In Mallorca, over 95% want Catalan education

I've just come across a news report from Mallorca which says that more than 95% of parents whose children are due to start school later this year have chosen to have them educated in Catalan rather than Castilian. I've linked to the Google translation, which is a bit rough but should be clear enough:

     Parents choose, by a large majority, Catalan for teaching their children

In some parts of the island no-one at all has chosen Castilian, and in the others only the parents of two or three children have chosen it.

     

It's interesting to compare this with the news, which we can read here, that the Tribunal Superior de Justícia de Catalunya is still trying to get Catalunya to reverse its long-standing policy of all education being in Catalan rather than Castilian.

However there is virtually no chance of the Catalan government changing this policy because—as is true in other countries, including Wales—using the minority language as the medium of education is the best way to ensure that children become competent in both languages rather than just one. It is unfair for future generations to be disadvantaged by not being able to speak both languages.

A Shining Diamond

If anyone missed it, here is by far the most reasonable and sensible speech delivered in Tuesday's Senedd debate on the Diamond Jubilee. The rest of the debate is entirely missable unless you have one of these to hand.

     

A sparkling contribution. Well done, Leanne, I'm proud of you.

Toadying sycophancy

I've just seen the rather strange declaration signed by Rosemary Butler on behalf of the National Assembly:

     

One part of it reads:

Your Majesty's wisdom and devotion have provided the bedrock on which sustainable democratic institutions have been established and developed ...

Does anyone seriously believe that the establishment of democratic institutions has had anything to do with Elizabeth Windsor's wisdom or devotion? Our National Assembly is the result of the vision and hard work of many people over many years. It was established because we as a nation wanted it and voted for it; and it has developed because we as a nation wanted it to be better and voted for it to be better.

Yes, we have come a long way over the past sixty years; but we cheapen our own achievements as a nation if we give the credit for what we ourselves have done to someone who has done nothing to deserve it.

Sign Up

I've just found out about this e-Petiton to the National Assembly:

The Welsh Language in our Assembly

"We call upon the Assembly Commission to accept the recommendation of the Official Languages Bill scrutiny committee to include an assurance on the face of the Bill that a fully bilingual Record of all Assembly proceedings be published."

Its recommendations reflect the wishes of the people of Wales to see the Welsh language being treated equally and to prevent discrimination against the Welsh language and its use.

Click here to view and sign the e-Petition

Perhaps a couple of things need a word of explanation.

•  First, the term "all Assembly proceedings" means not just plenary sessions but also the proceedings of committees and sub-committees of the Assembly, as officially defined in Part 1, Section 1(5) of the GoWA 2006.

•  Second, putting it on the "face of the Bill" – i.e. as opposed to putting it in the Official Languages Scheme that the Bill requires the Assembly Commission to produce and review on a regular basis – will make it impossible to renege on that commitment, as the Assembly Commission did in 2009, unless the primary legislation is re-enacted or amended. This will be a much more difficult thing to do than to simply change the OLS.

There are 590 signatures so far, and I'm sure most people reading this will want to add their names.

The Big Debate

Anyone who has an hour to spare might like to spend it watching last night's Big Debate on Scottish independence. Just click the picture:

     

I guess this will be the first of several dozen such debates over the next two-and-a-half years. I think I'd award the first round to Patrick Harvie of the Green Party. On subjects like defence and who should be head of state, he was outstanding.

The Race Begins

I'm glad to see that Yes Scotland, the campaign for a Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum, is now up and running.

     

However I couldn't help but notice that the declaration which they aim to get a million people to sign by 2014 seems to be an amended version of our own:

The Yes Declaration

"I believe that it is fundamentally better for us all if decisions about Wales' Scotland's future are taken by the people who care most about Wales Scotland, that is, by the people of Wales Scotland.

"Being independent means Wales' Scotland's future will be in Wales' Scotland's hands.

"There is no doubt that Wales' Scotland has great potential. We are blessed with talent, resources and creativity. We have the opportunity to make our nation a better place to live, for this and future generations. We can build a greener, fairer and more prosperous society that is stronger and more successful than it is today.

"I want a Wales Scotland that speaks with her own voice and makes her own unique contribution to the world - a Wales Scotland that stands alongside the other nations on these isles as an independent nation."

Well, I guess they're welcome to it. Independence will be good for Wales, so it should be good for Scotland too.

Failing to stimulate the Welsh economy

While some of the media have been looking to stir up a row over the relatively insignificant figure of less than £400,000, plans for spending a far greater amount were announced by the Welsh Government yesterday. This is from their news statement:

Capital investment for growth and jobs will accelerate in Wales, says Jane Hutt

"We remain a Government committed to the provision of infrastructure and the creation of jobs", Finance Minister Jane Hutt said ahead of the publication of the Wales Infrastructure Investment Plan for Growth and Jobs.

The Wales Infrastructure Investment Plan for Growth and Jobs – a commitment in the Programme for Government – will outline how the Welsh Government will invest more than £3.5bn over this Spending Review period and around £15bn over the next decade in capital projects.

Welsh Government, 22 May 2012

It's meant to sound impressive, but in fact isn't. In response to the criticism, Jane Hutt is reported as saying this about it:

Finance Minister Jane Hutt accepted a number of projects had already been announced or are already underway. But she stressed the plan was also designed to raise new money, potentially more than £1bn to cope with a 40% cut in the capital budget.

New sources of finance could involve specially-designed companies to borrow the money needed for specific projects.

BBC, 22 May 2012

When the ConDem coalition undertook its comprehensive spending review in 2010, it drastically cut (by 41%) that part of the Welsh block grant which is reserved for capital investment. In fact it cut it more severely than the equivalent figures for Scotland (a 38% cut) and Northern Ireland (a 37% cut) but that's a different story. The figures are in Table 2 of this document.

For the next three years the capital expenditure part of our block grant will be £1.2bn, £1.1bn and £1.1bn, and this accounts for the whole of the £3.5bn mentioned in yesterday's announcement after rounding. Although the devolved administrations are free to spend some of the revenue part of their respective block grants on capital projects, they are not allowed to shift any of the capital budget into revenue expenditure. So in blunt terms the Welsh Government is saying that it intends to spend the absolute bare minimum it is legally obliged to spend on capital projects, and no more. In essence, the plan just explains how the existing allocation of money in the block grant is going to be carved up. There's nothing in it that I can see (the full document is here) that will raise "potentially more than £1bn" of new money.

As for their ten-year projection, no-one is in a position to know what the next Westminster CSR will contain, but £11.5bn over the remaining seven years is only £1.65bn a year. As the baseline figure for 2010-11 was £1.7bn, they seem to be assuming that levels of investment won't return to what they were before for at least a decade.

So in short there is nothing ambitious or groundbreaking in the Welsh Government's investment programme, and absolutely nothing to justify the idea of "acceleration". It's just a lot of spin with no increase in speed.

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It's a shame, for things could be very different. An ambitious Welsh Government—knowing that increased investment in infrastructure would be a very good way of protecting Wales from the worst effects of the cuts and do more than anything else to create jobs and help our economy become competitive—would surely have tried rather harder to find ways to invest more money in improving our infrastructure. An ideal way of doing it would be to use the Build for Wales model developed and advocated by Plaid Cymru, details of which are here.

It's not exactly as if this Labour government are lazy good-for-nothings, despite Carwyn Jones' natural propensity for taking things easy instead of standing up for Wales. In fact it recently put a lot of effort into an innovative way to increase borrowing by coordinating the existing borrowing powers of local authorities, as I mentioned in this post only last week. In principle it's a clever idea; except that it will misdirect this borrowing into revenue expenditure on road maintenance rather than capital expenditure on new infrastructure. This is exactly the sort of bad borrowing that was a major contributory factor to the debt crisis we now find ourselves in. Labour in Wales are doing exactly what Labour did when they were in power at Westminster.

This is a missed opportunity that will have severe long-term consequences for our economy. We have a passive and incompetent government that is more comfortable pointing the finger of blame at the Tories in Westminster rather than getting off its backside to take responsibility for stimulating our economy through increased capital investment.