Left, Right, and Centre

Tweet I enjoyed the debate piece by Daran Hill and Adam Higgitt over at WalesHome, but found myself turned off a little by a lot of what happened in the comment thread afterwards. Both Daran and Adam offered us their perspectives 'from the outside looking in' as it were, and such perspectives are always useful.

Not having the hang-ups and baggage that so many of us within the party carry is both a plus and a minus; it enables them to think more outside the box than we can, but they don't necessarily have the same close understanding of the internal dynamic and some of the limitations which it can pose.

Returning to the comment thread, though, there is a danger that we get too caught up in debating what label we want to apply to ourselves, and what labels we want to apply to our opponents. It's a bit of an Endian argument to me; words like left, right, and centre don't have a lot of resonance outside the world of politicians; people are more likely to want to know what's inside the shell than which end we're going to crack it. And we'd be better off trying to explain that than to argue about whether we're more left or right or centre.

It's also the case that the UK mainstream political spectrum has become increasingly narrow over the years; the differences between Labour, Conservative, and Lib Dem are often more superficial than real in large areas of policy. A comment made - by Duncan, I think - was that Plaid could adopt elements of policy from any of those parties if it needed to. Up to a point, I agree with him; it's a reflection of how narrow the spectrum has become.

Despite Plaid's formal adoption of the word 'socialist' in the 1980s – and I plead guilty to having been involved with that change - the reality is that Plaid has always been a loose coalition of disparate people with different ideas about what sort of Wales we want, agreeing (well, most of the time, anyway) on one main objective, namely independence. (Although we've had a fair few arguments about what to call it!)

A party of government, however, needs to have a coherent set of policies which are implementable. That need for coherence poses rather more of a challenge to a party of government than it does to a party of opposition. And a party of government inevitably has to deal with the short term as well as the long term – again, a constraint which a party of perennial opposition does not have to face up to.

The danger, for Plaid, is that we end up becoming a fourth party competing in the same narrow spectrum of politics, fighting on largely short term questions rather than long-term ones. In that situation, what is our USP?

One consequence of trying to play the game of politics in a crowded field within a very narrow spectrum is that parties have become afraid to put forward a real alternative viewpoint. For instance, in an attempt to appeal to aspirational floating voters, there has been an increasing trend for parties to put forward policies which are seen to advance the interests of, and appeal to the instincts of, that particular group.

And one result of that is that mainstream parties in the UK have largely abandoned any real attempt to provide a shared vision of a more co-operative and egalitarian society in which people work collectively to build a better world for all. With no-one putting that case, it can surely be no surprise that advancing personal rather than collective interests has become the norm; and has then developed into a self-reinforcing vicious circle.

If any party is well-placed to rediscover and present that sort of alternative vision of society, it is surely a party whose raison d'etre is to build a different sort of Wales and which has consistently argued for a participatory approach to management of companies and institutions, and for the empowerment of communities.

Universities, graduates, and jobs

Tweet It looks as though a significant number of young people who want to go to university, and who have obtained good enough A level results to do so, are going to be disappointed this year when they find that there are not enough places available for them. And it won't simply be a case of those who obtain the lowest grades being excluded either - depending on the choice of university and subject, many of those rejected could actually possess better grades than many of those accepted.

It raises big questions about how many places should be provided at universities, and how they should be filled.

It seems to me that there are two fairly rational ways of determining how many places should be provided in total. The first is to look at the number of people who want to have a university education, and who meet the minimum requirements; the second is to look at the number of jobs requiring graduates, and only provide enough places to meet that demand. We are actually doing neither of those things; we are setting the number of places based primarily on the cost of providing them.

I make no secret of the fact that I favour the approach of providing the education for all those who want it and meet the minimum requirements. A better educated population has advantages well beyond the merely economic.

But I also think we need to get away from the idea that there are 'graduate jobs' and 'non-graduate jobs'. Of course there are some jobs where a particular degree qualification is an absolute requirement – medicine is the one which immediately springs to mind. But in many cases, employers restricting their openings to graduates are doing so unnecessarily. It's sometimes little more than a lazy way of sifting and grading people.

As a concrete example, I remember having a bit of a battle with HR professionals many years ago when I wanted to recruit non-graduates as computer programmers. We were having difficulty getting the numbers we needed, and I just didn't see that a degree was as relevant as having the basic aptitude and ability. I won the battle, and the people I went on to recruit turned out to be, on the whole, just as effective as the graduates.

Many graduates themselves are already having to recognise that if they want to restrict themselves to jobs labelled as being for graduates, then they are restricting their career chances. And many of those being rejected by universities this year will be every bit as able and competent as those accepted, but will be available for work three years earlier than their successful schoolmates. Employers who ignore that pool of talent will be doing themselves no favours in the long term. Judging people on their abilities and experience rather than on possession of a particular piece of paper may be harder to do; but those employers who are prepared to do it will find they have access to a wider range of talent.

Setting unrealistic expectations about the opportunities available to people just because they are graduates; excluding people from consideration just because they aren't; and deciding how many graduates to turn out for financial reasons rather than based either on demand for skills or demand for places are all misguided ways of looking at the benefits of higher education both to individuals and to society as a whole.

Do we need to become less efficient?

Tweet Yesterday's story about the continuing increase in the number of NEETs is something which should worry all of us. To have so many people, especially young people, who see no hope of gainful employment in or near their communities is a depressing situation.

The traditional answer of the political right has been to encourage people to 'get on their bikes'; to become more mobile and move to where the work is. It's a solution which makes sense only to those who see people as a labour pool for the economy rather than as members of a community. It's the right answer for some individuals; but the wrong answer for a society or a community.

A more enlightened approach has been to lay on ever more training and education programmes, so that people are ready for work when it's available. But once people have been on one or more of these courses, and are still out of work, it's easy to see how the attraction starts to fade.

We've had a policy of trying to attract industries to the locations which most need the employment opportunities, albeit that that policy has been followed on an intermittent basis, with differing levels of enthusiasm depending on the state of the economy and the party of government. It's brought some jobs, and some of the companies have stayed and made a success of their investment. Others have proved to be more transient. The apparent successes of the boom years can quickly look hollow when things turn bad.

One of the most obvious responses to the economic downturn in the private sector - shortly to be imposed on the public sector as well through budget cuts – is to try and do more with less. Generally that means trying to achieve the same or more output with lower input; usually fewer staff working longer hours (or for lower wages, often by moving factories lock, stock, and barrel to lower cost countries).

That isn't just a product of the recession, though; it's a long term driver of a competitive economy to try and reduce input costs. The economy is built on an assumption that 'economic growth' will soak up the excess labour. That doesn't always happen in the good times; it certainly doesn't happen during a recession.

But if continued compound economic growth is ultimately unsustainable, as I believe it to be, then depending on growth to solve the problem of unemployment is a strategy which is doomed to failure. The current recession should have served as a warning to us, but the powers that be seem determined to ignore that warning and rush back to 'business as usual' as rapidly as possible. The outcome will inevitably be that we have a persistent and growing number of people who remain economically inactive for the foreseeable future. 'Efficiency' may make narrow economic sense, but it doesn't always make broader social sense.

There is an alternative though. If instead of employing fewer people to work longer hours we were to employ more people working shorter hours, we would be more effectively 'sharing out' both the available work and the rewards for doing it. (And, in the process, cutting the levels of tax on those who do work which currently go to support those who do not.) We'd also have a more equal society, and probably a happier one to boot.

No doubt many, especially those who do not yet understand that the dependence on growth is unsustainable, will see this as unrealistic. Or maybe just plain undesirable. My response would be that more equality is inherently a good thing. And the alternatives facing us if we wait until growth actually hits its limits are likely to be far, far worse.

Crisis, what crisis?

Tweet It's another of those famous phrases which the person to which it is widely attributed (in this case, Jim Callaghan) never actually said. It came to mind today when two different journalists telephoned me to ask whether Plaid is going through a crisis, following a series of press stories over the last couple of weeks.

Well, it is the 'silly season' of course; a time when there is a dearth of hard political news. That, in turn, means that some recent events have received rather more attention than they would have received in other times, or than they merit. And in a way, I suppose that I contributed ever so slightly by stepping down as Chair.

But there really is no crisis. There is a debate to be had about Plaid's future direction, and we are having it. Some of it will inevitably be held in the public arena, but some details of party strategy are always best discussed internally, and I hope that members will try and remember that.

For my part, I will be taking part as a candidate in the hustings meetings to select the party's nominees for the Mid and West Region, and I have every intention of using the opportunity to talk to members across the Region about where the party is going and what we should be doing next. That is a healthy debate to be having; and it's one of the right places to be having it - with the party's members and activists.

Elements of that discussion will no doubt spill over into the public domain, whether accidentally or deliberately. But debate is not the same as division. Intelligent and sensible debate is something Plaid used to be very good at, and it's a skill we need to relearn.

It's our decision, not theirs

Tweet Some of the coverage this week about the cloned cattle, or rather offspring of cloned cattle, which have got into the food chain seems to have shown a degree of confusion between cloning animals and genetically modifying them. And some of it has been somewhat alarmist as well.

There are, in my view, good grounds for continuing to reject the application of both technologies at this stage; but that isn't the same as saying that all laboratory research should be stopped.

In the case of cloning, the evidence is clear. At current levels of knowledge and expertise, many if not most cloned animals suffer developmental problems and lead short and painful lives. Not all the reasons for this are properly understood as of yet, and for me that's adequate reason for keeping cloning in the laboratory for the time being.

In the case of GM products, whilst the techniques for adding single genes which act as 'on-off' switches for single characteristics are well tried and tested, the understanding and control of genes which act in concert is far less well understood. And the long term impact of releasing exotic gene combinations into the natural environment is another huge area of uncertainty. Again, that's adequate reason for me to want to keep the technology in the laboratory at this stage.

There is a danger, though, that fear of the unknown, or just the highly complex, leads to a form of 'anti-science'; and we need to be careful that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater as it were. I don't oppose continued research in both cases; it's more a question of deciding how much research is enough to give us the degree of certainty which we need.

And that's another point. One of the things that struck me about the coverage this week was that some people were seeking an absolute degree of certainty about the safety of eating cloned cattle. Science just cannot give us those absolute guarantees which we instinctively seek. All it can give us is probabilities based on a mixture of facts, estimates, and assumptions.

Science can do the research, and give us the probabilities. But it is for all of us to decide, through political processes, when that science is to be applied, and what degree of certainty we want to see first. That in turn requires a more informed debate than we often seem to get on subjects which are highly complex.

It also means that we should not allow ourselves to be driven into a too-early application of new technologies by the agri-businesses which are, ultimately, mostly concerned with recovering their investment in the research and delivering value to shareholders.

The real issue is a long way removed from the entry of two cows into the food chain; but that event, apparently based on someone flouting the law for their own gain, will have been of some accidental benefit if it encourages us to deal with the underlying questions.

Houses and Homes

Tweet The announcement by Cameron that council tenancies will be of limited duration in future rather than for life seems to have ruffled a few feathers amongst his coalition partners. It is, though, a natural continuation of the basic hostility to council housing which Thatcher displayed with her 'Right to Buy' legislation, but without the underlying understanding of people.

I was always a bit ambivalent about the 'Right to Buy' legislation, to be honest. On the one hand, as a member for part of the 1980s of the Housing Committee of the Vale of Glamorgan Council, I could see at first hand the effect that it was going to have on our ability to house people. But on the other, I also understood very well how appealing the idea was to a large number of the tenants on the two small council estates where I grew up.

Whilst Thatcher may well have been motivated primarily by reducing the quantity of local government housing, and reducing the power of local government in general, she also touched a chord amongst tenants. It is sometimes too easy for us to overlook that. It was a skilful piece of politics, which encouraged people to put their own immediate interests ahead of longer term collective interests. (And that's actually a neat summary of what 'Thatcherism' was really about – and the impact it's had on society.)

It pleased her party's right wing, of course, and I'm sure that Cameron's announcement will have done likewise. But there, the similarity ends. Thatcher saw families living in and wanting to own their homes, and offered them a large carrot. Cameron seems only to see an insufficiently mobile labour force occupying publicly owned dwelling units, and is trying to wave a large stick.

He's not only wrong – it's not even clever politics.

Whose strategy?

Tweet It's always fascinating to read the words of Plaid's anonymous and generally self-styled 'strategists' in the Western Mail. Today's story is a case in point.

According to the paper, "Party strategists had been working on the assumption that the current leader, Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones, would stand down at some stage during the next Assembly term, with Mr Price his obvious successor."

It's either an assumption which for some reason the 'strategists' chose never to share with the now ex-Chair or NEC - or else the Western Mail has been fed a piece of fiction. I know which I believe. But then if a story happens to fit a particular agenda...

Taxing graduates

Tweet Student fees and loans have been unpopular since Labour first introduced them, and with four of the five Labour leadership candidates supporting a graduate tax instead, it seems that some in that party are, albeit belatedly, realising what a mistake they made. But is a graduate tax any better?

It's hard to make a definitive judgement without a lot more detail, but what seems to be being proposed is a sort of supplement to income tax. So graduates on low incomes may end up paying little or nothing for their tuition, whilst those on high incomes may end up paying several times the cost of their tuition. Whilst the total amount collected may roughly equate to the total cost of fees paid, the amount paid by any individual may bear little relation to the cost of his or her tuition.

In short, it looks very much like a selective form of income tax, where people in one group within the population, graduates, pay more income tax than people earning the same salary who happen not to be in the selected group. Once we start doing that, where do we stop? How about an A-level tax?

The argument, presumably, is that those who gain a degree have benefited from their education by getting a higher-paid job than would otherwise have been the case, and should therefore pay towards the cost. But what if a graduate and non-graduate end up doing the same job at the same salary? They would be paying different rates of tax, with the graduate having a lower take-home pay than the non-graduate.

And we all benefit differentially from a whole range services provided out of public funds; what is it that makes a higher education a service which is chargeable, whilst other services are not? I don't understand what the key principle is which underlies that distinction, other than the base one of 'what do we think we can we get away with?'.

It isn't just graduates who benefit from higher education; society as a whole benefits from an improved level of education. Why do we treat education up to A-level as an investment but education beyond that as something different?

Good GDP, Bad GDP

Tweet It is clear that the underlying problem affecting Wales' potential viability is the under-performance of the Welsh economy, and that to address that, we need to improve the level of GDP per head. But not all GDP is 'good' GDP; there are good ways and bad ways of increasing Wales' GDP, and chasing growth per se will not necessarily provide a sustainable long term economy for our country.

As an example, I'm sure that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has led to an increase in GDP in some areas, as people have been employed in clean-up operations, in extra drilling operations to set up a relief well, and in manufacturing a 'cap' for the well head. Similarly, a major nuclear accident would boost GDP in managing the clean-up after the event. But I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that an oil spill or a nuclear accident would be good things for Wales.

It's even more subtle than that. When people think of creating wealth, they often think in terms of boosting manufacturing industry, and indeed, the front page of today's Western Mail draws attention to the slump in manufacturing in Wales. There's a problem with manufacturing though – making stuff almost invariably requires raw materials, as well as using environmental resources, and in the developed world, we are already using more than our share of both of those.

That doesn't mean that we don't need manufacturing, or that we should simply depend on other people doing the manufacturing, of course. The raw material cost and the environmental cost is still down to the ultimate consumer rather than the manufacturer; we don't escape those costs by simply 'exporting' manufacturing to India or China.

But we cannot continue to seek economic growth based primarily on an unfair share of the usage of finite resources, and there is no evidence to suggest that increasing efficiencies in the use of resources will square that circle.

'Good' GDP is GDP which requires no extra use of raw materials or environmental resources, or which involves investment in restoring the earth's environmental systems. It's likely to be more service based, more labour intensive and less profitable in the traditional sense.

Are we ready to embrace that sort of future, and accept that it means building a different type of economy?

Half a cheer

Tweet I've never been a fan of ASBOs. Like so much of what New Labour was about, they were, first and foremost, a gimmick. They played well with people who were experiencing real problems, and it is too easy for those of us who never liked them to forget those very real problems. But I was never convinced that they were particularly effective, and they often became something of a badge of honour in some circles.

In some cases, they were used to deal with behaviour which was actually criminal, as a substitute for using existing laws; and where they were used in cases of non-criminal behaviour, breaching them could lead to jail - in effect jailing people for something which was never a criminal offence in the first place.

So my first reaction to the announcement that they are to be killed off was positive. But the small print is missing, and I'd like to see it before getting too enthusiastic, since the Government seem to be talking not so much about abolishing them, as about replacing them. And they have yet to spell out how.

Talk of communities working with the police sounds all well and good; but that is nothing new; it happens to a great extent already. (Although it does involve the police spending a lot of time in liaison and discussion sessions. Given some of the other statements made by the Government, it's hard to believe that they're proposing more of that, but the bottom line is that 'working with communities' involves a serious commitment of time and resource.)

The other strand of what the Home Secretary said – 'giving the police the powers they need' – worries me rather more. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until they spell it out; but my first reaction was that it sounds like ASBOs without the controls and checks provided by the courts etc. And that, applied to activities which are not criminal in the first place, would be a huge step backwards, not forward.