to yesterday's post, it seems that it's not only here in the UK that people have doubts about the way the tycoon's money is used to impact on politics. His adopted homeland of Belize is having second thoughts as well.

The Ashcroft Connection

Tweet It wasn't just the membership figures which made interesting reading in the Tories' annual report for this constituency - there's a host of financial figures as well.

Given the largesse which has been distributed to a number of Tory constituency associations by Belize-based tycoon Lord Ashcroft, it's surprised me for some time that there has been no obvious connection between him and the Tories in this area.

I knew, of course, that they were not really short of a bob or two from fox-hunting hedge fund managers. Indeed, far from being financially challenged, their latest accounts show that they have a very healthy bank balance with £50,000 on deposit for a rainy day, and a further £35,000 in cash and bank accounts available to spend as and when they wish. It's the sort of resources which most parties in most constituencies can only dream of. Investment income alone contributes almost £4,000 to their annual income.

Nevertheless, pre-existing bank balances haven't stopped Lord Ashcroft 'investing' in a range of constituencies, and then keeping a close eye on what happens to his little investments. The noble lord himself may or may not be a tax exile; his party have consistently declined to confirm whether he is or is not a UK resident and tax-payer, as was promised at the time of his ennoblement. His donations are, however, all legal, of course. Although tax exiles cannot donate directly to political parties, UK-based companies can - and Lord Ashcroft seems to have a few convenient UK companies through which to channel his funding.

There are, as far as I can trace, no direct donations from Ashcroft to the Conservatives in Carmarthen West and South Pembs – none that have been declared to the Electoral Commission at any rate. It was interesting, therefore, to read in their annual report to the Electoral Commission that representatives from Lord Ashcroft's office regularly attended local campaign meetings. Perhaps some of the £8,600 which they received from HQ was actually Ashcroft money?

It surprised me that Ashcroft has 'an office' which can send staff to meetings all over the country. I assume that this is declared somewhere as a notional donation from one or other of his companies, but haven't so far been able to find it.

I'm jealous of their funding, of course – who wouldn't be? But my real concern is twofold. Firstly, no party should be able to try and 'buy' an election by out-resourcing its opponents. That's one of the worst aspects of US politics. And secondly, when campaigns are being funded on the back of anti-social behaviour such as short-selling bank shares and sterling, and possibly tax avoidance as well, it is simply not enough to say that 'it's within the rules'. As MPs of all parties have found out recently, that excuse simply won't wash – they need to be able to justify it in moral terms as well.