Closed to business

I suppose Tory politicians can't help it, but their most hackneyed cliché must surely be "open for business". Cheryl Gillan is as prone to it as the rest of them, telling us yesterday that the electrification of the Great Western Line from Swansea and the Valley Lines would mean that Wales was open for business.

     Electrification across South Wales shows 'country open for business'

It's hard to know whether she meant anything by this or whether it was a natural and involuntary emission of air. But were we to take her seriously, then her message must be that south Wales and the Valleys won't actually be open for business until somewhere after 2017, and that the rest of Wales will remain closed to business for the foreseeable future.

Politics by innuendo

When I saw a headline yesterday's Western Mail which said that Cheryl Gillan had spoken out against the "glaringly obvious" risks of a separate legal jurisdiction for Wales, I thought we would at least be told what she thinks these glaringly obvious risks might be.

But even after reading what she said several times, I couldn't see anything that even hinted at what she meant. The substance of what she said was that she saw no case for changing the current arrangements and questioned how it would benefit the people of Wales. Maybe so, but that's very different from saying that a separate legal jurisdiction for Wales carries any risks.

I can only conclude that what she had in mind must have been so glaringly obvious to her that she felt relieved of any need to tell anybody else what she meant. That's one way of doing politics, I suppose. At least it's good for a laugh.

     

Say no more, Cheryl. Politics should be about presenting what you believe simply and openly in the hope of getting others to see the merits of your position ... not resorting to cheap innuendo.

Assembly elections on 2 June 2011

A vote was taken in the Commons yesterday to hold the AV referendum on 5 May 2011. Because the Bill is at committee stage it would still be technically possible to change it in a later vote on the whole bill, but for all practical purposes this vote has confirmed the date of the AV referendum. The voting figures of 335 to 207 show that any subsequent rebellion would be unlikely to get the date changed anyway.

As I'm sure everyone reading this will know, this is the same day as the elections to the Welsh and North of Ireland Assemblies and Scottish Parliament are due to be held. There has been quite some protest about the clash, but the ConDem government at Westminster has simply gone ahead anyway. It's not often that I agree with Chris Bryant (although the work he does with regard to teenage pregnancies is an honourable exception) but this is one occasion where I fully agree with what he said:

Mr Bryant, shadow justice minister, said there had been an "extraordinary" lack of consultation with devolved assemblies about the proposed poll date and its impact on devolved elections.

There was a "firm view" among these assemblies that the date was a bad idea and it showed a lack of respect to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, he suggested.

"It would just seem to be common human decency to be able to consult," he told MPs, adding this "betrayed the rather London-centric view of the government."

BBC, 25 October 2010

This is matter has been on the table for some time. Back in May, in one of the first bilateral meetings between the Welsh Government and the new Welsh Secretary, the subject was raised ... but Cheryl Gillan did nothing to relay those concerns to the Westminster government, saying that she did not do so because the request wasn't made in writing. We can read about it in this report in the Western Mail in July:

     Wales ‘strongly opposed’ to election date clash

This is the position of the One Wales Government on the issue:

An Assembly Government spokeswoman said: “We do not believe that the UK Alternative Vote referendum should be held on the same day as the people of Wales choose their AMs for the next four years. There should be no distraction from the National Assembly election. That is why we have agreed with other parties in the Assembly that our own referendum should not be held on the same day as the Assembly elections. Indeed, we have raised with the Secretary of State the possibility of deferring the Assembly election so that there is a longer gap between the referendum poll and the Assembly poll.

“The First Minister therefore intends to make clear to both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Wales at the earliest opportunity that we are strongly opposed to the AV referendum being held on the same day as the Assembly election.”

And there was even dissent from some Tory MPs:

Tory MP Bernard Jenkin told the BBC that most of his Conservative colleagues would support the principle of a referendum as it was part of the coalition agreement.

But he added: “I am astonished to hear that they are thinking of putting this referendum on the same date as the elections in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly because that’s going to lead to differential turnouts in the referendum in different parts of the country. In Scotland and Wales they will be thinking about who runs Scotland, who runs Wales, they won’t be focusing on the main question of the referendum.

“It’s clearly an attempt to stoke the turnout in areas of the country which already have different voting systems which is why I presume there will be less resistance to change to the UK system.”

My own view is that I'm not against the idea of holding different polls on the same day in principle, but I am against this particular clash. Rather than repeat myself, I set out my reasons in this post in May:

    When it is right, and wrong, for polls to clash

 
But what's done is done. The AV referendum is going to be on 5 May 2011 despite our objections. But all is not lost. There is a simple mechanism in Section 4 of the Government of Wales Act by which the date of the Assembly elections can be put back (or indeed forward) by up to a month.

This provision mirrors a very similar provision in Scotland, but in Scotland's case they are able to make that decision for themselves. In our case the decision is not up to us, but up to Secretary of State Cheryl Gillan. What's more, she can do it with or without the consent of the Welsh government ... she is merely under an obligation to consult with the Welsh Ministers.

So the question for the Welsh government is simple. If the protests made by Labour MPs in the Commons are more than just complaining for the sake of "having a go at" the Tories, our First Minister must now make a formal request to Cheryl Gillan to have the date of the Assembly elections moved to 2 June 2011.

The ball will then be in her court. But if she wants to hold on to the last remaining shreds of the ConDem government's much vaunted "respect agenda" for devolved government in Wales, she'd better say yes.

Nobody's Poodle

In an attempt to counter the rumours circulating at both ends of the M4 about Conservative differences over devolution, Nick Bourne's office cut short the bank holiday weekend to issue a press release. In it he said that as leader of the Conservative Group in the Assembly he continued to enjoy a close working relationship with Cheryl Gillan, the Secretary of State for Chesham and Wales.

     

The photographic evidence clearly shows that I'm not a poodle, he claimed.

Scotland 8, Wales 1

There's a piece on Golwg360 today that I thought I'd highlight for those who rely on English-language media:

In essence Cheryl Gillan has been appointed to only one cabinet committee, the Home Affairs Committee, but her Scottish counterpart Danny Alexander has been appointed to a total of eight committees.

Peter Hain said that this means Wales has no voice on the committees that matter most to Wales, particularly the Legislation Committee and Business Committee, which deal with Assembly requests for transfer of powers to Cardiff.

-

Details of the membership of the ten cabinet committees are in this document issued by the Cabinet Office.

As we can see, Scottish Secretary Danny Alexander attends most of these committees "in his role providing Ministerial support to the Deputy Prime Minister in the Cabinet Office" but nonetheless he is there ... not just as a voice, but as a pair of ears and eyes to make sure that Scotland's interests (or at least his perception of Scotland's interests) are not ignored. This might be one explanation for why Scotland has continued to receive favourable financial treatment (for example the release of the fossil fuel levy, worth £185m to Scotland) that will go some way to offset the cuts announced this week; while at the same time the ConDem coalition has announced it intends to do absolutely nothing to redress the £300m shortfall in Wales' funding identified by the Holtham Commission.

This complete lack of knowledge about Wales' position was highlighted again yesterday when Paymaster General Francis Maude confused the Holtham Commission with the All Wales Convention, as reported here.

-

Such ignorance is perhaps understandable. To most politicians in Westminster Wales is a small, far away part of the UK which they can't really be expected to have much knowledge about. But that is why Tory and LibDem MPs from Wales need to be up on their feet, kicking up a fuss that their own leaders will not be able to ignore. What else are they there for, if not to represent Wales' interests?

But not one of them is doing that. They all seem to be much too busy passing down the message about how "caring" their leaders are being as they impose the cuts.

Cheryl Gillan's attitude

I've just downloaded Cheryl Gillan's interview with Bethan Rhys Roberts on yesterday's Good Morning Wales. I did it because of this story in today's Western Mail about her attitude to holding the Westminster and Senedd elections on the same date in 2015. This is the relevant extract:

     

I wrote about the clash in this post last week, and it has been raised by a number of other people too, so Cheryl Gillan can really have no excuse for not having thought about it.

Her attitude was that she saw no particular problem in holding these two elections on the same day. She rejected any suggestion that there was a problem by saying:

Well I'm awfully sorry, but I think you can hold two elections on one day.

And she repeated almost exactly the same words later, in fact she emphatically said she didn't foresee the election being moved to avoid the clash. This should ring some very loud alarm bells, for the effect will be to drown out any discussion of Welsh issues because the media will concentrate on Westminster issues. Hywel Williams put it well:

Running these two elections at the same time, with the UK election dominating the media to the detriment of the Assembly election, would prove hugely unfair and confusing to the electorate in Wales.

It would be an injustice to voters in Wales if their coverage was dominated by UK and many England-only issues, while pushing so many important devolved issues to the sidelines.

The most important factor when deciding timetables for such important elections must be the interest of voters. I'm sure that the Electoral Commission would have concerns about how this would impact on voters too.

And of course the same is just as true for Scotland.

-

I was impressed with the way that Bethan Rhys Roberts handled the interview. She was able to press for an answer on a number of issues that Cheryl Gillan was clearly uncomfortable about and wanted to avoid. The interview showed that she had very little to say after her limited supply of stock answers had been played out.

     

One thing that stood out for me was how willing Gillan was to shift between "I am Welsh, you know" and "That's got nothing to do with me, it's up to the people of Wales to decide."

For example, why should she be so keen on the St Tathan development, telling us that she supported it completely, not least because it would benefit, in her words, "our economy in Wales" but on the subject of the referendum on primary lawmaking powers say that she had no particular view and wouldn't campaign one way or the other because it wasn't something for her, but something for the people of Wales to decide?

Not quite hypocrisy, but certainly a very large dose of double standards.

She can't have it both ways. It is appropriate for a "governor general" to remain constitutionally neutral, and not express political views. But if s/he does that, s/he can hardly then start expressing political views on some subjects but not others. It shows that the Tories' view on how to govern Wales has not changed. This is now the sixth Secretary of State we have had imposed on us by a Tory prime minister in Westminster: we have had Peter Thomas in the seventies under Heath; Peter Walker under Thatcher; David Hunt, John Redwood and William Hague under Major; and now Cheryl Gillan under Cameron. Not a single one of them elected by anybody in Wales. Nicholas Edwards was the only exception.

Not so long ago, one of the Tory catchphrases was that it was the job of politicians to represent people in either Westminster or Cardiff Bay, not for them to represent the government in Westminster or Cardiff Bay to the people. Yet this is exactly what the Tories have done. I don't wish Cheryl Gillan any ill on a personal level, but her appointment was a mistake and she needs to be replaced.