A cloud across the Chair

Translation of a post by Vaughan Roderick

Sometimes it seems that Dafydd Elis-Thomas's grip on the Llywydd's chair is almost as strong and unchangeable as Cadair Idris's place in the heart of his constituency. In the nine years since the Assembly was established the Llywydd has annoyed a few AMs on several occasions. Nevertheless on the whole the respect for his experience and his work as the Assembly was being built as a parliamentary body independent of the government has ensured that there was never any serious threat to his hold on the office.

Now, there are a few signs that things are changing. With the changes that came in the wake of the second Wales government measure now having reached some kind of stability there are a few members beginning to suspect that it's time for the Lord to step aside.

A series of decisions and comments made by the Llywydd and the Assembly Commision (the committee of AMs which oversees the place) has rocked the boat.

For some time some AMs have complained that the LCO process is clumsy and painfully slow. Until recently the Llywydd insisted that this was nonsense. Any criticism of the system was the fruit of ignorant and malicious journalists' imagination in his opinion. Then whilst presenting evidence to the Justice Committee a week ago the Llywydd admitted that the complaints were not unfounded. It wasn't the system that was to blame, of course, but for once the idiots from the press and television were also innocent. The Welsh Affairs Select Committee was the problem this time. MPs don't elect the Llywydd, of course, but I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall as the committee members discussed this with their Labour colleagues in the Bay!

Recent decisions regarding publishing members' expenses and draught rules to control blogs have also irritated some of our politicians. It seems Alun Davies is among them. During questions to the Leader of the House, Carwyn Jones, Alun asked a courteous enough question: would it be possible to hold a debate in the Government's time regarding the Assembly Commission's accountability?

As it happens the Deputy Presiding Officer, Rosemary Butler, was in the chair at the time but there's no two ways about it that the question was a warning to the Llywydd. Has David Melding started canvassing yet?

Dyfed Edwards: New Direction

Dyfed Edwards, the new leader of the Plaid Cymru group on Gwynedd Council, has expressed his intention to revise plans for the reorganisation of primary education in Gwynedd and seek a consensus between parents, teachers and politicians:

“It is obvious that there has been opposition to some aspects of the draft proposal for re-organising primary education.

“We have to consider a new direction, which involves working with Gwynedd's communities to create a primary education system that is suitable for the 21stcentury”

Dyfed Edwards acknowledges that the draft proposal put forward by the previous Council must be looked at again, and that there is a need to build consensus between the Council, Gwynedd's communities, teachers and headmasters. In order to do this, it is inevitable that the council looks again at the practicality of the previous draft proposal, to evaluate which parts of it remain viable.

Having said this, Plaid Cymru's leader emphasises that the Council must face up to the challenge of creating a primary education system that is both sustainable and fair.

Next month Plaid will face Llais Gwynedd again in a by-election showdown in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Meanwhile there's a rumour being floated around that Seimon Glyn is already fed up with his new affiliation and may wish to return to the Plaid fold...

Euronews: France Prepares For EU Presidency

Jean-Pierre Jouyet, the French Minister for European affairs, is currently preparing for when France takes over the EU's rotating presidency on the 1st of July. It is a crucial time for the French and the EU as it will be France that guides the Union through the ratification process of the Treaty of Lisbon. There are a number of issues on the agenda, apart from the environment and energy issues, the EU will have to deal with the important and difficult issues of agriculture, trade, immigration and Turkey.

Mutiny on the Brownty

From Mike Smithson of Political Betting:

Word reaches me that the former Health Secretary and fervent Blairite, Alan Milburn, is planning to mount a leadership bid to topple Gordon Brown in the aftermath of Labour’s likely heavy defeat in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this but it comes from somebody I trust who has very close links within the party.

Whether this is true or not, and I am inclined to believe that it is, there are a number of senior figures within the party who have reason to loathe Gordon. The Prime Minister will be at his weakest in the days after the loss of Crewe and Nantwich and this will be the ideal time to strike.

Guido Fawkes adds:

If only people like Milburn, Clarke, Hoey or McDonnell say it, he can weather it.

...if only a handful of members of the cabinet were to tell Brown to his face that he had to go for the sake of the party that would be that. Jack Straw would be the man deputised to do the job. Brown has been a disaster for the Labour Party, he can't be the change he promised, he is clearly physically and politically exhausted. Will Jack be the one to put him out of his misery on Friday?

Guido also reveals that apparently Gordon will flee to Fife on Friday.

More on this subject from Paul Linford and the Half-blood Welshman.

The Lord & the Archbishop: Part 2

Continuing from Part 2

Why then has Dafydd Elis-Thomas been so thin skinned -so uncharacteristically thin skinned- regarding this matter? Not, one can venture, because he believes the appropriate role of the Assembly's Presiding Officer is to defend whatever constitutional 'settlement' that Assembly happens to be founded on at one particular time or another. As he showed between 1999 and 2006, he sees his responsibility as one to the institution and its potential rather than to the letter of any law or particular system. Certainly he did not feel any criticism of the 1998 Act to be personal criticism.

One explanation is that he feels some form of personal ownership of the 2006 Act; that he considers himself to be one of its architects. That is certainly a possibility. Little, in truth, is known about the creation of the act. We know, of course, that Peter Hain and the Wales Office played a key role and Hain has spoken of struggling with members of the Cabinet in London regarding the act. We also know that the Assembly Government's civil servants extended considerable practical support to the Wales Office as the act was drawn up. Rhodri Morgan's exact role is more of a mystery. There are suggestions and rumours that he played a very important role, but there is nothing to confirm this. What about the opposition parties? Again it is a matter of public knowledge that Dafydd Elis-Thomas and some of the Welsh Liberal Democrat lords extended firm support for the measure when questions were raised concerning its future in the wake of the House of Lords' opposition to the government's intentions to change the voting system for its own partisan benefit. This support was timely and particularly useful for Peter Hain. But did Dafydd Elis-Thomas or the Presiding Office contribute anything substantial to the contents of the Act? At the moment we can only guess. One can be sure that there was some parley concerning the details ond my guess, at least, is that this happened within the context of a substantial framework that had already been determined by the main actors from within the Labour Party. But as I said, this is only guessing.

But influence or not, I believe that Dafydd Elis-Thomas's response to scholarly criticism of the legislative system established by the 2006 Act lays bare one of the pathological weaknesses of Welsh politics. For decades devolution and Welsh constitutional politics has been a matter for a small elite only, and the group that counted without exception was the leading group within the Welsh Labour Party. If the people's voice was heard at all, then it's role was to obstruct or validate decisions that had already been made by the elite, rather than discuss the substance of the plans. Such was the case at the end of the 1960s and the 1970s. Such was the case in the 1990s. Such was the case when the 2006 Act was being drawn up. Such will be the case even with the Welsh Constitutional Convention when the possibility of holding a vote to validate a new system (its length and breadth already decided) is discussed. This is one of the consequences of one-partyism, of course. Another characteristic of one-partyism is that the other parties within the system that believe in self-government have concentrated their energies on attempting to move the argument within the dominent party. As long as one-partyism continues to be such an evident characteristic of Welsh politics in Westminster, and as long as Westminster continues to predominate over Cardiff to a degree which is much greater than it does over Edinburgh, for example, the strategy of trying to effect the Labour Party's internal discussions is a completely reasonable one. Indeed if it wasn't Dafydd Elis-Thomas who said that ' the path to a Parliament leads through the bowels of the Welsh Labour Party', then it should have been!

But there is a price to pay for this. In the present case, that price is the multitude of problems attached to the new legislative system. And the appropriate role of scholars is to draw attention to those problems and that price, be that convenient or not. That doesn't mean being depreciative of the political reality or insulting our politicians. And indeed, I know of no serious commentator on constitutional developments in Wales who is not perfectly aware that politics is the art of the possible and that this limits considerably that which can be achieved. But our function is not to prepare an apologia for our plitical system either; nor sing the praise of that system's produce when defects are wholly evident. Dafydd Elis-Thomas knows that well enough, of course. Being for my part a big admirer of Dafydd Elis-Thomas, it is a matter of personal sadness that he seems to have lost sight of these truths -at least at the moment.

As he thundered against Scotland's parochialism in the 1960s, Tom Nairn said that that country would not experience a recovery 'until the last minister of the Kirk had been strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post'. I don't have quite such a strikingly colourful image to offer for the future of Wales. But for my own part, I believe that our own present parochialism cannot be escaped and a truly mature and broadminded Welsh polity crafted in its place until we can discuss our constitutional future without having to give priority every time to 'what will the Welsh Labour Party be willing to swollow?' Instead, that party should be no more than one voice (albeit an influential one) among many in a multi-aspected and multi-lingual discussion concerning what kind of polity do we want to be citizens of. And there will even be a place for scholars in that discussion too.

Bring On The Clowns

Guerrilla Welsh-Fare picks up on Welsh Labour's new stand up comedy act. Entertainment guaranteed!

The Lord & the Archbishop: Part 1

Translation of Professor Richard Wyn Jone's column in this month's edition of Barn

The debate concerning the new constitutional system in Wales continues. Dr Barry Morgan, the Archbishop of Wales, is the latest to attack the present system, much to the annoyance of Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas.

Scholars are to blame. That's the opinion of the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly for Wales -and President of Bangor University- Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas. They're scaremongers, prophets of doom when it comes to the Wales Government Act and the new system of legislisation established for the Assembly. But their allegations are completely baseless. Dafydd Elis-Thomas wants to assure us that there are no fundamental problems with the system established by Part Three of the Act. Rather the new system of LCOs in Westminster allowing Measures to be passed in Cardiff Bay is working remarkably smoothly. On top of which, it affords the Assembly the indispensable opportunity to gain experience in drawing up its own primary-in-all-but-name legislation. Better days have already come to the National Assembly and that establishment is growing daily, it's just that these scholars fail to recognise this.

The scholars' problem, it seems, is their naivete. They are purists who worry too much about abstract theories concerning fundamental principles which should be incorporated in constitutions, without fully understanding and appreciating the nature of practical politics. This isn't innocent purism either. Considering just how vehemently Dafydd Elis-Thomas condemned them recently, it appears that the Llywydd feels that these scholars are scaremongering, creating baseless fears and invalid doubts among the general populace. That in turn could undermine or fetter the further development of the National Assembly in the future. This is then no small matter.

Until recently, however, the Llywydd also counted BBC Wales as being among the scaremongers regarding the new legislative system. One sour enough appearance on CF99 will stick in the memories of those who witnessed it.But in a later appearance on Gwilym Owen's programme on Radio Cymru he went even further. On that occasion Dafydd Elis-Thomas went as far as to claim the BBC in Cardiff had made an 'editorial decision' to portray the new system as being a failure. Only the correspondents of BBC Radio 5live, he said again, offered a correct picture to their listeners. He was, he announced, about to meet the chiefs of the Corporation in Cardiff to discuss the fallacious attitude of their Welsh reporters.

I don't know what came of that meeting - oh to be a fly on the wall! Perhaps the Llywydd has been convinced now that the reporters and their bosses don't spend their time over their editorial meetings' poor coffee and dry Digestives discussing ways of portraying the 2006 Act in a bad light? But it certainly is not so in the case of scholars. Rather, following a speech at the beginning of April by the Archbishop of Wales and founder of Cymru Yfory, Dr Barry Morgan - a speech that dared to raise the question the new system - Dafydd Elis-Thomas returned to the battlefield. In another appearance on Gwilym Owen's programme he suggested that scholars had been whispering venemously in his old friend and spiritual leader's ear. Although the Llywydd aknowledged Barry Morgan's right to express an opinion, it was difficult for listeners not to come to the conclusion that he would have much preferred the Archbishop to have remained silent. And if he chose to return to the matter in the future , as a report in the Western Mail noted, the advice of Dafydd Elis-Thoma to the Archbishop was clear enough: 'he might consider appointing a new constitutional advisor'.

It's not wholly clear which scholars exactly are under the lash in all this. Dafydd Elis-Thomas is too much of an old hand to name anybody directly. But one can guess. There are two academics on Cymru Yfory's working group, both highly respected. One of them is David Lambert of Cardiff University - a man who was chief legal councillor to Dafydd Elis-Thomas himself between 2000 and 2004. The other is Alan Trench, now of Edinburgh University - one of the chief authorities on the legal and constitutional aspects of devolution in these isles. These two, and especially the latter, were ready enough to draw attention to the weaknesses of the Act and it is likely enough, then, that one or both of them are counted among the heretics. Perhaps your present columnist is counted among them as well.

As Dafydd Elis-Thomas has always -in my experience, at least- benn a particularly courteous and polite man, and none of the scholars mentioned have placed any blame on him for the problems of the 2006 Act, the ferocity of his response to the academic criticism of that act was unexpected and a bit of a shock. Nevertheless, it's obvious that he feels this criticism to be a personal criticism, and that it gets under his skin. More's the pity, in his dissappointment and his anger, one hears the Llywydd misrepresenting the contents of the academic criticism, creating a worthless straw man of an argument which is easily cast down, rather than responding to the substance of what is being said. Thus, as the scholars have argued -it is claimed- that the new system will not work at all, the fact that the LCOs are slowly crawling through the appointed process (and one been passed, even), means, ipso facto, that those scholars are incorrect and their criticism unfounded.

Because it is unclear who exactly is under the Llywydd's lash, and as I'm not claiming knowledge of every public announcement made by those who could be counted among the infidels, it's hard to prove beyond doubt that none of them / us has said something that could be interpreted as a prophecy to the effect that the system would not work at all. But it's unlikely. And whatever the case, could it be that Dafydd Elis-Thomas himself is aware that there is much more substance to the criticism than that?

There were several elements to the criticism, of course. The new system was likely to be a complicated one, slow, and less than transparent. There would be the danger that the system would lead to that which specialists call 'double scrutiny' - a situation where Westminster and and the UK government decides the fate of the Assembly's applications for powers, not on the basis of the constitutional propriety of what is requested, but rather on the basis of their own opinion concerning the political propriety of what is intended to be done with the transfered powers. Such double scrutiny would not only undermine the Assembly's democratic mandate but - it's likely - create stupendous tensions when the day dawns where governments of different political colours are in power in Cardiff and London. Another concern voiced is that the system would strengthen the government's hand at the expense of the legislature even further, something we the constitutional purists (and Rhodri Morgan and Dafydd Elis-Thomas in their day) tend to worry a lot about and for good democratic reasons at that.

After almost a year of use, it appears that the doubters fears concerning the new system have been proved correct time after time. Forgive me for not scrutinising all the evidence in detail in this column this time. Lat us only note the marked slowness of how the LCOs are dealt with; the evident problems with the scrutiny system in Westminster; and the fact that is is completely obvious that double scrutiny is occuring with requests for powers set against a political measuring stick as well as a constitutional one. And is my word isn't sufficient, we have heard public announcements by Dr Hywel Francis and Paul Murphy aknowledging that there are problems with the new system which need to be overcome. Of course, we're not in a situation to know yet if the worst fears of the critics concerning the likely fate of the system will be realised when Labour lose power in London or in Cardiff. But with the Tories already opposing the transfer of power to Cardiff on the matter of selling council houses, and that for political reasons rather than constitutional ones, isn't it fairly clear which way the wind is blowing over ther? It isn't scholars who are creating these problems; and these problems would not dissappear if scholars were to keep silent.

Continued in Part 2

Doing the right thing

Failed asylum seekers in Wales will now be given free health care - unlike their counterparts in England, where the Department of Health in England is taking legal action to restrict free access to the NHS to this group:

Health Minister Edwina Hart said her decision was the right one and that the mark of a civilised society was how it treated the sick and dying.

"No-one would want to see a pregnant woman turned away from hospital if they were having difficulty with the pregnancy and people are fundamentally decent and they will understand this argument.

"I'm simply looking at the human being at the end of the chain and saying if they've got severe health problems and they require help and assistance, as a civilised country we should give it."

I couldn't agree more. Well done, Edwina.

Another day, another poll

Labour support is in freefall, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today. It shows that the party's position - 14 points behind the Conservatives - is worse than at any time since May 1987, just before Margaret Thatcher won her third election by a landslide:

Public confidence in Labour's ability to govern has dropped heavily on a series of key measures. Voters are also turning their back on Gordon Brown personally: 75% of people who voted Labour in 2005 now think that Tony Blair was a better prime minister. Overall, voters also place Brown as a leader behind Thatcher and even John Major.

Labour support, at 27%, has fallen seven points in the space of a month and is the lowest ever recorded in the Guardian/ICM series, which began in 1984.