Johnny come back lately ap Iorwerth

In the comments section of my post of 29 July entitled Rhun ap Iorwerth is lying about Wylfa B was this exchange:

Lyndon said:
This blog is now being quoted by Plaid's enemies in the by-election, so I hope you're happy.

99 people out of a hundred in Wales couldn't give a monkey's nuts about the nuclear power issue.

Rule #1 in politics, never mistake your own personal obsessions for a matter of genuine public interest (see also: Tories/Europe).

 
MH said:
In case you hadn't realized it, Lyndon, my position on nuclear power is not a "personal obsession". It is an opinion shared by the majority of Plaid members. It is my party's policy, and I am not prepared to sweep it under the carpet for the sake of some Johnny-come-lately who has only been a member for a few weeks and who only made his support for Wylfa B clear after he had been selected as Plaid's candidate.

So don't get angry with me, direct your anger at those responsible for undermining party policy instead.

I was then taken to task for this and accused of telling lies about Rhun in an anonymous comment on Blog Menai. This is the exchange:

Anonymous said:
MH 'di'r un sydd 'di deud celwyddau. Roedd m'ond angen iddo godi'r ffôn i rywun call ac mi fyddai wedi darganfod y canlynol:

... 2. dydi Rhun ddim yn rhyw "Jonny Come Lately" i Blaidd Cymru – fuodd o'n aelod yn yr 80au/90au cynnar cyn troi ei law at newyddiadura

... Y cyfan yr oedd MH angen ei wneud i sefydlu'r ffeithiau hyn oedd i godi'r ffôn i Rhun neu eraill yn y Blaid – dyna fyddai aelod cyfrifol wedi ei wneud. Yn hytrach mi ddaru fo gychwyn grwsâd anheg ac anghywir gan wneud niwed iddo fo'i hun a'r Blaid. Siomedig.

MH is the one who is telling lies. He only needed to phone anyone with any sense and he would have discovered the following:

... 2. Rhun is not some "Jonny Come Lately" to Plaid Cymru – he was a member in the 80s/early 90s before turning his hand to journalism

... All that MH needed to do to establish these facts was to lift the phone and speak to Rhun or someone else in Plaid – that's what a responsible member would have done. But instead he embarked on an unfair and incorrect crusade, doing damage to both himself and Plaid. Disappointing.

 
MH said:
Am aelodaeth y Blaid: Rhun yw'r un a oedd yn disgrifio ei hun fel "aelod newydd" o'r blaid, yma, nid fel rhywun sy'n ail-ymuno i'r blaid. Celwydd arall? Ydoedd, os oes hynny ddim yn wir.

Dwi'n cael fy meirniadu am alw Rhun yn "Johnny come lately", a dwi'n ymddiheuro am hynny'n llwyr os oedd Rhun yn aelod yn yr 80au. Byddai e'n "Johnny come back lately" yn hytrach. Ond, rili, beth yw'r ots am hynny? Os oedd Rhun yn aelod yn gynt, Rhun roedd yn gamarweiniol am y peth, nid y fi.

About [his] membership of Plaid: Rhun was the one who described himself as a new member of the party, here, not as someone who was rejoining the party. Another lie? Yes it was, if that wasn't the truth.

I'm being criticized for calling Rhun a "Johnny come lately", and I completely apologize for that if Rhun was a member in the 80s. He would be a "Johnny come back lately" instead. But really, what does it matter? If Rhun was a member before, Rhun was the one being misleading about it, not me.

From my point of view, all I was being presented with were assertions in an anonymous comment with no evidence to back them up. That is why my response was "if". But the matter came up again in the comments to my post on 15 August:

Beard said:
I think you'll find Rhun was a member for years in his youth before joining the BBC and running over your dog.

 
MH said:
The story that Rhun was a former member of Plaid has been doing the rounds, Beard. I don't think it's particularly important either way, but I'll point you to what I said about it here on BlogMenai. Rhun described himself as a new member here on his blog, not as someone who was rejoining the party. So if he was in fact a former member, it would be another example of him misleading people.

In the investigation report, this was twisted into the following bald statement:

August 15 (post-election)
MH claims Rhun had stated he was a new member of Plaid Cymru and was therefore misleading people if he was in fact a former member.

It's a distortion for a number of reasons. First, it implies that I was making the accusation, when I was in fact responding to the accusation that I was telling lies. Second, it's hardly a "claim", as if to cast a shadow of doubt over whether what I said was true. It's a simple indisputable fact that Rhun did describe himself as a new member of the party. Isn't the whole point of an investigation to find out whether "claims" are or are not true?

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Let's be clear, this is not a big lie on Rhun's part, and I wouldn't even be mentioning it except for the fact that it was considered important enough to be included in the official investigation report and used as evidence against me for supposedly bringing the party into disrepute. I'm presenting it as an example of how certain people in Plaid Cymru had lost all sense of perspective, and were scraping the barrel looking for any tiny thing that could be bent out of shape to use against me.

I'm equally sure that those in positions of power in Plaid Cymru who were responsible for trying to stitch me up will now try and point the finger at Shaughan and say that the contents of the report are his and his alone. But that's not entirely fair on Shaughan. As this accusation was not mentioned in Elin's letter of complaint, it seems clear that Elin must have pointed him to it ... but not pointed him to the context in which it was said. If I had not been shut out of the investigation, I could have told Shaughan all of this at the time. I could have directed him to what was said in the context in which it was said. But, as only became clear to me several months after the event, he was given specific legal advice by Plaid Cymru's lawyers not to contact me by email to ask me any questions.

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What is so tragic is that this was a completely pointless and unnecessary thing for Rhun to lie about. Why say anything at all about being a "new member"? Nobody was putting him under any pressure or asking him any awkward questions about it. If he can't be honest and straightforward about himself, even on a completely uncontentious issue, how on earth can anybody trust him to be honest and straightforward about what he believes on more contentious political issues?

Yet Elin, in her letter of complaint about me, says she is sure that the people of Ynys Môn "would have known Rhun's integrity enough to trust him over an unknown blogger". My answer is that integrity is something Rhun needs to do rather more work on than I do.

Tactical voting? Not in this election

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.

One of Three

In the next day or two, nigh on eight thousand ballot papers for the Plaid Cymru leadership contest will be coming through our letterboxes. In itself, this huge increase in membership over the past few months has been one of the good things about this election and about our vitality as a party. Of course some will be lapsed members who only pay their subscription in years like this when there's something worth voting about; but many will be old members who left because they were disillusioned about the party, and many new people will have joined too. As I see it, they will have joined in the hope of being able to help transform a party which has languished in the polls since the days when we won seventeen seats in the National Assembly including the Rhondda and Islwyn in 1999.

One big question has stood over Plaid Cymru for the past decade. Why has a party that could make such a breakthrough in 1999 fallen back so far since then? Part of the reason has been our leadership. I don't mean in terms of personality, nor do I wish to single out our leaders alone; instead I believe that we have suffered as a party from a collective leadership that lacked the confidence to articulate our aims, and therefore spent too much time on the back foot. With the bitter taste of 1979 still very real, and only winning the referendum of 1997 by a wafer-thin margin, it was as if we were too scared to go further. We started to hide our aims behind convoluted words.

One thing I am convinced about is that the party as a whole—made up of its individual members and activists at branch and constituency level—has always been very clear about what Plaid Cymru is for. We joined because we wanted to see an independent Wales; a Wales in which we take responsibility for ourselves and our own prosperity rather than letting others make decisions on our behalf. But too many of those we chose as our AMs felt comfortable enough with a half-baked Assembly and lost sight of the final destination. Now, in this leadership election, we have a real chance of changing that and getting a leader and leadership team that is not afraid to speak about independence for Wales being the first and foremost aim of Plaid Cymru.

So I want to take a final look at what the three contenders have got to offer in the hope of helping any Plaid members who are undecided about which way to vote.
 

Dafydd Elis-Thomas

Let's start with something positive: if Dafydd is elected his first aim will be to get Plaid Cymru back into government with the Labour Party.

Being in government is a good thing, so that's a good priority to have, right? Well, my answer is no. Being in government should be the reward you get only as a result of winning enough seats in an election. Getting into government through some sort of back door is a very different thing. There are times when it will work, but it will only work when two conditions are met. First, when a coalition of some sort needs to be made because no one party can form a government on its own; and second, when a clear programme of government can be negotiated to include the things that matter to us as a party. One Wales was a perfect example of both conditions being met: Labour could not form a government on their own, and Plaid negotiated a commitment to hold a referendum on primary lawmaking powers, which we could only get with Labour support because it required a two-thirds majority to get it through the Senedd.

But this time round Labour have enough seats to form a government on their own. They don't need our votes to get any legislation through the Senedd—not that they have many ideas about what they want to legislate on anyway—and there is nothing that Labour could offer us in the way of constitutional advancement because Labour's MPs in Westminster are not in a position to deliver it.

So any attempt to get Plaid into the current Welsh Government will be nothing more than pointless vanity. Of course it will be nice for one or two Plaid AMs to be called ministers and I'm sure they'll run their departments competently. But it will come at the cost of us being able to criticize Labour, and in the election in 2016 we will be unable to present ourselves as an alternative to Labour. We paid a heavy price for the One Wales Agreement in terms of seats lost in May 2011, as is usual for junior partners in a coalition; but it was a price worth paying in order to get primary legislative powers for the Assembly. The referendum was held too late for us to effectively decouple ourselves from Labour as would have been possible if it had been held in autumn 2010. But what on earth is there to gain this time round? We will just give Labour an easy ride for the next four years. If Dafydd becomes leader, Labour will be the ones who benefit, and we will end up paying the electoral price for it in 2016.

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However, I probably need to make it clear that I do believe Dafydd is now in favour of independence for Wales and that my objections to him becoming leader of Plaid Cymru have nothing to do with that. It is his lack of honesty and integrity which disqualify him.

Dafydd's problem is that he very clearly wasn't in favour of independence before, and the first anyone knew about his closet conversion was when he told Martin Shipton about it, as I noted in this post. But rather than admit that he was wrong and had been forced to change his mind, he has tried to make out that this is what he has always believed; and trying to reconcile two irreconcilable positions simply results in him making statements that are little short of gobbledygook.

For all his experience in life we have to be clear that Dafydd is a raw novice about the issue of independence for Wales. He might well have all the enthusiasm of a new convert to the idea; but when it comes to working out a plan to achieve it he's still wet behind the ears.
 

Elin Jones

I think Elin would be a good leader for the party. She is competent, determined and ambitious for Wales. For me this was best illustrated not so much by her being the minister for agriculture and rural affairs—though I think she did that job well—but that over the years of the One Wales agreement she was one of the few AMs (Jocelyn Davies was another) who appeared to understand how the process of getting the referendum on primary lawmaking powers was playing out. There were many times when things looked as if they would go wrong, and the message coming from Ieuan was not as positive or confident as it should have been. In fact his caveats about it when interviewed actually fuelled the impression that the referendum might not have taken place as agreed.

The other positive is that Elin is unequivocally in favour of independence for Wales and has been one of the few AMs who was not afraid to say it. For this reason alone she would be far better than any of the leaders we have had in recent times.

I am in broad agreement with most of what she's said in her campaign, apart from two things. The first was the rather strange condition she set when she said that Plaid Cymru would have to win two Assembly elections before we would get a referendum on independence. My thoughts on that are here. It was a pointless thing to say because we may well not win the 2016 election. Let's say we did much better than ever before and got just over 20 out of 60 seats, but one or two fewer than Labour and still not enough to form a government. If we followed Elin's logic it would mean we couldn't hold a referendum even if we won an absolute majority in 2020.

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But more disturbing than that was what happened when Simon Thomas threw in the towel and she accepted his support on condition that he became her deputy leader. Put bluntly, it was a rather sordid deal. As I noted here, it was not only one that she was in no position to make but one that could pull her down with him.

Now I fully accept that if Elin were to become leader she might well get her choice of deputy leader, not because she has the right to make that decision (it is in fact decided by a vote of Plaid's AMs) but because after any internal election everybody is anxious to make a show of uniting behind the new leader so as to heal any wounds that might have been inflicted during the campaign. But it was an error of judgement to be presumptuous, and the worse presumption was that those AMs who have come out in support of Elin as leader will also want Simon to be her deputy. If Elin wanted to engineer that sort of "joint ticket" the time to do it was before the contest started rather than half way through it.

Now I don't have anything in particular against Simon ... well, except that he did made a complete mess of the manifesto for the last election. On his own merits he might make a half-decent deputy leader, but I certainly don't think he deserves that position just by making a private deal behind closed doors. I think Elin has tied a millstone round her own neck.

In one sense her calculation was good: before Simon jumped the bookies had her trailing behind Leanne, but the deal she made with Simon put her back in front, though only by the tiniest of margins. But let's imagine she does win and think about what the consequences would be for Plaid Cymru as a whole. It seems obvious to me that having both a leader and deputy leader from the same part of Wales would send completely the wrong signal to the electorate. It would do nothing to expand our appeal to the parts of Wales outside our natural heartlands, and indeed would reinforce the idea that we are a party that finds it difficult to reach out to other parts of Wales. There's no problem with Elin becoming leader, but if she does become leader the party will need a deputy leader that's not from her own back yard. Elin on her own is fine, but Elin and Simon are a terrible combination. It was a bad decision, but Elin has tied herself to it and now she can't get rid of him.
 

Leanne Wood

I wasn't at all sure that Leanne would put her hat into the ring for this election contest. She left it late, and it was a bit of a surprise to me that she did so, but certainly a very pleasant surprise.

For me, she is an ideal leader for the party because she has been in the forefront of developing ideas. For too long we have had leaders who have lagged several steps behind the party as a whole. But in Leanne we have someone who has a record of actively developing policy ideas, someone who is usually a few steps ahead ... which is, after all, what a leader is meant to be. During the course of this campaign we have heard a lot about her Greenprint for the Valleys, but her work on the Justice system in Making Our Communities Safer was impressive too.

Make no mistake, the future of Plaid Cymru depends on our ideas for Wales. Other parties are basically about working within the existing structures, and find it difficult to see beyond those boundaries. Our business is to transform Wales, and without that transformational agenda we are nothing. The challenge for us is to convince others that tinkering around the edges of our current constitutional settlement—maybe devolving a few more powers and responsibilities from Westminster every few years—will do nothing to reverse our continuous, slow economic decline over the last twenty or thirty years. We need more radical solutions.

Leanne has that vision, the ability to flesh out the detail and the ability to communicate it. If we're looking for an inspirational leader then she is by far the best choice available to us, and in particular our best chance of making the breakthroughs we need to become the government of Wales. In concrete terms, we must beat Labour in their heartlands to do it. We will not do it unless we can win in places like the Rhondda and Islwyn as we did in 1999, or unless we can also win places like Caerffili and Neath. So often this is portrayed as us having to out-Labour Labour, as if Labour would be fine if only it hadn't systematically abandoned most of the ideals of the people it was formed to represent. But it is much more simple than that, it is about having better ideas about how to make us a fairer and more prosperous society. As everybody can now see all too clearly, being in the One Wales Government lent Labour a sense of direction and purpose; but on their own and with a slow-moving, lack-lustre leader, Labour are struggling to come up with anything that will move Wales forward.
 

Vote wisely

In a nutshell, these are our choices as party members. If we elect Dafydd, we will ruin ourselves as a party. It will take many years to pick up the pieces again, if at all.

If we elect Elin, we will get a better party than we've had for some time. Better because we will have a leader that agrees with and supports Plaid Cymru's aims and policies. For all Ieuan's good qualities, it was often embarrassing to have a leader that didn't agree with some of our key policies and who could hardly bring himself to mention the word "independence". Elin will get my second preference for that reason. There is absolutely no point in putting Elin last because it will not help Leanne one way or the other.

But if we elect Leanne, we will get a party that is capable of reaching into Labour's heartlands, leading the next Welsh government and leading Wales to independence.

A toxic waste of space

One of the millstones around the neck of Plaid Cymru while Ieuan Wyn Jones has been leader has been nuclear power. The party is unequivocally opposed to nuclear power, but Ieuan was personally in favour of it.

But at least Ieuan was honest about the situation. He realized that his position was at odds with that of the party, even though it made things awkward, embarrassing even, whenever he was questioned on the subject; instead of being able to give a straight answer to the question, he had to give complicated answers that compromised him and made it look as if Plaid's policy on the issue wasn't clear. It's hardly surprising, because most other parties have policies that are determined by the leadership, rather than by party members.

So the very last thing Plaid Cymru needs is another leader who will not be able to give straight and unequivocal answers about nuclear energy.

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Nuclear energy was one of the subjects that came up on the CF99 leadership debate yesterday evening. I think it's well known that both Leanne Wood and Elin Jones are against nuclear energy, but that Dafydd Elis-Thomas is in favour of it. But what I found disturbing was Dafydd's intervention to jump down Elin's throat when she made the simple statement that not only she, but that Plaid Cymru as a party, was opposed to nuclear power.

     

He interrupted her with a rather petulant, "Well you'll lose Ynys Môn if you carry on talking like that, I have to say." Then tried to interrupt her again later.

How can anyone in Plaid contemplate having a leader that not only holds a position which is completely opposite to party policy, but one who is completely unapologetic about it and openly dismisses something that has been democratically decided by the party's membership? At least Ieuan was principled enough to acknowledge Plaid's position on the issue was at odds with his own.

Dafydd clearly does not share the same principles. He's just shown us that if he gets to be leader all we'll ever hear from him are his own personal views, rather than those of the party he is meant to represent.

Simon jumps, and might pull Elin down too

Starting with the obvious: Simon Thomas had absolutely no chance of becoming leader of Plaid Cymru and therefore it is not too much of a surprise to see him bow out of the leadership race. The only question to ask is why he put himself up for election in the first place.

However there is one aspect of his retirement from the leadership contest that is a cause for serious concern. He is reported on both the BBC and WalesOnline as saying that he would support Elin Jones "as her deputy on a joint ticket".

This is simply not possible. The Standing Orders for the party's group in the National Assembly make it quite clear that:

3.2  The leader of the party’s group in the National Assembly shall be elected by the party’s membership in accordance with the relevant Standing Orders.

3.3  All other officers of the Group [this includes the Deputy Leader] are to be elected by secret ballot of the members of the group following the party’s Rules for Internal Elections.

The new leader of Plaid Cymru cannot determine who will be her deputy after she is elected. It is up to the party's AMs, and only the party's AMs, to decide who the deputy leader should be. There is no such thing as a "joint ticket". In a way this is a shame, because I personally had argued for such an arrangement in this post back in May. But rules are rules, and it wasn't possible to change them.

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However what seems more disturbing is that Elin Jones, judging by what she is reported as saying in WalesOnline, seems to have bought into the idea of Simon as her deputy. It is actually more embarrassing for a potential leader to not understand how the election of the deputy leader works.

If anything, she appears to have been so unquestioningly grateful for Simon's support that she was willing to offer him a position that is not in the gift of the party leader. And it might well prove to be a poisoned kiss. After all, if Simon doesn't have leadership qualities, it's tying a millstone round your own neck to say that you want him to be your deputy leader. And it seems particularly ill-advised for Elin to say that Simon's vision for Plaid Cymru is "identical" with her own when the one thing that was most obviously lacking in Simon's leadership bid was any sense of vision. That's surely the main reason why he was getting virtually no support from party members.

This is a shame, because I think Elin would make a good leader ... although in my opinion not as good a leader as Leanne Wood will be.

When do we get our independence referendum?

Elin Jones has just been reported by the BBC as saying:

"There is a debate happening now in Wales, England and Scotland now about the future of the UK constitution - I want to see Plaid Cymru engaged fully in the debate in order to lead us to becoming a successful independent nation.

"I'm clearly of the view that two consecutive victories for Plaid Cymru, just as with the SNP in Scotland, could trigger a referendum for independence in Wales."

It is the first time a leading Plaid figure has suggested a referendum could take place within the next decade.

BBC, 25 January 2011

Let's start with the positives. First, it's right to acknowledge that Elin has consistently taken a stand in favour of independence for Wales, that puts her head and shoulders above two of the other leadership candidates. Second, 2020 is certainly an improvement on her previous suggestion that we should aim to be independent before 2036. That is the sort of date that means nothing in practical terms because it is much too far away.

But I don't think she should have put it in the way she now has. It is definitely not necessary for Plaid Cymru to win two consecutive elections before we have the right to call an independence referendum. We just need to look to Scotland to see that. The SNP would have had a referendum on independence before 2011 if there had been a majority in the Scottish Parliament willing to pass a referendum bill in the 2007-2011 term. The only reason it didn't happen was because the SNP (together with the Greens and Margo MacDonald) didn't have a majority, and the three unionist parties would have voted it down.

The same is true in Wales. We will have a referendum on independence when a majority of AMs in the Senedd is prepared to vote for it. Nor will all those that vote for it have to be Plaid Cymru AMs, for there might well come a time when other parties are convinced that independence is in the best interests of Wales. But in practical terms, getting an independence referendum is more likely to happen when we elect a Plaid Cymru government.

     

I couldn't agree more with the idea of setting out a route map towards independence. We need to do this. Every country needs to have a framework of fundamental structures and institutions in place in order to safeguard the wellbeing, prosperity and security of its people. Wales does have some of these and with the progress of devolution is gaining more, but we are some way from having all of them. Every step we can take now will make the final step to independence that much smaller and therefore that much easier.

But we must also bear in mind that other events might bring us to the point where we are faced with making a decision much sooner. Events such as Scotland becoming independent, a wave of other countries in Europe becoming independent (Catalunya, Euskadi and Flanders, for example) or a reunited Ireland might mean that we have to make a choice between independence or being part of Greater England before we've built the framework of structures and institutions we need. That's not an insuperable problem ... we'll just have to build them after we've become independent instead.

So although we should work out a step-by-step route map and put dates against each step for planning purposes, we should not rule out becoming independent much sooner. The only criticism I have of what Elin has now said is that it seems to rule this out. I'm sure that is not what she intended, but those who are opposed to our independence are going to interpret it that way.

Meanwhile, down on another farm

By a strange irony, at least one of those who has been most vociferously opposed to the badger cull in Wales has been equally vociferous of his support for the new ConDem coalition between his party and the Tories in Westminster.

I'm sure that when Peter Black read this in their full agreement yesterday, it might not have raised his eyebrows:

•  As part of a package of measures, we will introduce a carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control in areas with high and persistent levels of bovine tuberculosis.

The Coalition: our programme for government

But exactly what form of control the ConDem coalition had in mind has now become clearer. This is what Jim Paice, the new farm minister, had to say in this morning's Farmer's Weekly:

Minister confirms badger cull to combat bovine TB

DEFRA farm minister Jim Paice has confirmed that badgers will be culled to combat bovine tuberculosis in cattle. A targeted cull of badgers will take place once the right “hot spot” locations have been identified.

Mr Paice made the pledge during a visit to the Devon County Show on Thursday (20 May).

"Down here in the south west, in Devon, clearly bovine TB is a major problem. The coalition agreement quite clearly says that we will carry out a scientifically-led targeted cull of badgers in hot spot areas," Mr Paice told show visitors.

A DEFRA spokeswoman added, "The coalition has committed itself to badger control in areas of high incidence. The coalition includes culling in a package of measures. The package will include the vaccination option. The pilot in Wales will be informative about the implementation and rollout of a cull. The fact that a cull is about to start in Pembrokeshire is an interesting opportunity for us to see how a cull can be achieved. We will all learn from the way Wales embarks upon it."

Farmers Weekly, 20 May 2010

Those who are opposed to any element of culling to control bTB are, of course, just as entitled to their views as those who believe otherwise. But they will no longer be able to point to England and say that Wales has gone off on a tangent. Quite the contrary. Elin Jones took the hard decisions and has been able to justify them in the face of all the criticism and legal action that has been thrown at her.

Now England has decided to follow her lead.