Every month(ish) in Y Barcud Oren, I try as best as possible to explain the latest developments in Welsh politics to the English. It's a task I enjoy enormously (and let's face it, if you had two government parties throwing you this much comedy material, you'd be enjoying it too) but sometimes covering the news isn't enough to give a sense of the developing trends sneaking their way into the mix. And with just ninety days (presumably) until the polls open, there's one developing trend in Welsh politics we really should be looking at.
There's a party excited about a hung parliament. And it isn't us.
I suppose Alex Salmond's boast that the SNP will return 20 MPs at the general election is so oft-repeated that it might pass you by, particularly in a psephologically-savvy party that knows that a party that returned 21 of 72 constituency MSPs (29%) in an election specifically about Scotland will have trouble returning 20 of 59 MPs (34%) in a UK-wide election. And with coverage of devolved matters so patchy, leaving the English viewer with just intermittent nods to party conferences and the odd controversy, you could be forgiven for writing it off as bog-standard leadership bluster. But when you live with it every day, you can't fail but come to a far more disturbing conclusion.
They actually believe it. And I mean believe it, as the True Word and the Good News.
In the nationalist oral history (which has now transcended mere political narrative and become a national epic poem, somewhere between a new Mabinogion and the Mahabharata) the 2007 elections represented a fundamental turning point wherein the people of Scotland and Wales rose up and demanded that Plaid and the SNP lead them to glory. Minor details like the inevitability of two parties that had spent years framing themselves as considerably Labourer than yow benefiting from the unpopularity of a disastrous Labour Prime Minister and the supposedly crushing mandate only amounting to 31% and 22% of the vote in Scotland and Wales respectively somehow failed to trouble the chroniclers.
Now if you're telling yourself that sort of story you're already in all sorts of psychological trouble, but the hung parliament idea adds another layer of lunacy. The SNP target of 20 surely presumes that even in the worst case scenario they get to 15 and Plaid must be imagining a green sweep from Ynys Mon and Aberconwy in the north through Ceredigion to Llanelli that "guarantees" them at least 7. And if your minimum nationalist expectation is 22, with an option on anything up to 35, then you have to consider yourself, however delusionally, a player in the post-hung game.
At this point the rational analyst thinks that it's quite cute that the nats think the other boys will let them play but wonders who exactly they think will give them the ball. Getting Plaid onto the same page as the Tories in Wales for the rainbow that never was was tough enough and as for the SNP, one imagines that Annabel Goldie's response to any approach from them would be distinctly Anglo-Saxon. Maybe the SNP's referendum (which you have to presume would be the non-negotiable first item on their coalition shopping list) could be delivered by Westminster itself without Dave having to beg to Annabel, but post-hung Dave will want to keep the good ship Change on course for a decisive second election win and if any issue is likely to blow him onto the rocks of the small matter of his party still being, you know, Tories, giving the SNP a referendum is it.
That rational analyst is, however, being a bit Lib Dem in assuming that the Tories are the most relevant partner here. What happens if Labour manage to stay over 300 and a Labour-nationalist coalition is a possibility? The Lib Dems might feel that Labour's losing fifty-odd seats and quite possibly the popular vote overall disqualified them as partners. But for the nationalists, for whom any coalition deal is just the next step in their epic poem, is that a factor? After all, it is essentially what Plaid are doing now, albeit in the Assembly where we've slightly more experience and a lot more maturity about the nature of coalition politics than Westminster. If the nats feel they can come back to their nations and successfully justify rewarding failure because the epic poem told them to, they could well go for it.
Of course, that's all presuming the delusion becomes reality and the fact I'm calling it a delusion should tell you all you need to know about that. Nevertheless it's a delusion that will frame, however subconsciously, all the nationalist spin from here on in. Moreover, you have to wonder where the nationalist heads will be when they wake up on May 8th to find their dreams in tatters. With a powers referendum in Wales still to deliver and a year of governing left for both parties, any failure to respond to the reality of their lot could be catastrophic for their countries and ultimately for their votes.
As a Crystal Palace fan and a Cardiff resident, football's not been very good to me this week. And with Gloucester RFC not setting the world on fire and Gloucestershire CCC a long way from being back in action, America's been providing my sporting fix of late. Which would be fine if they could manage to hold something as simple as a Super Bowl without dragging politics into it.
It all started with a player who isn't playing in the Super Bowl and may well never do so. Tim Tebow has just finished his final season as quarterback at the University of Florida, having won both a National Championship and the Heisman Trophy during his four years with his hometown alma mater. Tebow has long been subject to nationwide scrutiny, particularly now as he moves into the professional ranks where long-standing questions about the suitability of his own personal skill set to the NFL will finally be answered.
Tebow's initial claim to fame, however, came well before his recognition as a professional-calibre player. He was one of the first players to benefit from a 1996 Florida law allowing home-schooled students to play for the high school team of the school district in which they lived, but moved with his mother to an apartment in a different district so that he could play for a bigger school that passed more. At first the move was controversial, since conventionally-schooled players could not move districts with such ease, but Tebow is now the poster child for efforts to give the same rights to home-schooled children in other states.
And then, with his place in professional football still tentative and millions of dollars resting on his every action between now and the draft in late April, Tebow decided to wade right into the middle of the abortion battle and in that most public of American settings; a Super Bowl ad.
You see, the reason Tebow was home-schooled is that his parents are missionaries who wanted their children's education to reflect their Christian values. And Tim certainly wears his faith on his sleeve, or more accurately on his eye black which regularly carries references to biblical passages. But on Super Bowl Sunday, he'll wear it in an $2.5million ad for Focus On The Family which, as the name suggests, is an anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-evolution lobbying organisation.
There are two minor problems with this. In the first case, CBS had previously banned such advocacy ads altogether, notably in 2004 when the United Church of Christ, Barack Obama's own denomination, were prevented from running this ad welcoming gay and lesbian members;
Perhaps more pertinently, however, there is the likelihood that the ad itself will be, well, bollocks. It's expected to feature Tim and his mother, Pam, "telling their personal story", namely that while Pam was pregnant during a missionary trip to the Philippines in 1987, she contracted amoebic dysentery and suffered a placental abruption after which she was advised to have an abortion. Which is fine, except that abortion in the Philippines has been illegal since 1870, specifically prohibited in the constitution since, gee, 1987 and carries a six year jail sentence for anyone performing or receiving one. If you can find me a doctor who advises an abortion under those circumstances...
Meanwhile, CBS have been reviewing ads for the back-up list for the Super Bowl and saw fit to reject this fine example of the advertising executive's art;
Because, of course, a major television network isn't an enormous hypocrite, oh no...
Reading through the Lib Dem blogosphere I'm often struck by the recurring thought; "Would we mind fixing one thing at a time please?" I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, therefore, to find that thought cropping up elsewhere. Not that Geraint Talfan Davies and the IWA are trying to fix multiple things at once, of course. But they do call useful attention to something we often seem to be.
Mind you, I am surprised that it wasn't the Lib Dem blogosphere that alerted me to a House of Lords Constitution Committee investigation of referendums; I'd have expected geekery-a-plenty on that sort of thing by now. Then again, given that Wales is the only part of the UK likely to have a referendum (that actually matters and has a cat's chance in hell of being answered in the affirmative) in the near future I suppose we do have the most immediate interest in that investigation's results.
That referendum is a statutory requirement of the Government Of Wales Act 2006, but you have to ask yourself why? As the IWA point out, Britain's referendal history has a lot less to do with questions of vital constitutional importance and a lot more to do with political expediency. Britain didn't need a referendum to join the EEC in 1973; it needed a referendum pledge from Harold Wilson in 1974 to placate the TUC whose opposition to it had divided his cabinet. Every European referendum pledge since stems from the divisions in John Major's post-1992 government; Maggie herself happily signed the Single European Act without a thought to a referendum because she was politically strong enough to do so. As for Lisbon, it's the subject of one of my coursework essays so I'll let you know when I've finished it...
Meanwhile, the 1979 devolution referendums were the result of a minority Labour government facing opposition in its own ranks, notably from Neil Kinnock. And of course, once you'd had the 1979 referendums you had to have the 1997 ones, which begat the GLA referendum, which begat the North East regional referendum, which begat, which begat... Heck, if instead of specifically creating the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, Labour had gone the whole hog and established regional government for the whole UK (which is, of course, exactly what they should have done) the whole thing would have been essentially a local government reorganisation and you wouldn't even have needed the referendum on constitutional grounds.
For Wales, then, the IWA's picture is gloomy; a powers referendum that shouldn't be necessary, whose result will depend more on the wording of the question and the internal battles of the coalition over timing and that might be lost when losing it simply isn't an option. And now it may not even be the last word; Jack Straw has already said that any future move towards a separate Welsh legal jurisdiction would need a referendum, which for such a technical and fundamentally necessary reform is simply bonkers.
For Liberal Democrats, however, the IWA ask a far more searching question; what does this proliferation of referendums mean for representative democracy? Obviously we were talking about fixing the political process long before it became a hot button topic, but now that it is we shouldn't start pretending that every policy idea in that direction is sacrosanct. Saying as many do that we should put more issues to referendums is fine in and of itself, but when you're already talking about PR, an elected second chamber, votes at 16, election finance reform and power of recall, at some point you have to ask yourself what the result of all of that would be.
To put it another way, if we delivered PR, elected second chamber and election finance reform, three things we've only been promising since the neolithic, wouldn't that do the job? Or at the very least, isn't it worth giving those things a chance to do the job before jumping into things like referendums and recall powers that really do change the nature of democracy? Having suffered so long from the effects of a political system that was designed by throwing lumps of constitutional concrete into a pile and hoping it ended up as a house, I'd like to think we were employing a little architecture in sorting the mess out. Either way, I suspect the committee's report will be an interesting read for the Lib Dems and for everyone who's waiting for One Wales to get on with it.
For Giles Clarke, the chairman of the ECB who's been whingeing all day that not being able to sell TV rights to the Ashes to Rupert Murdoch would destroy grassroots cricket, a parable.
Younger readers may not be aware that back in 2003 the England rugby team won the World Cup (that's right kids, there was a time when the England team was vaguely selected on merit and not entirely on the basis of who sounds cool right now and happens to play for Wasps, Quins, Bath or Leicester...) The team came back to enormous celebrations and two weeks later many of the squad were back in action in the first round of pool matches in that year's Heineken Cup.
Except that some genius had decided that, after a number of years on the BBC, that year the Heineken Cup would move to Sky. Just at the moment that live coverage of club rugby at the highest level could have paid real dividends, brought more youngsters into the game, it wasn't there. It may be the worst mistake rugby union has ever made in the professional era (and given that both the RFU and WRU exist, that's saying something...)
So Giles, when you pontificate about the dangers of grassroots cricket losing money, remember that the purpose of grassroots cricket is people. Remember that cricket, glorious and wonderful game though it is, has no God-given right to cultural recognition (and if you need proof of that, compare the celebrations in 2005 when everyone saw the matches to the celebrations in 2009 when no-one did)
And ultimately, remember how many young people might never see good quality cricket if it isn't on TV and free-to-air. Yes, the money's tempting and yes, you'll never have any trouble thinking of ways to spend it. But if the people aren't there and if you by your actions have helped that to happen, you're guilty of gross incompetence and should be dealt with accordingly.
One of the more eclectic entries in my blogroll is that of Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip. His analysis is always original and thought-provoking, but even I was surprised to find a piece from him that was relevant to the Question Time British National Party Controversy (or as Alice might have put it, "until Wikipedia has a name for it, like the Question Time British National Party Controversy, it isn't really happening...")
Scott's point is about privacy and how a world where the proliferation of electronic data makes it increasingly impossible to conceal things might actually lead to profound social change as people are liberated by the sharing of their foibles and proclivities. To a great extent, however, this has already happened as practitioners of every imaginable hobby and fetish have found each other through the various iterations of internet social networking, from bulletin boards and newsgroups through Tripod and Geocities to Facebook, Twitter and the rest. Heck, a couple of months ago The Not Quite Late Enough Show had Kevin Smith and Jeanette Winterson discussing the mainstream emergence of geek culture and how the internet had proven the size of the market involved (and if you'd said ten years ago that Kevin Smith would ever be on there...)
But this effect also extends to politics and, as is often the way with extremists, the anti-fascist hard left have managed to miss the boat while sitting on it. No Platform was of course their baby and their proudest (i.e. only actual) achievement. If no platform ever worked, it was on the basis that if fascist ideas could not be heard in any mainstream setting, people would only hear the view that such ideas were fundamentally beneath contempt and that any individual who might hold them had better well keep quiet about it because they are clearly inhuman scum.
Now that works when there are only three channels and even the Daily Mail is willing to not be openly fascist. In an internet age where any bunch of deluded extremists can find adherents and claim respectability with a half-decent website and a controversy-seeking media strategy, it's utterly ridiculous. We can't shut the door on the BNP's views anymore, we have to put them front and centre and demolish them.
The one thing I would say in that respect is that we must make sure such exposure does not fall into the trap the BNP want it to, namely that of making Nick Griffin its sole and messianic leader. Question Time itself is already guilty of that, inasmuch as I can only ever recall Caroline Lucas appearing for the Greens. If Question Time really want to perform a public service, then next time let them invite Andrew Brons onto the show and let us see if the rest of the BNP are as resilient in the face of a smackdown as their leader.
