A Covid surge wouldn't be the best Christmas present

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Wales’ First Minister has supported the idea that the four administrations within the UK should develop a common set of rules governing the Christmas period. The idea seems to have started with the Lib Dems (which ought to be surprising given that they claim to be the party of federalism, both in internal party matters and for the UK as a matter of policy: federal freedom for each administration to make its own decisions as long as they all make the same decision seems more than a little odd). Whatever, in principle, the idea is sensible; but then keeping the four administrations aligned would have been sensible throughout, if only one of the four hadn’t decided that it was going to make rogue and reckless decisions and expect the others to follow.

And that brings us to the problem with the proposal – how do we decide which set of rules suits all four administrations if the position in relation to the virus is different? Minimising the premature loss of life would suggest that the common regulations should be as stringent as those set by the worst-placed administration at the time, whilst maximising opportunities for family gatherings would suggest that they should be set according to the needs of the best-placed administration at the time. In practice, though, we know that one of the four administrations – the biggest – will simply set its rules and expect the others to follow. Their idea of a negotiated agreement looks more like the dictation practice which I remember from my school days.

There’s still two months to go and a lot could change in that time, but, as things stand, falling in line with England doesn’t look like the smartest idea either Mark Drakeford or the Lib Dems have ever had. With its lackadaisical approach to taking action, England is currently suffering the worst surge anywhere in the UK. One study estimates that the number of infections has now reached 100,000 per day, and is doubling every 9 days – a rate of progress which would see a million infections per day by the end of November if more drastic action is not taken. Official figures are unlikely ever to record that sort of level – to record a million positives per day would require doing several millions of tests per day, well beyond any foreseeable capacity. Long before then, they will reach a point in England where most cases are simply going undetected.

Perhaps Johnson will come to his senses and act before England gets to that point, although his current stubbornness isn’t a good sign. It looks, rather, as though he’s resorted to a policy of herd immunity by inactivity. With a population of 56 million in England and a rate of infection of 1 million a day by the end of November, the number of people infected by Christmas would exceed the threshold (believed to be somewhere between 60 and 80%) at which herd immunity (if contracting the virus actually delivers immunity at all – currently a very large unknown) kicks in; there’d be few people left to infect. It’s no longer inconceivable that that is the deliberate policy of the English government. Any vaccine would be too late to have any impact.

There are two major problems with a policy of herd immunity. The first is that big unknown mentioned above – does contracting the virus actually deliver immunity at all, and if so, for how long? The second is that – and this is something that advocates of herd immunity aren’t very forthcoming about – pursuing such a policy in the absence of a vaccine necessarily results in a substantial number of premature deaths. That’s the way nature works; the vulnerable succumb and those that are left are those who withstood the onslaught. It’s not easy to put a precise number on it, of course, and numbers are very impersonal and abstract in any event: we're dealing with real people and real families here. Early indications were that around 1% of those contracting the virus died of it. Assuming that only 60% of 56 million are infected before the spread of the virus is checked, that would result in around 336,000 premature deaths. If the rate of 1% has been overstated because of undetected infections, and if we now know enough about treating patients to be able to reduce the death rate, then even if those two factors halved the number of premature deaths, we’d still be looking at reaching a total of 168,000 – more than an extra 100,000 from where we are today – in England over a period of a few months. And that's using the optimistic assumptions set out above – other scenarios are calculable.

I find it hard – extremely hard – to believe that even the current English government would seriously opt for such a policy, but their actions to date are not very reassuring. If they haven’t formally opted for that approach, they seem to be drifting into it almost by accident and paralysis. So, whilst I agree in principle with Drakeford about having a common approach over Christmas, Wales should be extremely wary about committing to following England (which is what it effectively means) unless and until the English government changes course. Otherwise, we’ll just be opening the gates once again and the pain of the current lockdown will have been wasted.

Using sterling would tie the hands of an independent state

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Yesterday, Nation.Cymru carried a piece by John Ball on currency and budgets, in which he argued for the continued use of sterling by an independent Wales. I’ve known John for many years, and there are many things on which we agree – but the continued use of sterling after independence isn’t one of them. Much of the detail of the piece is unarguable: using sterling is an entirely practical way forward, it makes the transition easier, and the importance of the psychology of currency continuity is something which should not be underestimated. He rightly dismisses the ludicrous suggestions by unionists that Wales would or could somehow be prevented from using the pound if we chose to do so, although doing so by agreement in some sort of currency union would be preferable. My objection, though, is rather more fundamental that practicality and psychology.

In simple terms, a country with its own currency and whose debt is denominated in its own currency has more freedom over economic policy than a country without a currency of its own and/or whose debt is denominated wholly or largely in someone else’s currency. The former can never go bankrupt for one thing, whilst the latter can – and it can be forced into bankruptcy by others. There is a widespread misunderstanding about the way in which the UK government has funded its response to the pandemic, with the media and many politicians talking about a huge increase in borrowing, likely to reach £300 billion this year alone. Whilst it’s true that the deficit (the gap between income and expenditure) is likely to reach or even exceed £300 billion this year, it is not true to say that that has been funded by borrowing. In fact, as Richard Murphy points out here, whilst the deficit has increased, the debt has gone down. The UK has funded its response to the pandemic entirely by the creation of new money. That is an option which would not be open to an independent Wales using someone else’s money – we would have had no choice but to borrow any necessary funds, probably mostly from lenders outside Wales.

That’s a specific example of the problem, but my objection goes wider, to the whole objective of economic policy. The objective of the Bank of England (as set out in the remit given to it by the government, underlining that BoE ‘independence’ isn’t all it seems) is to maintain inflation at or around 2%, whilst the government has set itself a target of ‘balancing the books’. The first is highly arbitrary and the second is a policy choice, but both are based, ultimately, on protecting the value of private wealth. The ‘cost’ of those policies is seen in an acceptance of a permanent level of unemployment of around 3-5% and the use of austerity measures as and when necessary, including – in the case of the current government – to enable the otherwise unnecessary cancellation of the extra money which they have created. A different government could set an alternative goal of achieving full employment by spending whatever is necessary to achieve that end and using taxation (targeted as appropriate on the basis of the social goals of the government) to rein in any inflation which full employment might cause. In this context, my point is a very simple one – using sterling outsources that decision to the English government in London and effectively mandates the current neo-liberal approach to fiscal discipline, whereas with a new Welsh currency we can take the decision ourselves. And since, for me, setting different priorities – governing in the interests of the many rather than the few, to coin a phrase – is a significant part of the point of independence, the decision is a very straightforward one.

Currency is a very thorny issue for independentistas, that much is clear. The SNP has got itself into a very deep hole on the issue by advocating the use of sterling, although the debate is still raging within the party. There’s a good and lengthy critique of the SNP approach on Open Democracy; everything that applies to Scotland also applies to Wales. I know that, for some independentistas, having an independent Welsh state which broadly follows current economic orthodoxy with a Welsh slant would be enough, even if it looks like just a timid first step to others. For some it’s a political question – tactics, even – about whether the best way to persuade Wales to choose independence is to minimise the impact of that independence so that it looks like a soft and safe option, or to present a vision which emphasises how different things could be. I’ve always been in the latter camp; I’ve never seen independence as a dry constitutional issue but as a means to an end. Merely replicating Westminster in Cardiff just doesn’t do it for me.

Giving us some of our own money isn't generosity

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The ‘Welsh’ Conservatives have this week issued a little digital poster claiming that “Wales has received more than £4 billion from the UK Government to tackle COVID-19”, and labelled it in large letters as “FACT”. When is a fact not a fact? One answer to that is ‘when Boris Johnson says it’ of course, but another is ‘when it’s a distortion of the truth’. And distortion is being kind in this case.

What they actually mean is that the UK Treasury (a treasury which, as its name suggests, is supposed to serve the whole UK) has magicked large sums of new money into existence through its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Bank of England, and has spent that money across the UK. In the case of Wales, it has passed part of Wales’ share of that money across to the Welsh Government to spend. Nothing particularly remarkable or generous about that, nothing that Wales couldn’t have done itself with the financial powers of an independent country. A more accurate message would be “UK Government passes part of Wales’ share of UK’s new money to Welsh Government”, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring of supplicant and master to it.

It’s interesting, not to say revealing, that they see the UK Government as something outside of and apart from Wales which voluntarily opts to give Wales something which we wouldn’t otherwise get. It’s an attitude which demonstrates why the union is, ultimately, doomed.

Saving the precious union

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It was reported yesterday that the UK government is setting up a dedicated ‘union unit’, headed by Michael Gove, to battle Scottish independence and promote the union. Leaving aside the obvious point that if the answer is Michael Gove then someone is asking the wrong question, it seems that the main functions of this new unit will be to ‘explain the advantages’ of the union and brand everything with the union flag. The first will be a struggle, given that the only advantage that they can usually come up with is that the union has made Scotland so poor that they can’t imagine how it could possibly afford to be independent, and the second is likely to be counterproductive.

The idea that the union could be saved is not an entirely lost cause however; Wales’ First Minister has today talked about the sort of changes that could save the union. Whilst I’m not convinced that saving the union is a worthwhile objective in any event, I can see how turning the existing union into what Drakeford describes as “… authentically a voluntary association of nations where sovereignty is held by each nation and then pooled for common purposes” could work if it could be brought into existence. I just don’t see how, in practical terms, it could come about. It implies that the central Westminster government formally acknowledges, once and for all, the sovereignty of the people of Wales and Scotland, and renounces any right to legislate in any area where those countries have not formally agreed to share sovereignty. Technically, I don’t see how that can be achieved without a formal written constitution because any other arrangement falls foul of the absolute principle underpinning Westminster government that nothing any parliament does can ever bind its successors. But more important than the technical issue, I don’t see any possibility that a Conservative government would ever renounce Westminster’s sovereignty in such a fashion, and nor do I see any likelihood that Drakeford will be able to persuade either the current or any other foreseeable leader of his own party to renounce Westminster’s sovereignty either. The most practical route to implement Drakeford’s suggestion is for Wales and Scotland to become independent one day and then immediately agree to share and pool in specified areas, and Drakeford looks unlikely to follow through the logic of his position to that point.

The bigger question with which I struggle is why the union is so precious in the first place. Why are politicians so attached to a structure which was created over 300 years ago to meet the perceived exigencies of the day, as though what was felt to be ‘right’ at that point in time is necessarily and forever ‘right’ in all succeeding circumstances? For those in Wales who have fallen for the myth of ‘too small, too poor, too stupid’, I can understand why they might fear any alternative, but what’s in it for England? After all, if it’s true that Wales and Scotland are a huge financial burden on England, why go to so much effort to frustrate the independence movements? Let’s not forget that ‘sending £350 million a week to Brussels’ (even if it wasn’t true) was one of the motivations for Brexit; it ought to be a surprise that politicians who plugged that line are arguing that they should continue to ‘send £millions a week to Cardiff and Edinburgh’ (even though that isn’t true either) rather than supporting the national movements.

It’s hardly about votes either. We know that English voters are largely ambivalent at best about maintaining the union, and that amongst Brexiteer supporters of the current government there’s a clear majority in favour of getting rid of Wales and Scotland if it makes their purist Brexit easier. I’ve heard unionists waxing lyrical about ‘shared history’ (to say nothing of ‘the war’) and ‘cross-border families’ as though the first means that the past must necessarily determine the future and as though the second will somehow disappear just because a decision is taken to govern these islands in a different way. I’ve also heard (loud and clear!) the nonsense about ‘you can’t survive without us’, but I’ve never heard a cogent, reasoned argument as to why the union is or should be so precious.

It could just be that innate form of conservatism shared by both the Tories and the Labour Party, that inability to conceive of doing some things differently. It could be a fear that the UK (or, rather, England in this context) would be diminished in the world, although it’s hard to believe that architects of Brexit could seriously be worried about that. Maybe it just threatens their own sense of identity in some way. One thing about which we can be certain is that it isn’t about altruism or concern for the people of Wales and Scotland. One has only to glance very briefly at people like Gove and Johnson to know that.

How can we be so ungrateful?

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The fact that GDP per head is lower in some parts of the UK than in others is not inevitable. It is not an accident, nor is it the consequence of mysterious uncontrollable forces, it is the result of a seriously unbalanced economic system which sucks talent and economic activity to the ‘centre’ and concentrates administrative and government activity there as well, impoverishing the periphery in relative terms as it does so. London and the South East of England haven’t become richer than the rest of the UK solely on the basis of their own abilities and actions, they have done so as a result of London-centric government, and it isn’t just Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland which have paid the price, it is also large swathes of northern England. The fact that it isn’t a result of the special economic talents of the residents of one small corner hasn’t stopped them from claiming that it is, and that the rest of us are relatively poorer due to our own failings. Far too many have believed them, but the biggest problem is that they’ve also convinced themselves that the wealth which they’ve accumulated at our expense belongs to them and them alone.

Toby Young may be an extreme case (as he is on most things), but his complaint that the Welsh and Scottish people are showing a lack of gratitude for what he sees as the ‘subsidies’ which the South East provide is an open expression of an attitude which lies behind the words and actions of the current UK government from the PM down. It’s true that there is a degree of fiscal transfer from the centre back to the periphery, but whether this is generosity personified or a grudging return of just part of that which was sucked out by an unbalanced economy in the first place is entirely a matter of interpretation. It’s a big gulf in perspectives; what he sees as ingratitude can also be seen as a complaint that those outside the centre haven’t all gone full Stockholm Syndrome.

An important feature of that particular type of English nationalist who denies being a nationalist at all is the idea of superiority. They don’t simply believe themselves superior, they ‘know’ it to be true, and the refusal of others to accept their superiority merely confirms the truth of it. It’s a belief which, it seems, nothing can dent. The loss of Empire was down to the folly of lesser people believing that they could ever govern themselves; the failure of the EU to give the UK everything it asked for just shows that the Europeans don’t know what’s good for them; and demands for independence from Wales and Scotland simply prove that the people making those demands are fundamentally stupid. But the real stupidity for Wales and Scotland is the degree to which we readily accept that view of ourselves.

Taking the right decisions

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On the whole, Mark Drakeford has come out rather well for his handling of the pandemic in Wales, with his clear, open, and honest attempts to do what’s right to protect public health and to explain what he’s doing and why. That’s not to say he’s got everything right or that he should be immune from criticism for some of the details, but compared with the bumble and bluster of our next door neighbour he has, quite rightly, enjoyed a large degree of popular support. And I’m sure that, looking at what’s happening over the border, moving to a second lockdown before things get completely out of control is better than the English approach of doing too little, too late. I’m not alone in suspecting that Johnson will be forced to follow suit eventually, but will preside over many more hospitalisations and deaths before that happens. Until that happens, Drakeford may be facing a bit of a bumpy ride from some quarters, asking why something is OK on one side of the border but not on the other. But the ‘Welsh’ Conservatives should be a bit more careful about criticising Drakeford – their words may well come back to haunt them.

The logic of making a distinction between essential and non-essential goods is clear enough. He’s not saying that buying food is safe whilst buying electrical goods, for instance, is not; it’s more a question of trying to ensure that as few people as possible make as few shopping trips as possible, and keep those visits as short as possible – it’s that reduction in contact which will have the required effect, not what people buy when they go into a shop. It might have been better had he explained it simply in those terms. His point about trying to be fair to the smaller shops which can’t open at all by not allowing the supermarkets to hoover up all their custom is also fair and logical, although it rather overlooks the fact that companies like Amazon fill the gap and that both the smaller shops and the supermarkets lose as a result. On-line purchases are better from a disease control point of view than shop purchases, but he may not be doing as much to protect those smaller retailers as he might wish to believe. Another problem is that the definition of ‘essential’ is not at all as straightforward as it appears. Different people in different circumstances will have different needs, and a blanket categorisation doesn’t allow for that.

Sometimes logic isn’t enough or, rather, a different kind of logic needs to be applied. Allowing supermarkets to sell anything and everything that they currently sell would, no doubt, carry a higher level of risk of the disease spreading than curtailing the range of goods sold. But there might be a benefit overall in controlling the spread if it maintained a greater buy-in from the public at large – losing that support carries a real danger as well. It’s a tough call, and somebody has to make it. I’m not entirely convinced that Drakeford has got this one right, but it’s easy for those of us not faced with the decision to criticise it. The thought that up to an extra 1,000 people could die between now and the end of the year if he gets it wrong is clearly weighing heavily on his mind. We should be grateful for that, given the insouciance with which the UK’s PM seems to regard the lives of the old and vulnerable.

World-beating at what?

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The first time that I came across Vilfredo Pareto and his eponymous principle was some 40 years ago in the context of a computer system managing the stocks of spare parts for repairing appliances. In this application, the 80/20 rule tells us that by holding the right 20% of all possible spare parts close to the point of use, 80% of faults could be repaired without having to order parts in. The savings in stock holding costs are significant – the hardest part is identifying which 20% need to be stocked, and that’s where the computer came in. In some ways, the principle can be thought of as a mathematical representation of the law of diminishing returns.

The 80/20 rule isn’t a precise law, but it’s a pretty accurate and highly useful rule of thumb which applies in many other spheres as well – like contact tracing, for example. Whether it was part of the thinking behind the 80% target set for the outsourced track and trace service in England is unclear, but its benefits to the outsourcer are very, very clear: the costs of achieving an 80% target are likely to be around 20% of the costs of achieving a 100% target. The graph between cost and target isn’t linear, but it rises only slowly up to about the 80% mark after which it rises sharply. I worked in outsourcing for a while, and experience suggests that anyone who wanted to maximise the profit margin on any service would choose an achievement target of around 80%; it’s a ‘sweet spot’ for the balance between cost and reward. If I could get away with no penalties for under-achievement as well, I’d think I was in outsourcers’ heaven. Fair play, the test, track and trace system may be an operational disaster having only a marginal impact on control of the pandemic, but no-one can criticise the outsourcers’ negotiation skills.

As for the government’s negotiation skills, on the other hand … the words generally attributed to PT Barnum spring to mind. As far as we know, Chris Grayling had no hand in this contract, but his spirit certainly lives on in government. They have an ideological commitment (and if ideology isn’t enough, an occasional political donation tends to help) to the idea that the private sector will always do better than the public sector, where ‘better’ is taken to mean ‘lower cost’ or, as they would prefer to phrase it ‘better value for money’. Sometimes it’s even true; the profit motive can indeed encourage a focus on costs and waste which an annual budget-setting approach does not. But often it isn’t true – apparent savings are just a mirage, a pretty picture hiding an approach based on corner-cutting and under-achievement with an approach to charging for change management which quickly devours those apparent savings in the initial price. One thing that the private sector is undoubtedly better at than the public sector is writing and negotiating contracts. It helps when those with whom they are negotiating are predisposed to believe whatever the outsourcers say. When the government refers to the service as world-beating, they are not lying completely, they are just referring to the profit margins rather than the service delivery.

Cutting pensions to repay imaginary debt?

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The media have been busy this week pointing to what they describe in terms such as ‘record levels of borrowing’, following the announcement that the UK Treasury deficit hit £36bn for the month of September, and is now estimated to be around £300bn for the year. The figures for the deficit (£36bn and £300bn) are right enough, but the straight line from those to an increase in borrowing is utter tosh. In fact, the UK has borrowed precisely nothing extra this year, not a single penny. It’s even more stark than that – the total UK debt so far this year has actually reduced by £50bn, as Prof Richard Murphy points out here. All the additional expenditure has been financed not by borrowing but by the creation of new money, otherwise known as Quantitative Easing. The idea that this money – created by the Bank of England, a wholly owned subsidiary of the government, and acting on government instruction – is somehow ‘owed’ by the government to the BoE is a convenient book-keeping fiction. This part of the debt is wholly notional because the government, in effect, owes it to itself.

It follows that the stories of doom about needing huge tax rises going forward to ‘pay for’ the response to the pandemic are also nonsense. The government has already ‘paid for’ that response; any decision that tax rises will be necessary (tax adjustments for other purposes such as incentivising some actions and deterring others are a separate matter) at some future date depends not on the costs of the pandemic but primarily on whether the government needs to act to control any inflation which might result – an outcome which looks to be several years in the future at present. So why are these think tanks and pressure groups calling for action to cut spending and/or increase taxation, including once again the old perennial about abolishing the triple lock on pensions?

The answer is not about economics at all; it’s about ideology. Cutting pensions, cutting benefits, and cutting spending are about putting the burden onto the neediest in society, in order to protect the personal wealth of the richest few. They’re about dividing the many against each other by focusing the debate on which services should be cut, which benefits should be cut, and whose pensions should be cut (those with large occupational or personal pensions certainly won’t be greatly affected by the abolition of the triple lock) rather than debating the level of inequality and the means by which wealth has been siphoned away from the many to the few. They’re about trying to create an intergenerational divide by arguing that the interests of the young and the old clash in order to prevent people noticing that the real clash of interests is between the few and the many.

The problem is that it works; that’s why they keep saying it. The idea that a government must balance its books is so seductively ‘obvious’ that people are easily led to believe it; the think tanks promote it, the media support it, and politicians are cowed by it. But one thing that life has taught me is that that which is ‘obvious’ isn’t always true and that which is true isn’t always obvious. In this case, the obvious is most definitely not true; most government run deficits most of the time and debt is rarely repaid. Indeed, the consequences were the government ever to repay all ‘debt’ would be economically disastrous. A widespread recognition of those simple truths would turn debate about government finances in a wholly different direction. That, of course, is something those behind these, often mysteriously funded, think tanks want to avoid at all costs. People need to ask themselves why that would be.

Would it be the same if we knew their names?

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A few years ago, I found myself sitting through a meeting of a scrutiny committee at a local authority as the members were looking for potential savings. The officer leading the discussion took them through the committee's KPIs, of which there were something like 76 (a sure sign of a lack of prioritisation and focus – no-one can seriously manage anything against a list of targets that long). Anyway, the officer pointed out that in some cases, the authority was outperforming its targets and that this had a cost. On one KPI, for instance, the Welsh Government had set a target of 80%, and the authority was achieving 95%. This, said the officer, was an opportunity to save money; by reducing the level of achievement from 95% to 80%, resources could be allocated to other activities with no penalties being imposed. It’s a classic example of how a target which is probably intended to set a minimum level of service ends up setting the maximum as well.

This rule has a more general application. Let's take, as a not-entirely-random example, an outsourced track and trace system in England which has a target of tracing 80% of contacts and telling them to self-isolate. It’s easy to see how a company providing such a service will (if you’re lucky – it really depends on whether there are any downsides to the company from failure) strive to achieve the 80%, but it has no incentive to go beyond that. Indeed, over-performing would lead to extra cost with no extra income, thereby hitting profitability. The public health requirements may well see 80% as a minimum requirement for getting things under control, which is probably why it was set at that level, but the profit motive turns it effortlessly into a maximum. It means, in effect, that England is only even attempting to catch 80% of those infected, and the other 20% (plus any margin by which they don’t even achieve the 80% target) of contacts will be allowed to spread the virus freely.

There are implications for Wales given the long and porous border with England: even if the Welsh system is doing better (and it is, albeit far from perfect), being in an open union with a country which has consciously decided to let the pandemic rip at a rate of about 20% of its potential makes it difficult to control the virus here. A short, sharp lockdown is a reasonable response, and is being widely supported, but its effect will be widely undermined unless the Welsh Government takes the opportunity to work out a longer term way of living with an irresponsible neighbour unwilling to take the necessary steps itself. That should have happened during the last lockdown, but didn’t. I can understand that Drakeford et al might truly not have realised just how irresponsible Johnson and pals would be, but they have been slow to react as that level of irresponsibility has been increasingly revealed. And they are hampered by the lack of powers, particularly financial powers to support people and businesses, a factor which does not fill me with confidence that they will be able to take all the necessary actions after the short lockdown ends, even if they wanted to.

The Tories, perhaps inevitably, have reacted by opposing the lockdown, claiming that the WHO have said that lockdowns merely delay things and are not a solution. This is a deliberate misinterpretation of a rather more nuanced stance by the WHO, and would be more credible if they were offering an alternative approach which didn’t start and end with ‘do as the chief incompetent says’. But even if they were right in saying that a lockdown only delays things, what do they really mean by that?

There has been an estimate (and yes, I know that there are always problems with the accuracy of any estimates) that around 1,000 lives would be lost in Wales between now and the end of the year without the lockdown. In a strict sense, given that human mortality is always 100% eventually, it would be accurate to argue that those deaths are not avoided by a lockdown, merely delayed. (The same is true, incidentally, for all medical interventions for all diseases. No lives are ever truly ‘saved’; they are merely extended.) Treating people as just numbers and statistics makes it easy to forget that these are real people with families and friends: we just don’t know which 1,000 people it would be. But if we did, if we could put names and faces to them, would the Tories still be willing to say to them and their families that it’s better for the economy for them to die before Christmas than after? Because that, ultimately, is what saying that a lockdown ‘only delays’ the spread of the virus actually means.

Drakeford has a weakness in his reluctance to demand sufficient autonomy for Wales to be able to take the necessary steps to protect Wales and her people, but at least he’s not completely heartless as the Tories seem to be.

When the wind blows...

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According to Bloomberg, the Tories are busy preparing a strategy to respond to the growing calls for Scottish independence if the SNP win their predicted large pro-independence majority in the Scottish election next year. However, what some might initially interpret as a long-overdue understanding that simply repeating the word ‘no’ would be counterproductive, the detail of the proposals so far considered suggests precisely the opposite: they have learned nothing and understood less. It’s said that generals always fight the last war, but I’m not sure that the Tories are even as up to date as that.

There are four main elements to their proposed ‘strategy’:

1.    Attempt to persuade the Scots that they should stay by devolving more powers to Holyrood. It sounds a lot like a watered-down version of the infamous ‘Vow’, a promise of greater devolution if the Scots voted ‘no’ on which the UK parties, led by the Tories, promptly reneged after the vote. As cunning plans go, assuming that the Scots will be stupid enough to fall for the same tactic again looks more Baldrick than Machiavelli. And that would be true even if the Scots couldn’t read, in the same article, that many Tories will oppose this route anyway, preferring to reduce rather than enhance the powers of the Scottish parliament.

2.    Get the EU to make it clear that there is no easy route to membership for an independent Scotland. The EU will, of course, play ball with this because… Well, presumably because they really want to go out of their way to provide political support to people who have spent the last four years being obstructive and objectionable and who are trying to undo the whole EU project rather than those who have bought into the European ideal and want to promote it. Yes, I can see how that looks like a sensible approach to English exceptionalists - but not to anyone else. On the cunningness scale it also runs far wide of the goalposts.

3.    To attack the perceived failings of the Scottish government, “making the [SNP] 'pay the price' for running the semi-autonomous administration since 2007”. I’m not going to pretend that the SNP record in a number of fields has been perfect; it has not. But given that at least some of the problems can be laid at the lack of powers (and especially financial powers) devolved to Scotland, and given the patent failings of the UK Government, the words which immediately jump into my mind at the thought of the UK government inviting people to compare its record with that of Scotland are ‘shoot’ and ‘foot’.

4.    To launch a “a hard-hitting, attack-focused” campaign against Sturgeon. Again, I can only wonder at the mindset behind a proposal that what is widely seen to be the most dishonest, corrupt and incompetent government in the modern history of the UK would be taken seriously if it launches a personal attack on the single politician in the whole of the UK who most emerges from the handling of the pandemic with hugely-enhanced credibility.

The one thing that the report showed clearly was that, despite everything, the English ruling class as represented by the English Conservative Party still has an unshakeable conviction in its own innate correctness and inalienable right to rule the whole of the UK (as well as the colonies and dominions which many of them don’t even seem to realise left a long time ago). Years ago, I thought that the rapid loss of the Empire might shift that view, and more recently, I thought that Brexit would convince them that they need to adjust their world view: the UK does not rule the waves and will struggle even to get away with waiving some of the rules. But no, they learn nothing and show no signs of being able to learn either. That’s good news for Scotland – it is, as the proverb says, an ill wind that blows nobody any good. People in Wales need to see which way the wind is blowing as well, there’s no good reason why we shouldn’t also seize the opportunity.