YouGov poll : All to play for in Wales

Still no sign of a new Holyrood poll, although for good or bad it sounds like we're twenty-four hours at most away from the next one. In the meantime, what we have instead is a YouGov poll for the Welsh Assembly election, which suggests that (contrary to what some would have you believe) Labour are by no means guaranteed an overall majority. Here are the full figures -

Constituency vote :

Labour 49% (+2)
Conservatives 20% (-1)
Plaid Cymru 17% (-)
Liberal Democrats 8% (-)

Regional list vote :

Labour 44% (-1)
Conservatives 20% (-)
Plaid Cymru 18% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 8% (-)

Although Wales uses the same Additional Member voting system as Scotland (or Mixed-Member Proportional as it's called in New Zealand), Labour rigged the ratio of constituency to list seats to give themselves a much better chance of winning an outright majority. Even so, on the numbers in this poll they'd only be past the post by one or two seats, so there must still be a fighting chance that Plaid Cymru will remain part of a coalition government after the election.

Since the assembly was founded in 1999, Labour have tried minority government, coalition with the Lib Dems and coalition with Plaid, so it would be interesting to know which will be their preferred option this time round if they don't creep past the winning line. By all accounts, the Labour/Plaid coalition has been surprisingly harmonious over the last four years, although that's probably partly because Welsh Labour is led by a small 'n' nationalist, and not a big 'G' Gray.

Which was less likely - Governor George W Bush of Texas granting clemency to a death row prisoner in 1999, or the unionist parties giving the people a say on their constitutional future in 2007 or 2010?

You have to hand it to the more mindless critics of the SNP and Plaid Cymru - if nothing else, they have their tedious little repertoire well-drilled. I popped over to Political Betting yesterday afternoon simply to express the unwelcome view that the Welsh referendum result was a "fantastic day for Wales", and yet another four-hour marathon ensued. First of all I was asked if I was even being serious - surely my comment could only be intended as sarcasm? No, I explained, it was indeed a fantastic day for Wales, as it was hard to think of a single good reason why the Welsh people weren't capable of running their own affairs on exactly the same basis as people in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Aha, came the predictable retort, it was absolutely fine if those countries governed themselves, just so long as they paid for it themselves. "As an English taxpayer," one commenter added, "I'm sick of subsidising the Scots". I told him in that case he should rejoice - because he doesn't. I pointed him in the direction of Professor Andrew Hughes Hallet's analysis -

"“The usual perception is that Scotland spends about 20% on public services more per head than the UK average...

“Those numbers are very misleading mainly because the spending in that part is what’s spent on behalf of Scotland but not necessarily in Scotland.

“The estimate for Scotland’s share, that’s contributions to defence, is 2.8 billion but it’s roughly 2.0 billion are actually paid out in Scotland

“So there’s an implicit subsidy going south in that sense and you can think of lots of other examples ...”

Hughes Hallett added:
“At the moment, on the current account, there’s a subsidy going to London, which is helping London.

“When you get down to it, on the current account for the last five years at least, maybe longer, Scotland has had a current account surplus, which is currently according to the national accounts in Scotland £1.3 billion.”

Asked whether Scotland would definitely be better off, Prof Hallett replied: “You can definitely say that it [Scotland] would be better off in terms of the revenue.”

Prof Hughes Hallett pointed to ‘missing’ income that is generated in Scotland but is actually attributed to London, giving the Crown Estate as an example saying: “The Crown agents who take fees for electricity generation and give it to the Treasury...”

Professor Hughes Hallett also destroyed one of the myths surrounding the bail out of HBOS and RBS claiming that their dealings in England would have meant that England would have shouldered a significant part of their liabilities."

Well, naturally the Nat-bashing hordes weren't best pleased about having one of their most cherished articles of faith totally demolished by a renowned economist, so after a series of fairly pathetic attempts to dismiss Hughes Hallett as a "no-name economist from a second-rate US university", we then moved on to the next phase of the standard repertoire - random (and rather desperate) muck-flinging. Yep, you've guessed it, it was the familiar heady blend of wild and long-since-disproved assertions that the SNP 'did a deal' over freeing Megrahi, and suggestions that they had bottled it on the independence referendum (or "acted dishonourably", as one commenter sniffed airily) by not bothering to spend an afternoon going through the motions of putting something to the vote in the Scottish Parliament that everyone knew was going to be defeated by 78 votes to 50, because the three unionist parties were hell-bent on voting it down.

It really is quite comical. If the SNP had taken the opposite course, we all know what the mantra would be by now - Alex Salmond would have "wasted parliamentary time and money on something no-one gives two hoots about" (the last bit is © Tavish "Two Hoots" Scott). As it is, they synthetically claim to be outraged that the SNP "weren't even trying to deliver independence". What are the SNP for, they plaintively cry.

That line of argument is, I'd suggest, the rough equivalent of claiming that a death row prisoner in Texas in 1999 wasn't really "trying to stay alive" because he dispensed with that all-important last-minute plea for clemency to Governor George W Bush.

An exotic variant on the traditional line came from PB's deputy editor David Herdson, who insisted that the SNP had 'squandered their golden chance' to call a referendum immediately after being elected in 2007. If they had tabled a parliamentary vote at that stage, he earnestly claimed, they would have got it through on the basis that the opposition parties would have recognised that the SNP had "won the election" and thus had the moral right to do it.

I believe the phrase "aye, right" was invented for moments like this...

Decision day in Wales

It's great to see Malc at Better Nation devote a post to the referendum in Wales today - it's received so little coverage in the "national" mainstream media that you'd be forgiven for not being aware that it's even taking place. On one point I'd quibble with Malc, though -

"To be clear, this isn’t a referendum to extend devolution or bestow more powers on the National Assembly for Wales. They already have the opportunity to get the powers which will be delivered in the event of a Yes vote in today’s referendum – they were bestowed on the NAW by the Government of Wales Act (2008).

This is more about speed of delivery – rather than having to apply to Westminster for individual powers in each of 20 fields specified in the Act using a lengthy process known as Legislative Competence Orders (LCOs)..."

To my mind, the vote plainly is about the extension of devolved powers. The whole point of having to apply for a power, surely, is that the application can be refused - or to put it another way, the power isn't actually 'bestowed' on the Assembly until an application is accepted.

Malc also reveals the entire lengthy preamble to today's referendum question, which includes this rather startling sentence -

"The Assembly cannot make laws on subject areas such as defence, tax or welfare benefits, whatever the result of this vote."

Which is as good as saying "you don't get to choose on such grown-up matters, so suck it up". Doubtless, though, there'll still be somebody brazen enough to claim a Yes vote today as a "vote against nationalism", just as Roy Hattersley did after the Scottish devolution referendum of 1997. Tell me, Roy - how exactly could I have gone about voting for independence in that referendum? A No vote? An abstention? How?

Still, in a way it's a pity that the AV referendum question won't be fronting up to its limitations in quite such a direct manner...

"At present, our voting system is not proportional. However you vote today, that will not change. Tough luck, baby."

A few thoughts on liberty and stealing

I got into an unexpected exchange at Political Betting a few hours ago with someone who feels that a wealthy person who suffers as a result of a progressive income tax system is no longer working for himself, but is instead a servant of the state - although, curiously, this only seems to apply when he is handing over "the majority" of his income.  I pointed out that such a person is simply being expected to make a fair contribution in exchange for the services that we all receive from the state, based on his greater ability to pay.  If he feels that he's not receiving as much 'bang for his buck' as the poorer people who pay less in absolute terms, he's clearly losing sight of just how much he actually gets back from the state - most notably the enforced adherence of the rest of the society to a system that legitimises his wealth and private property rights, and by extension the advantages he enjoys over most others.  Looked at that way, he's plainly getting the better side of the bargain in this social contract.

Fairly predictably, I was then told that the contract I was describing was nothing short of blackmail or a kind of protection racket - pay up, or your property will be stolen by the mob.  But this begs the obvious question - what actually is "private property" or "theft" if you don't have the state, and consent from the rest of society, to define and enforce it for you?  It all began to remind me of the arguments I used to regularly hear from the American "libertarians".  The punitive enforcement of the rights that happen to be most important to them - ie. the right to life, free speech and property as defined simply by being left alone to defend themselves with a gun, and to retain what they already own untouched - is regarded as an absolute moral imperative, because these are all 'natural rights'.  And yet the rights that are important to so many others - the right to life, free speech and property as defined by the right to health care and shelter that will actually keep them alive and healthy, and the right to education and a financial safety net that will give them the slightest chance of actually having a voice and owning a modest amount of property - are not only deemed illegitimate, but their realisation is actually regarded as an outrageous application of "force".  It never seems to occur to these "libertarians" that the advantages that afford them the luxury of meaningfully exercising the right to life and liberty without ever having to look beyond their 'natural rights', while others have no choice but to rely on the "force" of the state, is actually directly derived from something the state has conferred on them in the first place.

Who says massive inherited wealth is 'natural', for example?  Or the advantage of a superior education that others are denied?  You only have to look around Britain today - or just around the Cabinet table, for that matter - to see that the idea that wealth inequalities can simply be explained by how hard people work or how innately talented they are is utterly laughable.  The immense advantages that some enjoy on very dubious merit are not legitimised by nature, but by the state - and by force.  If others try to nip in and grab a small share of that wealth, or of those opportunities, they'll be stopped.  That's OK because that force has democratic legitimacy (ie. the consent of society) behind it, but it's force against the individual nonetheless, in precisely the same way that the compulsory payment of taxes required to realise other democratically legitimised rights like free health care and education is force against the individual.  The American libertarians seem to fondly imagine that the force needed to protect their property rights is trivial or non-existent in comparison to the type of force they complain of, ie. that it costs others nothing to simply respect their natural rights.  Well, that's fine until the 'natural rights' of a few consume such a fantastic portion of a society's wealth that others are squeezed out to the point of destitution, with no legal access to the minimal share of the wealth they require for a merely decent standard of living.  That strikes me as being quite a significant cost.

I've said before that in many ways I consider myself to be a libertarian, which naturally the American right-wingers are either bemused by or regard as an affectation, because liberty "can't be conditional".  But of course the truth (as they occasionally acknowledge when forced into a corner) is that liberty must by definition be conditional, otherwise it can never work - if you don't curb your own liberty by respecting the liberty of others, why should they do the same for you?  So the real principle of libertarianism is that the conditions applied ought to be the minimum necessary to preserve and further liberty.  A system that offers a theoretical right to life, free speech and private property, while all the time robbing some people - by force - of the slightest chance of ever utilising those freedoms falls well below that minimum threshold.

*

Also at PB this evening, a fascinating (and ultimately encouraging) article by Penddu on the forthcoming referendum in Wales on enhanced devolution.  He characterises the breadth of the No campaign in the following stark terms -

"backed by UKIP, BNP and a campaign group of disaffected Labour activists called True Wales which seems to consist of two spokesmen from Gwent and an inflatable pig" 

Not to worry, though, because Fraser Nelson manfully entered the fray on their behalf during this evening's Question Time, branding the referendum the most "boring" ever, and noting that he tended to take the view that "if you give politicians more power, you only encourage them".  Now, is it just me, or do people who call a proposed change boring, unimportant, or best of all "a distraction" usually mean that they can't actually think of a persuasive argument against it on its own terms?  (The debate on the fox-hunting ban springs to mind.)  And when they talk about not wanting "politicians" to have more power, don't they usually mean that they'd much rather if power wasn't transferred away from politicians in Westminster?

Welsh Labour leader wants perpetual Labour rule in Wales - who'd have thunk it?

Well, I've seen some cynical political manoeuvres, but this one takes the biscuit. Welsh Labour leader and First Minister Carwyn Jones has declared his support for a Yes vote in the forthcoming AV referendum, and has also innocently suggested that AV would be a rather good electoral system for the Welsh Assembly. Which is just about the only way a Labour politician could possibly hope to call for the scrapping of proportional representation and its replacement with a permanent artificial Labour majority without looking breathtakingly power-crazed. Mr Jones poses what he describes as an "important" question (presumably while struggling manfully to stifle his guffaws) -

"if this change is good enough to elect Members of the House of Commons, then surely it’s good enough to elect Members of the Welsh Assembly too?"

On the million-to-one chance that was a serious question, I'll spell out the bleedin' obvious for Carwyn - the bulk of Yes supporters categorically do not think AV is "good enough" to elect MPs. If they were offered a system like the one which elects the Welsh Assembly, they'd bite your hand off. In the meantime, they're simply making a rational choice for the better of the two rubbish majoritarian systems on offer in this referendum.

Murder on someone's mind

A few years back I was somewhat mortified to read a post listing some of the more unusual Google searches that had taken people to the blog in question - mainly because one of the searches was my own. Thankfully, my anonymity was preserved! It's occurred to me a few times to do a similar post myself, but sadly most of the searches for this blog have tended to be fairly routine. But a handful of recent ones did catch my eye...

bethan jenkins breasts

The blog list on the right can probably explain the first two words, but the third is a bit of a mystery. And on a vaguely similar theme...

her bosom as weapon

Ljubica, Ljubica...

will someone please kill alex salmond

Perhaps Senator Menendez is stepping up his "inquiries" once again?

Could the greatest challenge to Calman's timidity come from Wales?

Interesting to read in yesterday's Herald the suggestion that, if the Holtham Report is implemented in full, the Welsh Assembly would all of a sudden hold more extensive fiscal powers than the Scottish Parliament is set to receive under Calman. On the face of it, this is excellent news - the detailed economic arguments over Calman would be more than superceded by any perception that we are for the first time being left behind by our Celtic cousins. The pressure to beef up the proposals would become irresistible.

However, I'm more inclined to fear that the end result of this divergence may instead be that the Welsh proposals are watered down. As we all know, the default setting in both Whitehall and the Tory party is to relinquish as little power as they can possibly justify.

You know when you've been Paxoed - even if your name is Jeremy

I've long thought that the question of whether Jeremy Paxman's almost absurdly belligerent interviewing style serves - or is an irritant to - the democratic process is a bit like the question of whether it's a good thing that Prince Charles uses his privileged position to speak out on issues of political controversy. In other words, it all depends on whether you agree with the point he is making at any given moment. I'm sure there have been occasions when I've found myself cheering Paxman on - but equally there was one incident that made my blood boil like no other. During the 2001 election campaign, the then SNP leader John Swinney was invited onto Newsnight for what was billed as an 'interview', but what actually unfolded was little more than a prolonged Paxman sneer-fest. His introductory remarks were "OK, Mr. Swinney, you're on national TV now". He then spent almost the entirety of the exchange demanding to know why the SNP manifesto contained pledges that they could never implement, since they wouldn't be forming the UK government. But when you think about it, what was Paxman actually getting at there? That the SNP shouldn't have the temerity to stand candidates at all? Or that those candidates should stand without publishing a manifesto or telling anyone what their policies are? A line of attack that basically amounts to "justify your existence, not your policies" can scarcely be said to aid the democratic process. Naturally, Swinney as one of the most mild-mannered political leaders in recent history found the forbearance not to inform Paxman he was being an oaf and storm off, but I'm not quite sure how.

So how delicious to see Paxman try a similar job on Plaid Cymru last night and be made to look an utter fool for his troubles. Once again, there was a sneering introduction intended to undermine the credibility of the interviewee before he had even spoken a word - "I'm joined now by Eurfyl ap Gwilym, who's Deputy Chairman of the Principality Building Society, in which august position he's also Plaid Cymru's senior economics adviser". But, once underway, the exchange quickly spun completely out of Paxman's control. When he claimed that public expenditure in Wales was higher than in any region of England, Gwilym was able to point out that spending per head is actually higher in London, and with single-mindedness worthy of Paxman himself admirably refused to move off the issue until that point had been conceded. "Do your homework!" he repeatedly said, to Paxman's evident fury. The telling thing was that Paxman clearly started to twig at an early stage that he had probably got his facts wrong, but boneheadedly refused to simply acknowledge that, ultimately resorting to utterly risible bluster about how London wasn't really a region of England. And that, surely, is the Paxo problem in a nutshell - if his belligerence is to serve any real purpose it must be to break through the obfuscation of politicians, not to assist in his own obfuscation, or to shout down those who challenge him when he's clearly in the wrong.

Give me just a little bit more

Something for almost everyone in the latest full-scale Welsh YouGov poll - except for Lib Dems. Labour still lead (just), the Tories make dramatic progress from their 2005 position (bringing into even sharper relief the dismal performance of the Scottish Tories), and while Plaid Cymru seem to suffer even more than the SNP from the Westminster 'away fixture' effect, the seat projections nevertheless place them on an all-time high of five. But the best news of all is that there is solid backing for the principle of the National Assembly gaining full law-making powers. This should not lead to complacency - single-issue polling is typically far more volatile than voting intention figures, and for the evidence of that we need look no further than the referendum on an assembly for the northeast of England. However, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that these figures show that an early referendum on the issue can be won, and Peter Hain's excuses for kicking it into the long grass are looking thinner by the day.

Amusing to witness on the blogosphere the effortless way the usual suspects cherry-pick the bits of this poll they like and discard the bits they don't. The evidence for a Tory surge in Wales is naturally cast-iron to them, but the support for greater devolution can apparently be easily explained away thus - "I think you should be careful about polls asking people if they 'want more' of something, as the answer is almost always yes." Ah, so that would neatly explain why what the Tories regarded as their 'golden bullet' argument against aspirations for Scottish and Welsh devolution in the 1980s and 90s - ie. endlessly pointing out to people that it would entail "more politicians" - fell so spectacularly flat on its face.

Wales warms to self-government

I (slightly wearily) had a look at the ICM website tonight on the off-chance that the detailed breakdown of their latest poll might have been made available a bit earlier than usual. No luck, needless to say. But I'm glad I looked, because what I did find instead was the details of a survey that was carried out a couple of weeks ago for BBC Wales on the subject of the future of the devolution settlement. Remarkably - and it has to be said, somewhat misguidedly - there are twice as many people in Wales who feel that the Welsh Assembly has the most influence over their country as those who (more realistically) think that Westminster still calls the most important shots. But perhaps more to the point, when asked which tier of government should hold the most influence, 64% said the Assembly and only 19% opted for Westminster. So much for the Welsh being more reluctant devolutionists than the Scots.

And when questioned about specifically how much power the Assembly should hold, 58% wanted more powers than there are at present - including no fewer than 15% who favoured outright independence.

Shadow Cabinet gains another junior part-time observer member

I get the impression that the BBC's Betsan Powys has, to some extent, interpreted Annabel Goldie's elevation to part-time "Shadow First Minister" in David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet in the same way I did. Having probed whether the same 'honour' would be conferred on Welsh Tory leader Nick Bourne, she poses the question - "is it better to be Shadow First Minister or real life Leader of the Opposition?"

(For the uninitiated, the Tories are the Official Opposition in the Welsh Assembly despite being only the third largest party. This came about after the two largest parties - Labour and Plaid Cymru - formed an improbable governing coalition.)