The Institute of Welsh Affairs doesn't seem to have given this any publicity, but has recently put up a series of videos of a debate held in London a couple of weeks ago.
It was chaired by Peter Riddell and featured contributions by David Melding, Leighton Andrews and Adam Price. Use the £20 you've saved to buy your own bottle of wine, then sit back and enjoy.
Martin Shipton of the Western Mail is apparently "shocked" at Adam Price's decision to put himself forward for selection as Plaid Cymru's candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in 2016.
Adam Price announces shock bid to return to frontline politics
Let's think about that one. It's his home patch. He tried to get selected before, but Rhodri Glyn Thomas refused to stand down. Rhodri then confirms that he is going to stand down in 2016 ...
Yes, I suppose nobody could have guessed what would happen next. I can only imagine how much more of a shock it will be if he is selected ... or even goes on to win the seat.
In what is likely to be the defining theme of Leanne Wood's leadership of Plaid Cymru, she said:
Today, we're making a clear statement of our intent – that Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, links its own success with the economic success of the Welsh nation.
If achieving cultural self-confidence was the priority for the last century, then achieving economic self-confidence is the objective for the 21st Century.
So this introductory report from Plaid's new Economic Commission, co-chaired by Eurfyl ap Gwilym and Adam Price, will set the scene for the work it has to do. Click the images below to download it in either Welsh or English.
This is what Adam Price had to say about it:
Offa's Gap, the commission's initial report, makes for very stark reading. It is a sobering analysis of how Wales' economy has suffered because of its status within the UK over the past decades.
The first step in solving any problem is establishing its nature and its scale. Our commission's initial report does exactly this; acknowledging the economic realities that Wales' economy faces today.
With the launch of this report we are inviting everyone in Wales to participate in this essential process of discovering together the ideas and strategies that will offer our country a better economic future. There can be no monopoly on good ideas in this regard. Indeed only by pooling our intelligence can we hope to begin the task of charting a different course.
I missed it when it was being shown on the BBC, but I'm now about half way through catching up with Borgen. Did anyone else notice more than a passing similarity between Sidse Babett Knudsen and our very own Leanne Wood? The shape of nose in particular. Definitely First Minister material.
But then again, what would we expect from a series by Adam Price?
I must admit to being a little surprised by the reaction to what Adam Price said over the weekend when he urged Dafydd Elis-Thomas's supporters to give their second preference votes to Leanne Wood, and vice versa.
The first and most important thing to stress is that there is no such thing as tactical voting in an election where we can place the candidates in order of preference. Tactical voting can only apply in voting systems where each voter only has one choice. Specifically, tactical voting is where someone votes for a candidate that they think is second or third best because they will have a better chance of beating another candidate that they definitely do not want to see elected. In this election for the leadership of Plaid Cymru each one of us will be able to list the candidates in order of preference by putting a 1, 2 and 3 in the boxes beside their names ... although we could, if we wanted to, just put a 1 and a 2 leaving the third box blank, or even just a 1 leaving two boxes blank. It's entirely up to us.
That's why it's so misguided to accuse Adam Price of making a plea for Plaid Cymru members to use tactical voting. It shows a basic misunderstanding of how a fairer voting system than first-past-the-post works. All we need to do is rank the candidates in order of preference, we don't need to make any other calculation.
So at the most basic level, if Adam Price or anyone else thinks Elin Jones is only the third best of the candidates in the race, what on earth is wrong with him expressing that opinion and urging fellow members of Plaid Cymru to vote accordingly? I certainly disagree with Adam about who will get my second preference, but we're all entitled to our opinions.
But that said, it's probably right to say that second preferences are going to be the decisive factor in this election. When all the first preference votes have been counted the candidate with the fewest first preferences will be eliminated, and his or her second preferences will then be added to the first preference votes the other two already have to determine the winner.
So the big question is which of the three is most likely to be knocked out in the first round. Most people think that Dafydd is going to be eliminated first, and I would imagine that Adam Price is one of them. But I'm not so sure about that. I think Dafydd will get quite a lot of first preference support based on two factors:
The first is his geographical location. When I looked at the numbers a month or two ago more than a quarter of Plaid's members were in Gwynedd, and nearly half were in north Wales. Perhaps that will now have changed because of the recent increase in membership, with many joining specifically in order to support Leanne, but many members in north Wales as a whole and Gwynedd in particular will support Dafydd purely because they see him as their local candidate.
The second factor is familiarity. We have to bear in mind that not all Plaid members are as actively involved in the party as others. Not all of them will have kept track of the policy positions of the three candidates or, frankly, be that interested in them. Dafydd has been around for a very long time, and in the earlier part of his career did a lot for the party. So some will give him their first preference vote simply because of that, or because they think he is a more recognizable public figure than the other two. For these reasons I have an uneasy feeling that Dafydd might just survive round one.
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I don't expect Leanne to be eliminated in the first round. On top of her wide support from longer standing party members, I think it's clear that a very large part of the increase in membership over the past few months has been due to people joining specifically in order to support Leanne. She more than anyone has galvanized this election.
If Leanne has any problem, it's not any lack of enthusiastic supporters who will give her their first preference votes. It's that she is likely to be seen as too radical a leader by the more conservative (with a small c) members of the party.
So in a sense both Leanne and Dafydd are "Marmite" candidates. People tend to either enthusiastically support them or think that it would be a mistake to elect them as leader. Elin doesn't quite fall into that category. Of course she will have a good few enthusiastic supporters of her own but, in general terms, I think she is most likely to be seen as the candidate with the "safe pair of hands". For that reason, I would say that she is likely to get a higher percentage of second preference votes than either of the other candidates.
So let's run through the permutations. If Dafydd is eliminated in the first round, the second preferences of those who put him first will come into play. I think most of those would be likely to go to Elin, so Adam's intervention to try and get Dafydd's supporters to put Leanne second makes perfect sense from his perspective. It's not an appeal that I could make, for I've made it perfectly clear that I think Dafydd is totally unsuitable as a leader and therefore his supporters are not very likely to listen to someone like me urging them to put Leanne second ... though I hope they will.
I think we can safely rule out Leanne coming third, so the other possibility is that Elin is knocked out in the first round. If that happens, the second preferences of her supporters will be the ones that matter.
I hope it will be clear from what I've written in previous posts that I think Elin would make a good leader of Plaid Cymru. I think Leanne is a better choice, but Elin is certainly a close second. So just as Adam—who evidently has more affinity with Dafydd's supporters than he has with Elin's—can rightly appeal to Dafydd's supporters to give their second preferences to Leanne rather than Elin, I would in turn like to appeal to Elin's supporters to give their second preferences to Leanne rather than Dafydd.
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It's hard to imagine that your first preference candidate isn't going to win, but I would urge each of Elin's supporters to at least face that possibility. If Elin were to be knocked out in the first round, who do you think would be the better leader: Leanne or Dafydd? That's the stark choice you need to face.
I was impressed by a comment from Aled GJ in my previous post, who crystalized things perfectly when he said:
We all knew that Leanne would be fiery for independence from more of a leftist perspective but it's been great to see Elin more than matching her here, albeit more from a centrist perspective. We've also had the Lord providing some entertainment for members, putting the case for a completely different sort of independence, i.e. his right to follow his own line completely on all matters, whatever party policy may be on a range of issues.
I cannot think of one issue of policy on which Leanne differs from Elin. Both of them are equally committed to party's democratically decided position on policy issues, Dafydd isn't. Both of them have an equally consistent record on independence for Wales, Dafydd doesn't. For these reasons alone I would urge Elin's supporters to make sure they give their second preferences to Leanne.
I must admit to not having much time for navel-gazing programmes about what being Welsh is, but I read this report about today's Eye on Wales radio programme and saw that Adam Price was being quoted:
Former Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price believes the language issues "cuts both ways".
"It creates a deeper sense of national identity and gives us a tangible source of distinctiveness," said Mr Price. "On the other hand, it does divide us between two communities."
That sounded a little odd, so I listened to the programme on iPlayer and found that what he actually said was much fuller than that. This is the relevant extact:
Yet the BBC not only puts its very edited version in direct quotation marks, but actually manages to reverse the point he had made by missing out the "in some people's eyes" from:
"On the other hand it does divide us, in some people's eyes, between two communities ..."
There's something reassuring about the BBC's editorial bias. Like an ugly factory on a hillside, it would be quite a shock to wake up one morning and find it had disappeared.
When I read Adam Price's essay about the future for Plaid Cyrmu in the Western Mail today I was a little perplexed at his choice of phrase when he said:
We behave – to borrow an analogy from another context – like “closet nationalists”, frightened of people’s reactions to who we really are and what we believe. This convinces no-one and leaves us looking weak and even devious, which is worse. It’s time we came out and said it: our dream is Welsh independence.
Isn't dream rather wishy-washy? Aim, purpose, goal all seem to be better words for him to have chosen.
So it was time for a little lateral thinking; to join up the dots in a different way, and to remember that someone born in Wales had already given the answer:
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
T E Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom 1922
Time to live rather more dangerously. That is what you meant, Adam, isn't it?
Plaid Wrecsam beat me to it with the video, but it's worth showing again.
You seem to have made a real success of this independence thing. Well done,
and thanks ...... thanks for showing us how to do it.
Well, that was a slightly paraphrased ending. I was going to say, thanks for giving us the idea, but I think it was probably the other way round.
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As we can read in this article from the Harvard Gazette, Adam was chosen to give this year's Graduate Oration. Perhaps he, and we, should be grateful that he wasn't chosen to give the Latin Oration.
Adam Price, Graduate Oration
Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) student Adam Price is a seasoned public speaker. But one thing will be different when he stands to give this year’s graduate oration: He’ll have receptive listeners.
“I’m very used to being heckled,” said Price, a former British member of Parliament who served two terms with the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru. “I was a member of a party of three, so I didn’t have many friends in the audience.”
He’ll talk about the importance of independent thinking, something Price, 42, values highly. The son of a coal miner, he went into politics to fight for his homeland of Wales, which never recovered economically from the decline of the steel and coal industries.
“It’s a rare and cherished thing in politics to be able to represent the people you went to school with,” he said.
Price made bigger waves in 2004 when he led the charge to impeach then-Prime Minister Tony Blair for leading Britain into the Iraq War under false pretenses. He surprised observers by announcing he wouldn’t run again in 2010, choosing to leave his almost-guaranteed seat in Parliament for HKS’s Mid-Career Master in Public Administration program.
“We [in Wales] would like to take a leaf out of America’s book and assert our own right to self-determination,” he said. “Half the reason I came here was to learn how you did it.”
Price plans to stay in Cambridge for another year to complete a fellowship at HKS’s Center for International Development, where he will study the economic plight of small nations. He hopes to apply that knowledge when he returns to Wales.
“I’d like to be a bridge between these incredible, exciting new ideas being generated here and the world,” he said.
For those who were speculating about his early return, it looks like he'll be staying in Harvard for another year.
I was intrigued by this taster in today's Western Mail:
Currently studying at Harvard University in America on a prestigious Kennedy Scholarship, Mr Price has researched the comparative economic performances of large and small states.
In an article for the Kennedy School Review called “Small Is Cute, Sexy, and Successful: Why Independence for Wales and Other Countries Makes Economic Sense”, he argues that the widely expressed view that small nations fare worse economically is incorrect.
He writes: “My own analysis, carried out with the help of fellow student Ben Levinger, confirms [research carried out in France]. Using World Bank data, we found that small European Union countries – those with fewer than 15 million people – enjoyed a 50% increase in exports per capita between 2000 and 2008, compared to a 35% increase for larger states.
So despite the rather dubious title, I read the article itself, which is here:
Small Is Cute, Sexy, and Successful
Why Independence for Wales and Other Countries Makes Economic Sense
It's only a short read, and I'll leave people to do that for themselves. But I'd like to extract one thing from it, on the principle that a picture paints a thousand words.
This graph shows that Wales would be a lot richer as an independent state rather than as part of the United Kingdom.
Reading the reports of what Adam Price thinks of the quality and skills of elected politicians, I can't help but note that it is being interpreted as specific criticism of members of the National Assembly.
Here is the BBC's header:
Assembly Members "lack skills", says ex-MP Adam Price
A former Plaid Cymru MP often tipped as a future party leader has attacked the quality of Welsh Assembly politicians ...
And therefore, as surely as night follows day, the reaction from Assembly politicians has been completely predictable. The LibDems see it as "belittling the Assembly" and even Helen Mary Jones seemed to be on the back foot when she said the Assembly was a "better representation of Welsh society than Westminster".
I watched the piece on CF99 last night, and the clips that were shown seemed to confirm that view. But I had also watched Newyddion, and this is a clip from it:
The BBC's line in this piece too was that Adam Price was specifically attacking the standard of Assembly politicians. But that wasn't the point Adam was making. For those who don't understand Welsh, he said:
... not only in Wales, but everywhere—even in Westminster—the same thing is true.
So why wasn't that remark picked up in either the BBC's story on its website or in CF99 itself? It can only be the most amazing oversight or an attempt to misrepresent the point Adam was making. He was talking about elected politicians in general, not Assembly members in particular ... though of course the points apply every bit as much to AMs as to other elected politicians, and he is obviously more concerned about Wales than anywhere else.
In the discussion that followed on CF99, Daran Hill made the point that the problem of career politicians was in fact worse in Westminster than in Cardiff Bay. Yet he might not have needed to make that point if he had known that Adam Price had already said it, but that it had been edited out of the CF99 version.
There's probably not much of what Adam Price says that I fundamentally disagree with, but one part of what he's quoted as saying in today's Western Mail is worth challenging.
He wants the Welsh Affairs Select Committee to be made up in proportion to the number of seats held in Wales, rather than the overall composition of the House of Commons.
On the surface this sounds fine, but it has major flaws.
The reason the WASC has an "almost statutory role" is because it, like other similar committees, represents the overall make up of the HoC. This enables these committees to make recommendations which broadly reflect how the HoC will vote on any issue. This has immense practical advantages, because the purpose of such committees is to act as a microcosm of the HoC, so as to save the whole House from having to become minutely involved in too many different areas to do any of them justice.
Ultimately power rests with the HoC as a whole, and any vote on any issue can potentially be taken by the House as a whole. Those issues that go though with just a handful of votes do so because it isn't worth the hassle of every MP voting on every issue when the outcome is going to be decided on party lines anyway. If there were a situation where a committee was balanced differently from the overall make up of the HoC, it would end up being irrelevant because they could simply vote down any proposal it makes.
The only way that could change is if some sort of convention were introduced that the HoC as a whole would not overturn the decisions of the committee. To me, that sounds very like the sort of fudge the Tories dreamt up for an English Grand Committee.
Besides that—and much more seriously—the HoC is elected by under a FPTP system which gives an artificially inflated majority to a party that represents only a minority. This is particularly the case in Wales.
Westminster Election, 2005
Lab .... 42.7% of vote ... 72.5% of seats
Con ... 21.4% of vote ... 7.5% of seats
LibDem ... 18.4% of vote ... 10.0% of seats
Plaid ... 12.6% of vote ... 7.5% of seats
I think everyone, not least the Welsh Labour MPs, knows that Labour are in for a big fall in their share of the vote in the next election. I think the moot question is whether Labour's share of the vote will be above or below the 30% mark. Yet even so I think it is a cast iron certainty that Labour will remain the party with most Welsh MPs. Again, the moot question is whether the figure will be above or below 20 seats.
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So what would Adam Price's proposal mean in practice? Assuming that there was a convention that the HoC did not overturn the WASC's recommendations, it would mean that a party with say 30% of the Welsh Westminster vote gets an effective veto on any proposed new areas of legislation for the Assembly.
Look at the big picture. The big constitutional issue of the day is whether the Assembly will get primary lawmaking powers. The decision about whether we get a referendum or not rests entirely with the Labour party: their votes are necessary to get the two-thirds majority in the Assembly, their majority is needed to get it through Westminster. If we now hand the WASC veto powers on a plate, then Labour will not support a referendum. Why should they? Why would they give up their power of veto?
The major factor in focusing the minds of Welsh Labour is that Westminster, and in particular the Secretary of State for Wales, has so much power over the Assembly. That's been all well and good for them while Labour has had a majority at Westminster. It has given them a "double handle" on politics in Wales. The only reason they will now change their minds is because they know they will lose the next election and someone else will hold one of those handles.
In tactical, as well as practical terms, Adam has got this one completely wrong. He is giving Labour MPs a straw to clutch at, and some of them will reach for it. As they do so, it will divert their attention from the real task at hand, which is to transfer power to the Assembly so that a future Tory Secretary of State for Wales has less influence over our own ability to make decisions on matters which affect Wales.
Much of what will appear on this blog will also appear in the Syniadau Forums, but the emphasis on this blog is slightly different. The forums are focused more on the structures and institutions that Wales will need to develop in order to become a successful independent nation, arranged on a subject by subject basis, but the blog will have more of an emphasis on day to day political news and developments.
People are welcome to reply or leave comments either here or on the Syniadau Forums. If anyone wants to initiate a new subject they are very welcome to do so there.
