Green Party Conference

UKIP's party conference took place in Llandudno over the weekend, and the BBC devoted two programmes to it ... in the same way as they've covered the LibDem and Labour conferences, and will cover those of the Tories and Plaid. If you have a strong stomach, you can watch them here and here.

As it happens, the Greens' party conference also took place over the weekend, and the BBC ... umm, didn't cover it. In fact the BBC have a track record of not treating the Greens in the same way as they treat UKIP.

So, for the sake of some balance, here's a video of Alice Hooker-Stroud's speech.

     

Alice is leader of the Green Party in Wales and number one on the Mid and West Wales list. She was introduced by Amelia Womack, who is number one on the South Wales Central list. If we're going to have a Green AM in the Senedd in May, it will be one—or perhaps both—of these.

Relief

The overwhelming feeling, both for me and for most people who support Plaid Cymru, after the announcement of the European Parliament election result will be relief that Jill Evans managed to hold on to her seat.

Plaid lost a lot of their support and were in a fairly miserable fourth place. In the end Jill's seat was saved by Labour's failure ... and by UKIP's success.

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In the Welsh Political Barometer in February and YouGov poll in April, Labour were at 39% (details here) and in last week's Wales Political Barometer they were at 33% (details here). These percentages would easily have given Labour two seats. But in the end, Labour only managed to get 28.15% of the vote. This fall in support for Labour, and this alone, enabled Jill to squeeze in with 15.26%. If Labour had managed to get 30.6% of the vote, they would have won the fourth Welsh seat by getting more than twice Plaid's vote.

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Looking back at the campaign, Labour did themselves no favours by not really contesting these elections. They kept a low profile, not really engaging in the fight in any meaningful way; probably thinking that this election didn't really matter and keeping their resources safe for fighting the 2015 Westminster election instead. So they've only got themselves to blame for not getting two Welsh seats.

The second factor was that UKIP did much better than even I imagined they would do. They were never in any danger of not winning a seat in Wales, but they probably picked up enough votes from people in Wales who would otherwise vote Labour to keep Labour below the magic 30.6% that would have squeezed Plaid out. Mark Hutchings tweeted it right: UKIP saved Plaid's bacon.

So Plaid owes UKIP a rather large thank you. Quite ironic really, as Plaid's main tactic in this election had been to single out UKIP for attack.

Attacking UKIP

I have to say that I was a little surprised by the way that Leanne focused on UKIP at Plaid Cymru's spring conference last weekend. It goes without saying that UKIP is a party which fully deserves criticism for its anti-EU and anti-immigration policies, but I wondered why we would want to single them out for criticism.

Fairly obviously, the context for Leanne's concern is the European Parliament election which is now only a couple of months away on 22 May. The last European election was in 2009 and, as a reminder, these were the results for Wales:

Conservative ... 21.2%
Labour ... 20.3%
Plaid Cymru ... 18.5%
UKIP ... 12.8%
LibDems ... 10.7%
Greens ... 5.6%

BBC, 2009 European Election Results

It seems hard to believe that Labour could do quite so badly in any election in Wales, but these were the dire days immediately following the 2008 banking collapse, and the Labour government in Westminster was all but dead on its feet.

Now, after nearly four years of the Tories and LibDems in power at Westminster, and with UKIP playing a political tune that both the Tories and Labour seem more than willing to dance to, the polls are indicating a very different result. This is from the YouGov ITV Wales political barometer, with the changes from the December poll in brackets:

Labour ... 39% (-2%)
UKIP ... 18% (+5%)
Conservative ... 17% (-3%)
Plaid Cymru ... 12% (-1%)
LibDems ... 7% (-5%)

Wales Political Barometer, February 2014

If this poll is anywhere near accurate, then the chances of Jill Evans retaining her seat look very bleak. This is how the seats would be distributed:

First seat ... Labour ... 39%
Second seat ... Labour ... 19.5%
Third seat ... UKIP ... 18%
Fourth seat ... Conservative ... 17%

Notional fifth seat ... Labour ... 13%
Notional sixth seat ... Plaid Cymru ... 12%
Notional seventh seat ... Labour ... 9.75%
Notional eighth seat ... UKIP ... 9%
Notional ninth seat ... Conservative ... 8.5%
Notional tenth seat ... Labour ... 7.8%
Notional eleventh seat ... LibDems ... 7%

There are, of course, only four Welsh seats available, but I've gone down the list to show how the voting system works. We in Plaid might comfort ourselves by thinking we are fourth in the polls and are therefore in with a shout for the fourth seat, and the LibDems might comfort themselves by saying they are fifth. But for the LibDems it is such a poor fifth place that they would only win a seat if Wales had eleven seats, and Plaid would only win a seat if Wales had six seats.

So in practical terms we can forget about the LibDems because they don't stand any chance of winning a seat. However there is a chance that Plaid can hold onto a seat, but only if we understand what we need to do to win and, in particular, where to target our attack.

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The overall picture is that Labour are way out in front, and there is probably very little that will prevent them from easily topping the poll in Wales. There is also very little doubt that Plaid are not doing too well in the polls, for both UKIP and the Tories are ahead of us. In order to hold on to our seat, we must therefore do two things:

     Ensure that Labour don't get more than three times as many votes as Plaid
     Get more votes than either the Tories or UKIP

The first is not so big an ask. At 12%, Plaid are only marginally short of a third of Labour's share of the vote at 39%. We only have to up our share of the vote by a couple of percentage points to do it.

But the second is more problematic. It involves making the right tactical judgement about whether we need to beat the Tories or UKIP. In my opinion we should be aiming to beat the Tories rather than UKIP.

We should be under no illusion about UKIP's popularity. They are doing better in the polls than they have ever done before, and they always do better in European elections than they do in any other elections. For what it's worth, I think that UKIP are quite likely to top the poll in England, although I think they might fall short of topping the poll in the UK as a whole. Compared with the December poll, UKIP are already up 5% points ... and I think that rise will continue. When Nigel Farage has his big TV showdown with Nick Clegg on 2 April, is anyone in any doubt who will come out on top? Not even the Guardian is in any doubt about it. That's not because Farage will win the argument, but because UKIP have only two, simple points to make (anti-EU and anti-immigration) and he will just hammer them home relentlessly.

Plaid's tacticians therefore need to make this judgement. If UKIP's popularity is on the rise, then it is the Tories that we should be turning our fire on, not UKIP. At present, we seem to be focusing our attack on the wrong target.

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To put things into perspective, we need to understand where UKIP's vote comes from. Helpfully, YouGov have just conducted a poll to ask this very question. The details are here, but in general those who are most likely to vote UKIP are very or fairly right wing, working class Tories, men over 60, and readers of the Daily Express or Daily Mail. No big surprise.
 

     

 
In terms of previous political affiliation, UKIP draw the majority of their new support from those who used to vote Tory. Disaffected Tory defectors to UKIP outnumber LibDem defectors by three to one, and Labour defectors by four to one.
 

     

 
These figures are important for this reason. Let's assume that potential UKIP voters take notice of Plaid's attack and decide to change their vote in May because of it. Who will they vote for instead? Very clearly, most of them will vote Tory. People primarily vote for UKIP because they are strongly anti-EU, so if they don't vote UKIP most of them will probably vote for the party that is the next most Euro-sceptic ... the Tories. But it is the Tories that we need to beat for Jill Evans to retain her seat. Therefore concentrating our attack on UKIP is in fact counterproductive. We can see this from the February Political Barometer: UKIP have risen 5% points since December, and that increase was primarily at the expense of the Tories, who lost 3% points.

As I see it, this is the sort of result we should be looking for:

Labour ... 36%
UKIP ... 23%
Plaid Cymru ... 15%
Conservative ... 14%
LibDems ... 6%

First seat ... Labour ... 36%
Second seat ... UKIP ... 23%
Third seat ... Labour ... 18%
Fourth seat ... Plaid Cymru ... 15%

Notional fifth seat ... Conservative ... 14%

This simply requires the same 5% point increase in UKIP's share of the vote as we have seen since December, coupled with the same 3% fall in the Tory share of the vote in the same period. All we then need to do is pick up a few percentage points on our own merits to just beat the Tories to the fourth seat. It's tight, but it can be done.

If it seems unlikely that the Tories should slip from topping the poll in Wales 2009 with 21.2% to losing their seat only five years later, the explanation is almost entirely to do with who is in power at Westminster. Labour, with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and with an economy in freefall, were terribly unpopular in 2009 ... and a good part of the Labour-Tory floating vote went to the Tories as part of the normal Labour-Tory swing. Now the pendulum has swung the other way and the Tories (with their LibDem little helpers) are unpopular after four years of austerity for the poor and tax breaks for the well off. So of course the Tories are likely to lose support in Wales.

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To be clear, I'm certainly not saying that Leanne was wrong to attack UKIP last weekend. UKIP's policies are diametrically opposite to those of Plaid, so of course we need to speak out against them. But what surprised me was that we should focus an attack on UKIP, but not put anywhere near the same effort into attacking Labour and, especially, the Tories.

With Labour so far out in front and all but guaranteed to win two seats in May, we need to beat either the Tories or UKIP in order for Jill to keep her seat. In this particular election there is no doubt that UKIP will do better than the Tories ... even in Wales. It therefore makes more tactical sense to concentrate our attack to pick off the weaker party rather than the stronger one.

Rhun ap Iorwerth and Rod Richards

Rhun ap Iorwerth and Rod Richards have more in common than either would be likely to admit. Both were media personalities and both recently joined political parties in the expectation of immediately being selected as candidates.

So we can perhaps imagine Rod's surprise to find out that he had to go through a rigorous selection procedure, and his disappointment to find out that he didn't perform very well in it. UKIP's chairman described it like this:

The assessment process is immensely detailed and multi-faceted and has been devised to be as objective as possible.

We had 140 would-be candidates and had to whittle them down to 70. Rod hasn't been a member for very long and was at a slight disadvantage because he was not so au fait with our ways as others might be.

Wales Online, 15 August 2013

Isn't it strange that one party regards not being a member for very long as a disadvantage, yet the other party regards not knowing about a new member's political views as something that can be overlooked ... only to later find out that the new member actually opposes one of his party's key policies, tells blatant lies about it, and admits that he will vote against his party colleagues if he gets the chance to do so?

It's a sorry day for Plaid Cymru when even UKIP can teach us a lesson on how to select candidates in an objective and professional way.

Rod and Emu

Rod Richards is a fairly regular contributor to programmes like CF99, and even though he's lost none of his ability to make people laugh, I never figured out why he dropped Emu from his act.

     

But all has now been revealed.

According to this story in today's Western Mail, Rod has now joined UKIP ... and no member of UKIP could be seen to have anything to do with Emu.

Double Standards

It has been interesting to see the frenzy of media indignation over Nigel Farage being shouted at, booed, heckled, and eventually escorted away by the police when he visited Edinburgh yesterday.

He was supposedly there to drum up support for a UKIP candidate standing in a by-election. But as that by-election is some 180km away in Aberdeen, it seems rather more likely that he was doing his bit to persuade people to vote No in the independence referendum. Why else would he be talking about the Union Jack being "extinguished from Scotland forever"? There's a good selection of links here, and this is a video of it:

     

Clearly upset by what they thought of him, Nigel Farage called those who told him to go back home "anti-English", "anti-British" and "fascist scum", and the usual media have picked up on that theme with a vengeance, saying how unacceptable it is for a leader of a popular party in England not to be treated with the respect they think he deserves.

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What they have not picked up on is that, on the very same day, a Conservative MP interviewed on ITV Wales' Sharp End told us that if a certain politician dared to come to his part of Wales to present a different view on exactly the same subject of the EU, framed in exactly the same terms of English nationalism, people would also protest. In fact he imagined these protests would be so fierce that the politician concerned would, to quote him exactly, "be lucky if he got out alive".

     

Let's be charitable and assume that Simon Hart was just trying to "big-up" an imagined strength of feeling, and that Carwyn Jones would not actually be lynched, or even suffer any form of physical injury.

However, if what he said had any meaning, it is clear that he at least expected—and would probably condone—the protesters shouting, booing and heckling him to such an extent that the police might be called in to escort him away.

So why is it unacceptable for people to express their feelings against one politician with whom they disagree, but apparently quite acceptable for people with the opposite opinion (in Simon Hart's imagination, at least) to express similar feelings towards a different politician?

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And what's the big deal, anyway? People in Scotland certainly don't have time for politicians like Nigel Farage. People in west Wales might well not have much time for politicians like Carwyn Jones. Leaving unpopular politicians with no illusions about what you think of them is a healthy part of democracy.

One reason for UKIP's decline in Wales

I came across this letter in today's South Wales Evening Post from the one and only Gwilym Levell:

Only UKIP can help us

The solution to the present unconstitutional over-government is not to add more over-government by establishing a separate government of England. It is to get out of the EU and abolish the Welsh Assembly.

Only the policies of UKIP can get us out of the recession.

Gwilym Levell
Whittington Street, Tonna

I think it's fair to say that a large percentage of UKIP's support in Wales comes from people who think the same way. With all the other parties in Wales now firmly committed to further devolution to Wales, UKIP was the only hope they had of reversing it.

There's only one problem ... or, to be more precise, two. UKIP no longer wants to abolish the Welsh Assembly, and it does want to establish an English Parliament with a separate English Government.

UKIP now supports devolution

The big thing to come out of UKIP's conference in Eastbourne this weekend for me was the release of a policy paper entitled "A Union for the Future".
 

     

The policy paper, written by Paul Nuttall MEP, is a complete rewrite of UKIP's badly written, unworkable devolution policy which basically involved abolishing the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales (but not NI) and replacing them with Grand Committees of British MPs.

This new policy paper has no such retrograde suggestions in it. The current British House of Commons would be replaced with an English Parliament with English MPs, an English Executive and an English First Minister.

Bloggers4UKIP, 12 September 2011

So those in Wales who supported UKIP at the last election because they they wanted to see devolution either reversed or halted no longer have that reason to vote for them; and this explains why UKIP's support is falling in Wales, even though it is rising in England.

A complete farrago

Farrago is a good word to describe the hotchpotch of confused and conflicting ideas that UKIP claim to hold. Their aptly named leader provided a perfect example of this yesterday when he said:

"The EU states will simply never agree to give back powers to the nation states. The EU wants more power not less."

Daily Express, 3 April 2013

Where do we begin to unravel this strange utterance? I could start by saying that the "EU states" and the "nation states" he talks about in the first sentence are usually the very same thing, making the sentence complete nonsense. I could point out that the UK is itself an "EU state" so that, by Nigel Farage's strange logic, the UK "will simply never agree" to any repatriation of powers to itself either ... which is again complete nonsense.

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So it might be better to ask why UKIP regard the UK as different to most other EU states. Nigel Farage has in fact touched on the answer without realizing it: namely that the UK is not a "nation state" at all, but a collection of nations.

UKIP's fundamental hostility to the EU stems from the fact that both the EU and the UK aim to do exactly the same thing. I fully agree with UKIP that we don't need both. I disagree with them about which one better serves the interests of Wales.

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The principle behind both the UK and the EU is that countries are stronger when they act together on matters of shared interest. But there are some very fundamental differences between the two:

•  The UK was mainly established and enlarged by force. The EU was established and enlarged entirely by mutual, democratic consent.

•  The UK is dominated by one country which, with 83.9% of the population, can impose its wishes on the remainder of the UK irrespective of what the other parts of the UK want. The EU is not dominated by any country, the largest has only 16.3% of the population and its voting rights as a proportion of its population are even smaller.

The structures of the EU are carefully designed to give small countries a bigger say. In fact as individual member states of the EU, the countries of Britain would collectively have much more of a say in the EU than the UK has at present. The UK currently has one member of the EU Council, one commissioner and 72 MEPs. As separate member states Wales, Scotland and England would have three members of the EU council, three commissioners and probably 88 MEPs. On current parities, Wales would have 9 MEPs (the same as Lithuania) instead of 4, Scotland would have 13 MEPs (the same as Slovakia or Denmark) instead of 6, and England would have 66 MEPs (between Italy's 72 for 60m and Spain's 50 for 38m) instead of 59 ... although this would be rounded down for all member states as new states join because the maximum number of MEPs is limited to 751.

•  And finally the UK is very much smaller than the EU. Why would anyone in Wales want to be in a single market trading block with England, Scotland and Northern Ireland rather than be a member, in our own right, of a single market trading block that includes most countries in Europe?

UKIP support the breakup of Belgium

I suppose UKIP are rather too easy a target, yet I couldn't help but smile at something Nigel Farage said in an interview with the BBC:

He describes the election of a Dutch-speaking separatist party in Belgium's general election, which favours the gradual break up of the country, as "delicious", seeing it another sign that Europe is heading towards break up as a political entity.

BBC, 9 August 2010

If only he had the virtue of consistency. For if he supports the idea of Belgium splitting into Flanders and Wallonia, he would surely also support the idea of Wales and Scotland becoming independent of the UK. In fact he might even persuade his party to put more effort into making this happen, for he could then present it as "another sign that Europe is heading towards break up as a political entity".

But consistency is not one of UKIP's virtues. UKIP and the BNP are the only parties that want to undo the devolution we have and recentralize the UK.

Plaid to win two Welsh seats

     

With less than three weeks to go to polling day for the European elections, it's time to focus on what is going to happen. Most opinion polls headline what is happening in the UK as a whole, rather than what will happen in each country, but I'm going to start by looking at Scotland.

In the latest published YouGov poll (for the Sun, 13/14 May) the headline European voting intention in Scotland is:

SNP ... 40%
Labour ... 21%
LD ... 14%
Con ... 13%
Greens ... 4%
UKIP ... 4%

That is an amazing lead. Scotland's representation has been reduced to 6 seats in this election (if Scotland were independent it would probably have 14 seats, and if we were independent we'd have 11 ... but that's another story). It would give the SNP 3 seats, with Labour, the Tories and the LDs on one each. That will be a big success for the SNP.

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From the same data it's hard to work out what would happen in Wales because Wales is included with the Midlands. Before the Telegraph got into full swing I thought that Plaid, Labour and the Tories would all poll in the mid-twenties, but I wasn't at all sure what the order would be. Each of these three parties will win one seat. The only real question is who will win the fourth (and final) seat. It's very hard to see either the LDs or UKIP getting more than half the vote of the biggest party, so the fourth seat will be won by the party with the biggest vote. A week or so ago I didn't have much confidence that it would be Plaid.

But since then the scandal over MPs' expenses has deepened, leading to a large part of the population baying for political blood. I might question the direction in which some of that anger is aimed, but the anger is genuine and justified. The YouGov poll shows a huge surge in support for UKIP as a reaction against the three big UK parties. But what does that mean for Wales?

As Vaughan Roderick noted in his blog today, UKIP draw their support from the right. So any growth in their support will be at the expense of the Tories. A week or so back I genuinely feared that the Tories might get the biggest share of the vote in Wales, but if that gets split with UKIP they won't.

Labour, it goes without saying, are in freefall. Their UK figure is now 20%. In Wales that will be higher, but maybe only 25%. The champagne socialism of the likes of the Kinnocks and Touhig, which has got up my nose for years, has now got up everyone's nose!

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Which of course leaves Plaid. These may be "famous last words" on my part, but none of Plaid's MPs has been doing anything other than making reasonable claims for accommodation that nobody would question they need because of the distance and travelling time to London. After all, if UKIP are getting kudos for being seen as "clean" (even though, as VR points out, one of their MEPs was jailed for making false claims and another is facing fraud charges) then Plaid are certainly cleaner.

All this can only push Plaid's vote up, to the point where I now believe we can and will get somewhere around 27% of the vote, and therefore win the fourth Welsh seat. As support for Labour plummets, what other party will people with generally left leaning views vote for? The biggest challenge is to get people out to vote rather than stay at home in disgust, because not voting means that nothing will change.

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Finally - even though, sadly, it seems that this election is going to be focused more on the misuse of privilege and the integrity of our elected representatives than it should be - we need to remember that elections are about policies. Irrespective of the candidates the parties put up, it is the policies they enact which effect our daily lives.

So with that in mind, I'd invite people to click on the picture and read the Plaid manifesto.

But if manifestos aren't your thing, then ask yourself this question instead:

Is it better to have MEPs from a UK party in the European Parliament ... or MEPs from a party that stands up and fights for Wales?