What do the recent announcements by Peter Hain, Paul Murphy and now Hywel Francis have in common?
Each one of them is deliberately misrepresenting what this referendum is about and, instead of concentrating on the issue at hand, trying to turn the referendum into the first part of Labour's campaign for the Assembly elections in May.
• Peter Hain's claim was that voting Yes would transform the Welsh economy. But voting Yes will do no such thing, because the lawmaking powers we will get when we vote Yes specifically will not give Wales any fiscal or economic powers.
• Paul Murphy claimed that voting Yes had nothing to do with the procedural intricacies of lawmaking in Wales. But the referendum is only about the way the Assembly will be able to make laws and nothing else.
• Now we have Hywel Francis claiming that voting Yes will deliver a blow against the cuts being imposed by the ConDem government in Westminster. But voting Yes will not save us from a single penny of the cuts that have been made by them, nor the deeper cuts that are going to be made by them over the next few years.
So what would explain their actions? At one level it's very simple: they have decided that people in Wales simply aren't capable of understanding the issue at hand, and are therefore trying to make out that the referendum is about something they think people in Wales will understand. That doesn't say much about their respect for people in Wales, and it makes what they are trying to do no different from what True Wales have been trying to do when they claim that this referendum is about increased taxes, more politicians, or the "slippery slope to independence".
But there's more to it than that. It is clear that each of them is using this referendum as an opportunity to attack the Tories, but both Paul Murphy and Hywel Francis have now introduced a rather sinister sub-text. Paul Murphy criticized the Yes campaign because, as an all-party group, it had what he called "the problem" of not being able to attack the Tories in the way he would like; and Hywel Francis claimed that the Yes campaign was:
making it more difficult to mobilise a full-blooded anti-Tory campaign
So it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they are putting two fingers up at the careful work of the Yes for Wales campaign.
Now these three men are certainly being unscrupulous, but they are not stupid. They are quite sincere in wanting a Yes vote now, even though the only reason they've changed their minds is because they realized Labour was going to lose power at Westminster. They thought things were fine ... so long as they were in government there.
So would they put a Yes vote in danger by undermining the Yes for Wales campaign in this way? I don't think so. I think they have calculated that the margin in favour of a Yes vote—at least 20% in nearly all the polls—is such that they can afford to undermine cross party support for a Yes vote. So they reckon it probably won't matter if they alienate Tory and LibDem supporters so much that they vote No or, more likely, stay at home ... so long as they get a few Labour supporters who would otherwise stay at home out to vote.
As I see it, they realize that although a good many of their supporters do understand what this referendum is about, and will vote on the issue at hand, there are others who simply don't understand and who therefore see no point in voting in the referendum. They want to persuade these people that the referendum is, to all intents and purposes, just another party political election in which Labour is on one side and the Tories on the other. By getting people to vote Yes for Labour's reasons they hope that the referendum campaign will trundle on and seamlessly morph into Labour's campaign for the Assembly elections in May.
The big question is how the rest of us should react to this tactic. I think we shouldn't ... or at least not yet. In the immortal words of Huw Lewis, we should "Let Labour be Labour." We simply need to point out what they're doing and why they're doing it, but should not let ourselves be distracted from explaining why it is important for us to be able to make laws in those areas that are already devolved to Wales. If we stick to the job at hand, we will not alienate those from other parties who support a Yes vote.
Nor, I suggest, should we in Plaid react with anger to the sort of personal attacks that Labour have just made on Ieuan Wyn Jones. It's all part of the same strategy, in all probability orchestrated by the same elements in the Labour Party at Westminster. They want to turn what should be the campaign for a Yes vote in March into the early skirmishes of the campaign for the Assembly elections in May.
We can afford to wait a few weeks. Right now we need to keep fighting an inclusive, uniting campaign for a Yes vote; for the sake of Wales, and for the sake of people of all political persuasions in Wales. But after that—though maybe allowing a day or two for the hangover from the celebration party on 4 March to wear off—we can turn our attention to campaigning for the Assembly elections ... and do it with a clear conscience.
