Long Despairing Young Something

Call Me Dave and the Melchett Molestation

2011-07-08T15:57:00.000+01:00

Not that all politics is basically the same or anything, but I was writing this very piece about an entirely different news story. Funny how all your chickens come home to roost when inevitably they do...

There's a wonderful scene towards the end of The West Wing's final season in which President-elect Santos meets with the favourite to be the new Speaker Of The House. Santos outlines his first legislative priority; reform of the lobbying industry to free Congress from the corrosive effects of special interests. The soon-to-be Speaker's response is simple; "We have a majority and thus the edge in fundraising for the first time in years, I won't just give that away!"

If ever there was proof that psychology is far more important to understanding modern politics than philosophy or political science, it is in this attitude. It's only natural that politicians of all stripes will have their complaints about the nature of the game; everyone feels that way about some aspect of their chosen profession. And yet, when they win the game and have the chance to change it, even the most radical amongst them refuse to challenge the game as it stands, even in the face of their own overwhelming self-interest.

This effect was crucial in the death of the Labour Party; once it had convinced itself that Labour government was good and all other possibilities were fundamentally evil, the important quality for a Labour politician became, not their ideological soundness, but their ability to play the game. That such an attitude resulted in Blair, whose ideological emptiness was crucial to his development as perhaps the ultimate political player of the last half century, should not be too surprising.

The same was very much in evidence during the AV referendum and is an important factor to remember in any future electoral reform campaign. Much of the opposition to AV was based, not on a rational analysis of what Parliament should be and how it should best be composed to achieve that goal, but on the simple premise that first-past-the-post was democracy incarnate. For so many, the fact that the game was what it was meant that the game had to be that way, an attitude that will have to be tackled when the issue comes back round.

And then there is the ghastly ménage à trois that is Cameron, Murdoch and Brooks. The Dirty Digger's skills as a political seducer shouldn't be underestimated, but somehow, a succession of political leaders have failed to realise that his real power is not seduction, but blackmail; any advantage he grants to you comes through destroying your opponent and that power will be unleashed on you just as soon as you cease to be flavour of the month.

How much damage will accrue to each of the protagonists remains to be seen; Dave himself may well be saved by "politicians are all the same" deflecting the attention from his particular case of overindulging in the arslikhan. Still, it can only be good for the country and the coalition if this whole disgraceful affair teaches him the lesson that Lieutenant George got from Captain Blackadder; there's nothing wrong with dancing with the devil if he's the only one who'll bring you, but it is vitally important that you don't let him shag you on the veranda once you're there...

Lawyering Up

2011-05-19T21:50:00.001+01:00

And so, after the commotion, come the lawyers. Today's coverage of the unfolding saga regarding John Dixon and Aled Roberts and their present disqualification from the Assembly has latched onto the first legal opinion offered, by former counsel general Winston Roddick, and (with some exceptions) taken it as gospel.

Unsurprisingly, as your favourite (read: only) Lib Dem blogger-cum-law student, I've taken a look at the matter. So as that fine constitutional scholar, Toby Ziegler, might have had it, let us turn our attention to the Government of Wales Act 2006, for it is the owner's manual and we should read what it has to say.

Section 16 of GOWA outlines the grounds for which a person may be disqualified from being an Assembly member, and in Section 16(1)(b) includes as a disqualification the holding of any office, "for the time being designated by Order in Council as offices disqualifying persons from being Assembly members". It is this section that gives effect to the National Assembly For Wales (Disqualification) Order 2010, which lists the offices for which John and Aled are currently disqualified.

The effect of being disqualified is laid out in Section 18 of GOWA, and in this case Section 18(1) applies when it states that, "if a person who is disqualified from being an Assembly member is returned as an Assembly member, the person's return is void and the person's seat is vacant". It is this section that the former counsel general is presumably referring to when he says the law is clear that the election is invalid.

But, und zis is a big but, Section 18(1) must be read together with Section 18(4), which says that Sections 18(1)-(3), "have effect subject to any resolution of the Assembly under Section 17(3)".

And what does Section 17(3) say? "The Assembly may resolve that the disqualification of any person who was, or is alleged to have been, disqualified from being an Assembly member on a ground within section 16(1) or (4) is to be disregarded if it appears to the Assembly (a) that the ground has been removed, and (b) that it is proper so to resolve."

On the question of whether the Assembly has the power to reinstate, therefore, the Government of Wales Act is indeed clear; it does.

Inevitably there will be much politicking over the next few days as to whether it is proper to resolve, as that is a judgement left to the Assembly and not defined in law. But just by having Section 17(3) in place, the intent of the legislation must be obvious, that it seeks only to disqualify those who continue to be disqualified, and not to invalidate elections altogether or to keep disqualified those who aren't.

One of the few comforting features of British politics is that, once the sides have extracted their pound of flesh, calmer heads normally prevail. Armed with a clear power to do so, we can but hope that they do.

The Votes From The Elbonian Jury

2011-05-05T06:58:00.001+01:00

So what, then, to make of the AV referendum campaign? Like much in British politics in the , I suspect it's a question that only the historians will be able to answer. After all, whatever result emerges at teatime on Friday, will we be able to say with any sort of confidence why it happened?

I certainly don't feel like the campaign has had much to do with the result. Much as the Yes campaign clearly won the intellectual argument, doing so by default because the No campaign didn't have one made that victory rather hollow. Beyond that, the primary effect of the campaigning seems to have been to further convince the electorate that they're all just as bad as each other, which in a referendum always likely to be touched by voter apathy was never going to be helpful.

Either way, it is that lack of an intellectual argument that will, more even than the result, affect our politics in the years to come. The defining moments of the campaign were when David Cameron, the Oxford PPE graduate and student of Vernon Bogdanor, not only said that he didn't understand AV, but then proved it in front of John Humphrys. At another time, it might have been funny, but with the issue front and centre and coming from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, I have to say it was terrifying.

In the month or so of a formal campaign, it was understandably impossible for the Yes campaign to cover all of the many ways in which our world has changed and our political system hasn't. But for the No campaign to do what it has, to stick its fingers in its ears and its head somewhere else, and try to claim that the world hasn't changed and that our political system is what it is, what it will be and what it was, is unconscionable.

The result of one referendum on one small part of a political system that involves every single person in the country will not alter the fundamental fact that people rightly expect and demand more involvement in decision making and more choices and that it will require wholesale reform of every branch of government at every level to deliver that. Petty tribalism on all sides, including my own, cannot justify the disenfranchisement of so many.

So as you cast your ballot today, of all the myriad statistics that have been thrown at you, consider these two that maybe haven't. In the 2010 UK general election, just under 58% of people didn't vote Labour or Conservative, because a third of people didn't vote at all. Indeed, five million more people didn't vote than voted Conservative. How many of those didn't vote because their choice would be ignored or wasn't available under the current system? AV is not about Lib Dems, or Conservatives, or Labourites, it is about all of us and it is a road we must embark on, starting today.

The Deeper Meaning Of No

2011-03-15T13:35:00.002Z

It seems as if a lot always happens when I head off to my law school exams. Last year, I started two days before the General Election, a period in which a few little things came to pass. This year's exams began in earnest in the last week of January, just as North Africa discovered the delights of democratic revolution.

I guess it's easy to get nostalgic about it all, particularly for me as someone whose earliest political memories are of 1989. Indeed, as events unfolded in Libya I found myself wondering whether Gaddafi would be the Arab Ceauşescu, the literal sacrifice on the altar of the cult of personality. But now the metaphor has run out and we are faced with something we may not have seen before; an African civil war without the organisation, without the warlords.

Two questions jump out at me here. The first is reasonably straightforward; why do we care so much about the geography? Libya is no further away than the Balkans were, nor is civil war there any less of an issue for Europe than conflict in the former Yugoslavia was. Nevertheless, taking action there, even with NATO alone, seems to involve a psychological leap that it shouldn't.

It's the second question, however, that's rather more concerning. If intervening in Libya really is that difficult, shouldn't we all be, well, terrified?

The concern, at least at the level of a no-fly zone, seems to be that NATO aircraft might face resistance from Libyan planes and ground defences. On its own, that merely begs the question of what all the money we've spent on Eurofighter has really got us if it can't dominate an air force made up mostly of Soviet and French jets from the 1970's.

More generally, however, you have to wonder why on Earth you'd establish a no-fly zone where the guiding principle is, essentially, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. If your intention is to prevent someone from flying their aircraft over an area, the first thing you do is destroy their aircraft. It's a theory so simple, even Hermann Göring could understand it.

Moreover, Göring didn't wait for the planes to present themselves in full combat mode with pilot attached. And while he may have struggled to bomb the RAF into oblivion with his collection of Heinkels and Dorniers, NATO has positively designed itself to be good at blowing up immobile objects on the ground in the desert; this is the age, lest we forget, of stealth planes with laser-guided smart bombs and submarine-launched cruise missiles.

Worst of all, those advanced munitions are meant to be backed up with GPS, AWACS, Key Hole and, well, the CIA. Arguing that you can't strike at Iranian nuclear facilities because they're hidden away under hundreds of feet of solid rock is one thing, but at the very least, runways and hangars do tend to be on the surface where you can see them...

What's more, the same argument applies to almost everything else that Gaddafi might deploy. Helicopters? Again, if Eurofighter can't deal with those in a situation where fixed-wing air superiority has been achieved, that's pretty concerning. Tanks? Even the worst stand-up comic can make jokes about Britain's past successes combating tanks in Libya. Toyota Pickups? Top Gear is one thing, but they didn't have ground attack aircraft...

Maybe I'm simplifying matters a little, but equally, the last thirty-odd years of UK and US defence policy have been justified almost entirely on the idea that, through technology, more can be done with less. Libya could and should be an example of exactly that, a decisive intervention made without a single solider setting foot on Libyan soil. If we fail to deliver that, either through lack of political will or lack of capability, serious questions will need to be asked about what we've been doing for all this time.

Mr Brightside's Opus

2011-01-25T11:48:00.003Z

I'll admit that I've had some trouble picking the winner of the 2010 Scunner Broom Award for Stupidest Political Quote of the Year (the fact I'm only awarding it in 2011 has more to do with law school exams than anything else, mind you!) Not that there weren't copious gallons of air expelled or ink spilled in the cause of saying stupid things for the sake of politics; on the contrary, in the first General Election year with Twitter availability the sheer weight of idiocy hit record levels.

What was missing, however, was the magical mix of ingredients that goes to make a Scunner winner; the ostensible reasonableness, the fundamental absence of truth when subjected to scrutiny, the breathtaking gumption needed to stray so far from the facts...

In the end, I fear I've cheated slightly, in that my winner isn't so much the stupidest quote of last year as it will be the stupidest and most repeated of this year. Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for David Blunkett MP on BBC News in November;

"If there was something desperately wrong with our present system and if there was an alternative that provided all the answers that people want then by all means let's consider a change but we are not. We are talking about a system that does work being replaced by an unknown system that could distort completely the votes of those who have the temerity to actually vote from one of the two major parties."

The system works.

So much of the No campaign in the AV referendum will boil down to those three words and the idea that after a thousand years of history, everything's fine, nothing to see here guv, move along please. It's the old joke; if it isn't baroque, don't fix it. My response to that?

Baroque? It's ******* rococo!

I won't rehearse all the myriad reasons why first past the post doesn't work at all; the Yes campaign themselves do that far better than I can. What makes Blunkett's comment award-winning is the sheer hubris it takes to actually flat-out say that it might affect the two major parties, as if the two major parties have droit de seigneur over the voters and that majorness is somehow a natural state and not the corrosive result of a system designed more for the 12th Century than the 21st.

So David, for hubris above and beyond even your impressive resume, the Scunner Broon Award is yours.

1265 And All That

2010-12-23T09:26:00.001Z

Of the many questions the pundits and prognosticators will ask during 2011, one will dominate; is the AV referendum fundamental to the coalition? Of course, they'll add in a lot of extra words like "yes vote" and "survival of", which is a shame, because if they restricted themselves to the underlying question they'd find that the answer is yes, but for none of the reasons they've thought of.

For while a referendum by definition asks a question, both the referendum and the coalition itself demand that we consider the same problem; how do we govern our country? And that's a terrifying question for the British, because do you realise when we last asked it?

1265

It's quite scary as a law student to be taught that at its most basic level, Anglo-Welsh law still relies on the idea that the Monarch is empowered to dispense justice to their subjects and that a millennium's worth of legal reform has largely been about making it easier to deliver that justice to the people.

The standard British answer to most constitutional matters is "tradition". At one level, there is the simple irony that plenty of the elements we consider as traditions nothing of the sort (first election in which every MP was elected by FPTP for a single-member geographical constituency? 1950!)

More fundamentally, however, tradition tends to focus on individual elements of the system, which is where 1265 comes in. De Montfort's Parliament was the point at which we had all of the institutions of English government in place; the Monarch, the Lords, the Commons. Every reform since then has been about the details of those institutions; the relationship between Monarch and Parliament in the 17th Century, the nature of governments and the office of Prime Minister in the 18th Century; the franchise in the 19th Century; and the relationship between the Lords and Commons in the 20th Century.

If you were feeling charitable you might describe that as evolution, but it's really just a vaguely related series of circumstantial moments. Expediency, either through constitutional deadlock as in 1911 (and, indeed, 1642) or popular protest as in 1832 has always been the leading driver. The result is a systemic whole that we've never actually thought about, justified by spurious traditionalism and a vague sense that what we have has always worked. But as Blackadder would have identified, there's just one tiny flaw with that analysis...

Indeed, far from having always worked, our system has never worked and rarely has that been truer than now. The faults are legion; the tyranny of execuslation, the insane overcentralisation of power and money, the disservice to opinion and debate that is our electoral system, etcetera, etcetera...

And while much of the response to the coalition is about the policy (and at least some of that isn't even tainted by the foul stench of hypocrisy) a significant measure of the response derives from the fact that the system we have struggles to give even the appearance of functioning unless certain conditions are met. Now that we can't squint and tilt our heads to the left and think that what we have looks a bit like an effective system of government, we have to face up to what we have; many people clearly don't like the look of that and would rather wish the problem away.

My challenge to the Yes campaign, then, is to ensure that the naysayers can't do the ruby slipper act. The grassroots-focused approach they are taking so far looks an excellent way of doing that, but we all have a duty to ensure that complacency about the status quo is eradicated, not left to fester and undermine the reforms that are so crucial to our future.

(I Hate You) For Ideological Reasons

2010-11-23T10:24:00.002Z

Of all the responses to the Comprehensive Spending Review, perhaps the most intriguing has been Labour's use of the phrase, "ideological reasons". The way they spit it out, the venom they attach to it evokes the broadest Valleys accent (though whether the invocation is of Kinnock, Bevan or just my granny from Trebanog's cries of "uch a fi" at my four-year-old self's attitude to chocolate is unclear...)

Sonorous qualities notwithstanding, it's an unusual phrase to use, as after all it is essentially the point; you have an election, it's contested between various parties each of which expounds a particular ideology, and whichever party best convinces people that their ideology is best is then elected to carry it out. Surely the Labour Party can't mean that political parties should ditch their ideologies altogether? (Oh, hang on, yes they can...)

But it isn't what they mean, if only because they're nowhere near ready to admit to themselves that they ditched all their principles long ago. Instead, it comes down to an idea I've blogged about before; Labour's absolute conviction that everything they do must be good for the vulnerable because they are the ones doing it, they are are the ones who have their needs as heart. As this excellent dissection of the Thatcher legacy points out, the corollary of this is that anything done by any other party must be both bad and done out of malice. This being the case, the rest of the rhetoric shouldn't be much of a surprise; the leap from "ideological reasons" as code for "Tories hate poor people" to "ethnic cleansing" (a term on which Welsh Labour has prior form) is rather less mentally taxing than it ought to be. (As for Boris' invocation of that term, however, I have no idea...)

We Lib Dems need to be vigilant, however, because Labour's future attack strategy towards us is rooted in the same "ideological reasons." All those years of Yellow Tories basically boil down to the same idea; Labour are the only ones who care, therefore we can't care, ergo we must be evil too. The special vitriol reserved for Lib Dems derives from the Labour perception that we must be lying when we talk about helping the less well-off; the Labour worldview allows no other conclusion.

Their frustration up to now has been an inability to prove our evil (to their minds because of the deceit, in reality because we aren't) but their hope must be that the coalition will be their proof. The accuracy of that, either as a summary of the Lib Dems past or their future, is more than a little questionable. But we should keep watch, because it's a very Chinese crisis; as Labour strive to affirm their psychological hangups, they leave themselves open to the exploitation of them, and without them, there's not very much left.

Hi, I'm John Doe And I'm A Politician

2010-11-01T11:52:00.000Z

Regular readers of this occasional missive (hello Sid, hello Doris) will be aware of my tendency to draw somewhat left field conclusions from events. So you'll unsurprised to discover that my main thought on the comprehensive spending review, and particularly on tuition fees, is that we really didn't deal with MPs expenses very well...

One of the stranger suggestions amongst the litany of Lib Dem psychoanalyses that have emerged of late is the idea that our policies existed because we never expected to be in government (Andrew Rawnsley's crack at this theme being one of the best). On the one hand, it's fairly easy to point out that unless you're the kind of psephological illiterate who believes that the outcomes "Labour Win" and "Conservative Win" are appointed by God as the only possible results of an election (or as we call them, journalists) it should have been blindingly obvious that this election would result in a hung parliament (even if my guess would have had rather more Lib Dems and correspondingly fewer Labour...)

More importantly, however, while clearly there were many in the party who were bathing in the warm glow of their ideological purity, there were plenty of people wondering about how any coalition would work and how it would fit with our policy process. Unsurprisingly, as an amateur constitutional wonk who wrote the current Liberal Youth policy process, I was one of these and my general conclusion on the checks and balances was that there weren't any.

Okay, maybe that's not entirely fair. There is the not-quite-a-triple-lock (which, as we found in Wales three years ago, is true right up to the point when conference decides to exercise its power to overrule FEC) but that essentially only endorses or fails to endorse the coalition document. Once you're in though, your only recourse is to try to mount the reverse vote, but that would be quite some feat.

Of course, I suppose if we were particularly unhappy we could deselect any misbehaving ministers, though as that's a power for local parties it would rather depend on them and heaven knows there are some local parties I wouldn't trust to pick parish councillors (although let's be clear, the selection of diabolically awful candidates is a cross-party predilection...)

But then, this is the greater philosophical point. For all that our media narrative and indeed our voting patterns tend to fixate on the identity of the next government, the only thing we get to vote on is the identity of our representative. What's more, the same thing is true for every political party; we get to select our candidate, not everyone else's.

The trouble is, this isn't the question we generally ask of our candidates, at either level. What we actually ask is "What would you do if you were Prime Minister?" Partly this is because it's the only way we can formulate the question; we can't ask them what they would do in every possible combination of x Labour, y Conservative, z Lib Dem and (t-x-y-z) others. Mainly, however, it's because the years of oligarchy have lulled us into the idea that manifestos are non-fiction rather than science fiction.

Labour's manifesto in June 2001 contained very little, in retrospect, about the issue that would define their term in office; its authors were not expecting to see airliners flying into skyscrapers just three months later. Neither did the Tory manifesto of 1992 discuss what they would do if, five months later, David Cameron would have to scurry out of the Treasury behind the chancellor's back as he announced that the sky had fallen down on sterling's head. Think Margaret Thatcher's manifesto of 1979 contained any specific pledges about responses to an invasion of the Falkland Islands? Think again.

All the complaints about the coalition breaking manifesto promises ignore that it was ever thus, and not merely because politicians are politicians. In a quantum universe, the only accurate prediction you can make is that the value of your investments may go down as well as up...

What matters, therefore, is who is in the room. "Decisions are made by those who show up, so are we failing you or are you failing us?" Quoth Saint Jed of Bartlet, and he wasn't wrong. This coalition will be tested by something unexpected, not least because, as Alan Bennett so wonderfully put it, history is just one effing thing after another. Am I happy with every decision they've made? Of course not. But do I have confidence in the people we've put in the room for when things come to pass? I absolutely do.

What does all this have to do with MPs expenses? Well of all the many responses there were to that episode, the one that was missing was a defence of the idea of representative democracy itself. Instead, the cumulative effect was to reinforce the idea that politicians are by definition incompetent. After that, it's quite difficult to argue that the identities of the people in the room matter when you've already established that they're all the same anyway.

The difficulty going forward, then, is that the same applies to the AV referendum; how do you convince people that politicians can be better if you improve the method for holding them to account if you've already convinced them that there's no such thing as a better politician? Either way, we shouldn't be under any illusions that the referendum is just about everyone's first preference between FPTP and AV; it goes to the heart of how our political systems work. Indeed, our biggest advantage will be that the present system doesn't...

Thus Spake, Well, Not Zarathustra Exactly

2010-10-27T16:22:00.000+01:00

Amidst all the excitement (including, but not limited to, an interesting little spike in my readership, of which more anon) it occurs to me that I haven't provided my usual service of blogging my speeches from Welsh Lib Dem Conference, which was very successfully held in Brecon the weekend before last. So without further ado, my weekend's contribution, on a motion calling for a distinctive Welsh voice in party policy...

Conference, when I read this motion I was struck by the importance of the message it sends. Ironically, I think it struck me most because I'm English.

More specifically, I'm from Gloucestershire, barely 20 miles from the border but more than 120 miles from Westminster and the City. And so I don't know whether to laugh or cry when people try to denounce us as "one of the London parties". The trouble with London-centric thinking isn't that it thinks that Offa's Dyke is an active military installation defending it from the barbarian hordes; it's that it thinks that the M25 is an active military installation defending it from the barbarian hordes...

Now don't get me wrong, we shouldn't discard ideas purely because they come from England. There's no sense in creating clear red water the way Labour have, by kneeling on the riverbank and slitting your throat. Neither is there any sense in creating clear yellow water by standing at the riverbank and... well I think you can see where this metaphor is going...

The best expression of our commitment to policy making in Wales is that we are here, right now. Labour and Conservative can't even make policy democratically in England; we do it in every part of the UK and we should be proud of that. I welcome this motion and I am sure we will achieve its objective, but we will do so because we are Liberal Democrats and we would be that way whether we were in Brecon, Brechin or Bracknell...

Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Straw

2010-09-13T18:21:00.001+01:00

Impossible though it is to cover constitutional matters in words of one syllable, for the benefit of Jack's rapidly shrinking brain, a summary;

Fixed-term parliaments are good. They mean that all parties are on an equal footing and that governments and parliamentarians are held accountable regularly, not when they want to be.

If you're going to have fixed-term parliaments, they have to be five years long. The European Parliament works on a five-year cycle so to ensure that elections are not competing with each other (and if you want an example of why that's bad, look at the London Borough elections this year which had never previously coincided with Parliamentary elections...)

If you can be certain that each election will fall in May, it makes perfect sense to align the parliamentary sessions, and hence the Queen's Speech, with that timetable. Is having a long session to implement the realignment unusual? Yes, but no more so than having a full speech for a short session that then never gets implemented.

The Liberal Democrats in the Coalition, in particular, will not stand for the continued constitutional illiteracy that is their only response to any reform proposal so far. Labour gave up its moral authority on constitutional matters when it decided that 3,000 new criminal offences, the abolition of jury trials and imprisonment without trial weren't serious constitutional threats...

Please Replace The Handset And Try Again

2010-09-10T12:00:00.001+01:00

There can be little doubt that history will judge the Thatcher privatisations badly. On the one hand, there is the unavoidable conclusion that her dream of a shareholding society was an utter failure, twinned with the exquisite irony that someone whose foreign policy was so coloured by a war about stopping the Germans conquering Britain should have worked so hard to sell it to them instead.

Equally, while history will reflect that most of the services involved could and probably should have been privatised (it's really only water and the railways in which competition was fundamentally impossible) even those that could were let down by the appalling way they were sold off. Pretty much every privatised industry carried a fundamental flaw in its structure that has subsequently seen the government ride in to rescue, well, the companies profits as much as anything.

But what's struck me most as I think about it is that in hindsight, the most damaging privatisation was the one that should have been the easiest to justify and to enact. Indeed, the financial impact of the way the sale of British Telecom was botched, while impossible to compute, may well be more staggering than anyone could imagine.

It was my new mobile phone that got me thinking about this. For while we must accept that no-one in the early 80's could have foreseen the ubiquity of mobile phones, wi-fi and indeed the combination of the two, it's easy enough to see how the way the whole industry has turned out affects our use of these devices. In Wales particularly, where rural broadband and broadband for business are at the forefront of the debate on the economy, it's worth reflecting that we did not end up here by accident.

For starters, we should note that if anyone was responsible for the competitive telephony market of today, it certainly wasn't BT. While they dragged their feet on even the simplest competitive use of their wires, it was left to the cable companies and then to the mobile operators to offer better and cheaper services. Admittedly, once the behemoth had stirred it caught up with Virgin Media and Sky in the all-in-one package stakes, but all that amounts to is the replacement of one exercise of monolithic power with another.

The legacy of that process, however, is infrastructural chaos. For as BT catch up with the idea of domestic fibre optic cabling, the result will be two parallel cable systems. On top of that, you have five different mobile phone networks with their own independent mast systems. The Tower of Babel would be too easy a metaphor...

What really strikes me, however, as a particular geek in this direction, is how reminiscent all this is of the railways. In the privatised era, the only successful competition occurred in places where there was duplication of lines. Reaching back further, one of the few redeeming features of Beeching was the way he removed many of those duplicated lines which were themselves relics of earlier slapdash competition.

So how about the truly heretical thought; what if the telephone system had been privatised the way the railways were? A phone infrastructure company coming into existence in the mid-80's would have faced pretty much none of the conditions that made Railtrack's position untenable from day one, namely a decaying infrastructure that was safety-critical, impervious to meaningful technical improvement and only able to be repaired in situ rather than replaced.

By contrast, the putative TelWires would be faced with an immediate opportunity to entirely replace its network with a new and technologically superior system. Service provision over the new fibre optic network would have offered a starting point for competition, quickly bringing the cable service into direct price competition with the existing wires. At that stage, the wires themselves could have been phased out, giving TelWires an asset portfolio to sell to fund further investments; you'd have to imagine the mobile phone masts would be popular targets, particularly once Virgin Mobile established their network-sharing model.

The historical effects of all that would have been innumerable. Imagine how different the development of dotcoms would have been if everyone in the UK had been on cable by the end of the century instead of dial-up. Imagine how many fewer rows about siting of mobile phone masts there could have been if the provision was integrated...

As for today, public wi-fi could be a nationwide rather than an urban project, as TelWires would take responsibility for providing the wireless transmitters for it as well. Admittedly this would have allowed the iPad to achieve hive mind consciousness by now...

The continuing tragedy, however, is that all this is true in nearly equal measure of the rest of the privatisations too. In particular, capital investment is generally proving impossible, whether thanks to inadequate incentives (electricity), lack of competition (water) or easy fleecing of captive customers and cowering governments (rail).

It is of course far too late to put right the damage that's already been done. But we do need to recognise that trying to change things isn't some form of thoughtcrime against the market; you can't be interfering with the free market if the market isn't free and you (or at any rate HMG corporately) are responsible for the structure of it anyway. Either way, all these infrastructural elements are going to be crucial to the future of our environment and our economy and we have a duty to ensure that we get them right.

Aren't We Forgetting A Few People?

2010-09-01T09:54:00.000+01:00

As the political world starts its rather leisurely return to school, thoughts in the devolved parts of the country return once again to the problems of multiple referendums and elections on the same day in May 2011. And as Betsan Powys raises the very good question as to which of the various polls will be counted first, I'd like to pose one of my own.

Why do we keep forgetting Northern Ireland?

It may have escaped our notice, but their devolved government has (perhaps most miraculously of all) survived its four years and will be due elections in May 2011 itself. What's more, thanks to the failure of their most recent attempt at local government reforms, there will also be local government elections the same day. So that's two STV elections with something approaching a million ballots to be dealt with as it is, plus the AV referendum on top...

Such forgetfulness is particularly unusual given how crucial Northern Ireland's votes could be in the overall shakeup. After all, this is a country whose political system wouldn't function without STV; there has to be a decent chance of a wide margin in favour of AV and if there is, it could be 2011's Carmarthenshire...

Notes From, Well, Quite A Big Island Actually...

2010-08-04T15:03:00.001+01:00

So Richard Scudamore, the Chief Executive of the Premier League (not to be confused with Sir Dave Richards, the Chairman of the Premier League who Fulham are asking the High Court to fire for improper interference in transfers) says that the World Cup result is "partly" the Premier League's fault.

Which is fine (being at least the truth, if not necessarily the whole truth) except that he reinforced his argument by recourse to one of the great canards beloved of British sports pundits after another valiant or not-so-valiant failure; "We're only a small island, we have to be realistic."

Back in 2003, I remember the same pundits revelling in the fact that Yorkshire (a county not exactly united in its love of the game) had more registered rugby union players than the whole of Australia (a country almost five times the size). Indeed, this was meant to be one of the reasons why we would (and, of course, did) kick Aussie butt in the Rugby World Cup final (and yes, I am going to gratuitously link to the video...)

But football never considers those statistics, it just says "We're only a small country" and moves along without so much as a by your leave. Which if funny, because actually we're something like the 22nd most populous nation on Earth and what's more, six of the larger nations have never qualified for a World Cup and four of them have only ever qualified once.

When you go beyond the basic populations and look at the actual footballing statistics, the hypothesis becomes even more ludicrous. According to FIFA's most recent global study, we rank 7th for registered adult players and 6th for registered youth players, as well as having the 2nd highest number of professionals and the highest number of clubs.

If we really are such a small nation, how did Spain with 16m fewer people and 760k fewer players manage to win this time? Italy and France are about the same size as us, you tell me, how have they been doing in World Cups of late?

The problems in English (and, indeed, British) football are far deeper than being the fault of the Premier League institutionally; there is a fundamental cultural gap that I have no idea how to close. But suggesting that we shouldn't expect to be a substantial player in the global game is utterly disingenuous and the sooner we stop trying to excuse failure and start trying to ingrain success, the better.

Waste (17 Different Bits Of)

2010-07-31T09:56:00.001+01:00

Well, the stack of spam comments from China to be moderated suggests that its about time I got back in the saddle, blogging wise. My normal intermittency notwithstanding, I hope you'll understand that sooner or later, a dissertation and seven exams in two weeks were going to get to me and necessitate a rest from anything other than my council duties.

One thing I have been reflecting on in my time away is column inches and how they affect council debates. Cardiff Council is pretty good as a debating chamber, with plenty of speakers on all sides who'll give the political theatre some gusto and occasionally cover the issues reasonably well too. What's more, with webcasting you can now watch them in their entirety (and we'll ignore the terrible vision I just had of the highlights programme, complete with Alan Hansen...)

Now of course no local paper could cover such debates in their entirety, but space pressures can do them a disservice. Last year, for example, we had a debate on a foundation school application at Whitchurch High School that did an outstanding job of covering the philosophical underpinnings of new state school governance arrangements; the local press coverage, however, amounted to one column inch about me using the word screw (and even then only in attribution, not against anyone...)

Back in June, meanwhile, we had the latest in our regular series of Conservative motions on composting, which led to a brief article and an exchange of letters wherein I accused the Tories of wilful ignorance and they accused me of a lack of logic. Much as we could have kept going back and forth in the letters page, however, I suspect it will accomplish more to put the whole of the argument on record. In doing so, however, I'm mindful that at the end of the debate, Conservative group leader, Cllr David Walker, helpfully read out the dictionary definition of hubris, an act some might argue is itself the dictionary definition of hubris (though pointing that out may also be the dictionary definition of hubris, and so on until the heat death of the universe...)

Either way, the basic problem for the Conservatives was a fundamental failing of the English language, namely its lack of a plural indefinite article. Proposing the motion, Cllr Rod McKerlich said that he would lay out “the” facts. Instead, he laid out a range of things that may have been facts, some, none or fewer of which may have been in any way relevant.

The act that Cllr Walker thinks was hubris was the introduction, in September 2008, of food waste collections for every household that made Cardiff the first UK city to accomplish a city-wide roll-out. As with most waste policy matters for councils up and down the country, there were three key drivers for food waste collections. On the practical front, Cardiff's landfill site at Lamby Way is almost full and while we are (as part of the Prosiect Gwyrdd alliance of local authorities) pursuing alternatives, anything that can extend the life of the existing facilities is enormously valuable. Economically, between UK landfill tax escalators and EU recycling fines there is a huge financial impetus to perform. And of course morally there is the minor matter of it all being fundamentally the right thing to do, particularly with food waste and its potent mix of methane and pathogens.

Of course, once you've decided to collect something, you need to work out how to collect it and what to do with it. The Conservatives first objection to our scheme is that, by collecting food waste together with garden waste, composting of the garden waste now costs money when previously it was essentially done for nothing. But the costs of what you do with it and the costs of how you collect it aren't independent in that way; if you collect the food waste separately, that means a whole additional set of collections, with more trucks and more staff, plus more complications for the householder.

The other objection, the one that the Conservatives seem to think is a matter of public scandal, is that at present the food waste, once collected, is sent for composting at a facility in Derby. Environmentally they seem to think that that's a no-brainer, but that's why I accused them of not using their brains. If you put the food waste in landfill, it will release copious amounts of methane, which is at least twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide; any carbon dioxide emitted by transporting it to Derby therefore still represents a tremendous saving compared to the methane that would otherwise have been emitted. As for the cost, again it's quite simple; the alternative is putting the food waste into landfill and then getting fined for doing so.

Cllr Page in his letter seems to think his party were only asking why we don't have the facilities to do it ourselves. In fact, they were going one step beyond that, saying that because we didn't have the facilities, we shouldn't have started collecting food waste in the first place. Clearly that would have been financially and environmentally suicidal, and in any case, had they listened to a word that was said to them in the debate, they would have had their answer.

Capital funding for local authorities doesn't grow on trees, it is begrudgingly doled out by your higher authority of choice (in our case, the Welsh Assembly Government) and only if they absolutely agree with what you want to do with it. So if they decide to say, “You know those in-vessel composters we were telling you to build? Yeah, actually, don't do that, build anaerobic digesters instead...” the local authority in question has to sit there and take it.

That may not be convenient for an opposition party that wants everything to be the result of a gargantuan cock-up on the council's part, but it is a depressingly regular occurrence with WAG. So for the Tories, there is the age-old politician's choice; do you want to listen to the answer to your question, or do you want to claim that any answer that isn't the one you want is a lie? Sadly, on waste our Conservatives appear determined to take the latter option.

Becoming Laws Unto Themselves

2010-05-31T09:23:00.001+01:00

And then the inevitable happened. When the coalition was formed, as a blogosphere we all wondered how we would react when the first scandal came; lo and behold, when it did it came with a big dollop of core liberal issues attached.

Then again, I guess the response to Friday night and Saturday morning, up to and including David's resignation, was just as inevitable given the collective political response to expenses from day one. Looking back, the occasional Margaret Moran joke notwithstanding, I never blogged on the topic. Normally that might be explained by my general attitude to any sort of topicality, but in this case it stemmed from my being just utterly sick of the immaturity and hypocrisy of it all.

What we got was the very worst kind of moral equivalence. Neither the Torygraph nor any of the politicians really tried to understand what had gone on; instead, the Torygraph intimated that all the politicians were evil and the politicians acquiesced on the grounds that at least their politicians were just as evil as the other side's. Making it all about the individuals, however, doesn't do anything to address either what did happen or what should happen.

In reality, the expenses scandals were many and several. The duck houses were amusing, yes, but the sense of moral outrage at them was entirely misplaced. Fundamentally, even if the voters are the interview panel and the employers of MPs, they can't be their HR or payroll department, hence there must be a Fees Office. Clearly there was a failing there in scrutiny terms (which the FOI requests went to the heart of) but any such failing is by definition systemic and can only be solved by changing the system, which hopefully we have.

The thing that's missing from that scenario, from the point of view of a law student at any rate, is culpability. Plenty of bloggers and commenters have screamed about how David Laws is meant to have defrauded the public, but the question they must answer is simple; how? Claiming for money you never spent is fraud (see the various examples that are currently sub judice.) Flipping is fraud (as you are by definition lying to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which tends to be a bad idea. And before you start, even the Torygraph admit that Danny Alexander did nothing illegal and nothing any member of the public could have done...)

But what is it exactly that David Laws did? Even if we ignore the fact that the rule in the Green Book is lorry-drivingly vague (and seriously, the phrase "treat each other as spouses" is the sort of thing that earns QCs serious hourly rates down on the Strand) we have to ask what that rule was there to prevent. If David had taken money for somewhere he hadn't lived (like, say, Baroness Uddin) there would be a clear fraud. If David's claimed rent had been excessive for the property, that would have been fraud. As it is, while it may generally be advisable not to be in the situation David was, it is difficult to see how it constitutes any sort of fraud.

At the same time, what it does show is how abysmally the Torygraph-led knee-jerk reaction has actually served the taxpayer's interest. Then again, the one thing the Torygraph was never smart enough to understand was what the taxpayer's interest was, or that it was two-fold; to get value for money, yes, but also to ensure the effectiveness of their MP. On the value side, it would appear that David's rent claim was positively modest. And as for effectiveness, if anyone imagines he would have been a more effective MP if forced to move out of the home he shared with his partner...

I think we can all understand and sympathise with why David chose to resign. But we should be clear as a party that he didn't have to. Instead, the last forty-eight hours taught us three things; that we have still done nothing like enough to ensure that everyone can live in our country without fear of discrimination, that we need to do far more to restore not only the integrity of representative democracy but the idea itself, and that despite managing to prevent a Tory majority we have not even started to reduce the power of unaccountable press barons whose interests are entirely hostile to those of the electorate.

Unite v Simpson And Woodley

2010-05-26T14:45:00.000+01:00

As my exams draw to a close, I find myself pondering at least one court case. And I find myself wondering why, if you wanted a reason why the Labour coalition never happened, you would look any further than last week in the High Court.

Political parties have to have a fundamental idea around which they can coalesce. This would normally, of course, be an ideology, but it doesn't have to be; ideologies are generally better producers of narratives, but as UKIP have shown it is possible under the right circumstances to achieve a narrative without one.

Where this gets incredibly messy is that the idea has very little basis in fact. It is more than anything an article of faith; what matters is that you believe that your idea fits your party. The gravitational effects on the idea are of course considerable; the effects of time and personal loyalty pull peoples ideas around and together, while the occasional political earthquake highlights the differences in ideas in the same party and drives them apart.

The effect of time is most clearly seen in the Tories, who now have a real divide between their young, vaguely libertarian urbanites and an older, suburban, palaeoconservative core. To some extent this works because the younger group will grow into the older one, in others it functions because the ideology itself, while strong, continues to reassess itself.

It was that reinvention that sustained liberalism and thus the Lib Dems, albeit at the cost of its illegitimate offspring, libertarianism. Mind you, it has been the Lib Dems who have been most exposed to the earthquakes; social democracy in the 80's, the civil liberties agenda in the 00's...

But one of the standard pearls of political wisdom is that it's easier to oppose and it's here that the current political earthquake will damage us, if at all; for those for whom not-Tory, not-New Labour was their idea, the coalition may pose questions. But to define oneself as only against Blair is to misunderstand the other idea, or to fail to ask the pertinent question; what is the Labour Party's idea?

As a law student, I'd say that contractually the Labour Party is whatever the unions want it to be. Then again, in 1900 when those contracts were formed, there was a fairly clear ideological basis to the broader labour movement. But as socialism failed across the world, whether in its communist implementations abroad or its democratic ones at home, that ideological basis faded, eventually dying in the flames of Thatcherism and the rubble of the Berlin Wall.

If the idea was dead, however, what was to replace it? At the very least you needed something to blame that didn't involve the ideology having failed; admitting that is like saying Santa Claus isn't real, it shatters the illusion. In the end, five factors held the Labour Party together in its darkest hour. The cautionary tale of the SDP and the entrenchment of the two-party system in an old media world contributed, but I suppose the truth of the matter is that everything was overtaken by events.

After all, never has a government gone from victory to defeat quicker than John Major's. From the moment David Cameron walked out of the Treasury ten steps behind Norman Lamont, the Conservatives were doomed, though that didn't stop them piling on the self-inflicted wounds. Either way, you have to conclude that John Smith would have won in 1997.

But then, that's the great political what if, perhaps of all time. The questions are endless; how many seats would he have won? Would we now be calling it a Portillo moment? The variables are endless, and in any case it's difficult to see how radically different the policy would have been; Brown would still have been Chancellor, Blair would have been a key source of ideas in the Cabinet, Clause Four would have survived but it's not as if they'd have done anything about it...

Nevertheless, at that moment in the summer of 1994, the Labour Party was given a choice unlike that any party had perhaps ever faced; with victory assured, all it had to worry about was its idea and how best to express it. And what was the idea they chose?

Anything's better than the Tories.

It's instinctive to try and look for an ideological basis for New Labour, and God knows Blair tried with the Third Way. But by 1994, the unions (as the contractual partners in all this) were sufficiently shellshocked by the success of Thatcher's vitriol toward them and the failure of their reciprocal fury that it must have seemed almost trivial to say that anything was better than the Tories.

And so New Labour came to pass. For a foolhardy few it may have been a Munchausenian fantasy, a passionate belief in a non-existent ideology. But for most, whether jumped at with the fervour of a drowning man or begrudgingly accepted as necessary but irrelevant to one's own socialism, the only purpose it served was to beat the Tories.

It might not have mattered; just because the Labour Party was rallying around not-Tory didn't mean they had to express that idea in practice. But in a wonderfully synergistic confluence, the Labour Party got exactly what it deserved; the boy king Blair and his Somerset, Mandelson.

I've written before about how New Labour turned to quantum government, using spin (that quantumest of concepts) to justify not doing socialist things by showing how, by the political equivalent of the sum over histories, the things they did inched them towards a socialist ideal; that picture on the cover of the Labour manifesto was only inaccurate in that they put it at the start and not at the end.

In accepting that idea, however, New Labour, perhaps inadvertently, accepted its corollary; once you've established that anything's better than the Tories, it doesn't particularly matter how much better it is. That's not to say they needed to put so much effort into proving just how similar to the Tories they could be, of course...

Nevertheless, it is in that psychology that the impossibility of a Lib-Lab coalition was founded. Perhaps some part of the Labour hindbrain understood that the Lib Dems were the only practical non-Tory option in town, but it was overcome. On the one hand, by basing themselves on non-Toryness, Labour set themselves up as arbiters of what a non-Tory world looked like; presented with alternative ideas for such a world, they could not process them.

On the other hand, despite their belief in Blair's theory of a century of the left thwarted by the Lab/Lib divide, when the time came to forge that progressive alliance Labour had spent so long not needing to be progressive that they had entirely ceased to be so; never was a truer word spoken than Alex Wilcock's "58 MPs is not enough for a progressive alliance" speech at special conference...

We shouldn't forget in all of this the malign hand of Mandelson, but equally he isn't relevant to the longer term, it being so rare for British politics to throw up such a political sociopath. Nevertheless, as one of the few people in the Labour Party clever enough to understand all of this, it is instructive to note that he's done nothing to provide an alternative to the current Labour line, that everything is evidence of us not being progressive and that the coalition will crush us and restore Labour to its "rightful" place. But then, maybe he also understands the greater problem for Labour's immediate future.

All defeated governing parties struggle to understand why they've lost; most, indeed, believe they've done nothing wrong. When you have an ideology, eventually you can see how you deviated from it and how it deviated from what the country needed. But what do Labour have? How can you learn that you didn't do enough to not be the Tories when you've told yourself that anything is better than them?

The one thing that could save Labour is that contractual relationship with the unions, but as I said at the outset, all you need to know about where they've got to could be found at the Royal Courts of Justice last week. There they will have found the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls deliberating over the provisions of s231 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of both Unite's cause and BA's legal strategy against it, what this case proves is that thirteen years of bankrolling New Labour did sweet fanny adams for the trades unions. If they'd blown that money on crack and whores it would have been one thing, but far from pissing the money away, Unite and their colleagues golden showered it on the Labour Party and still got nothing for their troubles.

With that sort of record of incompetence, it seems unlikely that the unions will be staging an eleventh-hour rescue of their political brethren. Indeed, unless Unite's members take my titular advice and sue Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley for their clearly negligent use of their union's funds, the future for the Labour Party looks pretty bleak...

In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen

2010-05-09T12:54:00.000+01:00

In a strange way, I rather feel like this is the end of my first season on The West Wing; 2005 was my first General Election as an activist and this blog started (much as The West Wing itself) eighteen months later. I suppose I feel that way because I've very much watched this election from afar; indeed, I spent polling day in a property law exam! And as the alternative is revising for a public law exam with questions on reform of the electoral system and the powers of the Prime Minister, I figure I should add my twopenn'orth on what happened and where we're go from here.

I should start, I guess, by saying that in Cardiff we did reasonably well. Jenny Willott was of course re-elected in Cardiff Central with Labour making no real progress against us. In Cardiff North, John Dixon's vote held up despite the two-party squeeze in what a shockingly close contest (a three-figure majority that should have been five!) Dominic Hannigan continued to make progress in Cardiff South and Penarth, adding 2.4% to the Lib Dem vote despite adverse boundary changes and a hand-picked Cameron candidate.

As for my neck of the woods, despite their optimism about what from my letterbox was a fairly ropey and derivative campaign, the Tories only achieved slightly more than the national swing. And again, despite the pressure of the squeeze and similarly adverse boundary changes, Rachael Hitchinson matched our 2005 vote share (a 0.5% rise on the notional figures) and secured a thousand more votes than the Lib Dems had ever polled in Cardiff West.

Still, there's no denying the local and national disappointment and I won't rehash the numbers, they've been on our screens in Technicolor for days. What happened? Clearly the Labour terror campaign in the last week had an effect, both on the policy front (I've certainly heard anecdotally that Labour pounded the marginals on immigration) and on the "Vote Clegg, Get Cameron" front. I jokingly posted on Facebook that Peter Hain's idea of tactical voting was people voting Labour in Lab-Lib marginals and that looks like what happened; I'm stunned that there's been no media mention of the fact that, despite the comparable 2006 elections not having General Election turnout, Labour gained over 400 council seats...

I also wonder what effect our sudden acquisition of an air war had on our normal strength on the ground. Again, the anecdotal evidence is of high levels on candidatitis which won't have helped, but equally I wonder if Cleggmania changed people's attitudes to the flood of leaflets from "I'm surprised by how much the Lib Dems have done for such a small party" to "Oh, the Lib Dems, they're a big party, no shock there". As a local party chair for a non-target seat, I was certainly surprised by the number of "I'm surprised I haven't seen anything from the Lib Dems" inquiries I was fielding.

But as Paddy said, the people have spoken, but we do not yet know what they have said. Mind you, given the number of factors they had to consider under the disgrace of an electoral system we continue to use, it wasn't so much speaking they had to do, more sending smoke signals in a cyclone. The pundits, meanwhile, haven't shut up, which is a shame because most of what they've spewed has been, to quote that other great sage Stephen Fry, arse-gravy of the highest order.

For starters, the 36.1% of voters who voted for a Conservative candidate did not by any means endorse the whole Conservative Party and everything it stands for. Strictly speaking, they only decided that the Conservative Party candidate in their constituency was preferable to all the other candidates standing there. Add in the fact that the Tory manifesto does not reflect the thoughts of the whole Conservative Party (as the number of them coming out of the woodwork to say that the reason they didn't win an overall majority was that the manifesto wasn't fascist enough tends to indicate) and you have a very muddled picture on the policy front. What's more, as this applies to all the parties equally, any statement beyond "these are the people who were elected and they should talk" appears highly speculative at best.

On the more general electoral reform question, the punditry has increasingly shown the credibility gap for a status quo for which there is simply no intellectual justification. No matter which direction you look from, the numbers are simply awful. For example, Tories may protest that they won a majority of seats in England, but look at how the regionalisation works the other way; in the South East, on 49.9% of the vote the Tories won 89.2% of the seats, and in the East, on 47.1% of the vote they won 89.6% of the seats! So in at least one respect, the Home Counties are positively Communist...

All we have left for FPTP, then, is the constituency link, which is itself thoroughly discredited. If it really let you boot out bad MPs, how do we explain the fact that the only place in the East of England with Labour MPs is Luton? And if the link between one MP and one constituency is so important, please show me an example of a vote in the House of Commons where any MP should have voted a particular way because it was manifestly and unambiguously in the interest of their constituents to do so...

It's fine for the Tory MPs themselves to ignorantly bang on about the status quo out of naked, corrupt self-interest (and by the way, not only is the Tory idea of electoral reform blatant gerrymandering, but what on Earth do they think it'll do to the MP-constituency link if I end up living, not in Cardiff West, but in the South Glamorgan 3rd District?) But for the pundits to be so ignorant of the intellectual case that any GCSE Politics student can understand is unconscionable.

Still, righteous or not, its the Tory MPs we have to work with. In that respect, Nick's handling of the situation has been exemplary and I've been hugely disappointed by the level of the outcry at the mere thought of working with the Tories. Right now, the constitution is what the constitution is and the maths is what the maths is. My sense is that our negotiating team is first class (Laws, Huhne, Alexander and Stunell IIRC) and that we should trust them to get on with it and judge their efforts on the document that emerges.

As for PR, yes, I want it; it's the reason I first became a Lib Dem. And as Paddy pointed out this morning, Cameron's initial offer of basically what Heath offered Thorpe is almost offensively low-balled. Still, the argument that coalitions must be shown to work before PR is introduced is not unreasonable and the possibility of a fully-proportional, strengthened second chamber is not inconsiderable either. On the one hand, I'd like to reiterate the point I made on Lib Dem Voice; even if the voters punish us for pushing too hard for PR (something which doesn't feel especially credible anyway) if we get it, that punishment can hardly be any worse than 9% of the seats on 23% of the vote!

Either way, there are things short of STV I think we should be able to accept, and the consequences of not accepting whatever ends up on the table are so complex as to be almost impossible to strategise. We should above all see what appears on that table before denouncing it.

Listen Very Carefully, I Shall Say This Only Twice

2010-05-07T07:44:00.001+01:00

Right, if we're going to speculate about what's going to happen, let's do it properly!

As I largely outlined last week, when Parliament reconvenes there will likely be 644 MPs; the Speaker and the (at this stage 4) Sinn Fein members don't count and Thirsk and Malton won't have polled (which will have an effect for a brief period!) so a majority will be 323. On the current projections, we probably have the following groupings;

Conservative - 306
DUP - 8
Independent Unionist - 1
RIGHT = 315

Labour - 259
SDLP - 3
LEFT = 262

Liberal Democrats - 55
Alliance - 1
CENTRE = 56

SNP - 6
Plaid Cymru - 3
NATS = 9

Caroline Lucas = 1
Sylvia Hermon = 1

So the viable majority scenarios are RIGHT + CENTRE = 371, RIGHT + NATS = 324 and LEFT + CENTRE + NATS = 327 and the RIGHT group can only form a minority government with Lib Dem support (as LEFT + CENTRE = 318 ) So yes, despite my earlier protestations the nationalists do end up with much of the balance of power.

Can we upgrade the metaphor from balanced to knife edge?

Hypothetical? I'll Give You Hypothetical!

2010-04-29T07:28:00.004+01:00

I find myself roused from my self-imposed election blogging slumber (enforced by the coincidence of dissertations and exams, including one on polling day!) to make a fairly simple point; the trouble with the media isn't that it's asking too many hypothetical questions about hung parliaments, it's that it isn't asking nearly enough...

Okay, so the obvious one (to Lib Dems at any rate) about the Labservatives going into coalition is probably answered, but why isn't Dave asked if he would form a coalition with The David Miller Band if he was an option instead of Scunner Broon? It's no less likely than any of the variations that Nick's been asked about (though Liberals and Social Democrats of a certain vintage might like to avoid any thoughts of something being run by two men called David...)

Then consider the one known technicality that everyone seems to have ignored. I caught a bit of the leaders debate on UTV which reminded me that, despite what all the explanations of what happens in a hung parliament keep saying, the threshold for an overall majority isn't 325; you have to take Sinn Fein abstaining into account. If they keep their current five seats, that's six non-voting MPs (with the Speaker) and the threshold drops to 322.

And this is the deeper point; as the FT's (admittedly rather barking) story about the Conservatives reaching out to the nationalists illustrates, if Parliament does hang every single seat matters to the maths, and not necessarily in the nationalist super-block pipedream world. For example, the differential between the largest and second-largest party will be crucial, because if all the non-Lib Dem parties can't bridge that gap, then a minority government with Lib Dem support works far more easily (because the Lib Dems can abstain rather than having to vote for things to pass them). If it's a bit bigger, maybe you toss Barnett reform (which we support anyway) at the nationalists and get them onto the minority boat as well.

All of that is speculation, but the trouble is that none of it is appreciably more or less likely than the straight-up coalition everyone seems to want Nick to sign his name to before May 6th (or rather, that they want to harangue him about until he answers at which point they want to harangue him for what his answer was...) Hell, if you want to speculate, try as I have to work out what cabinet jobs Brown or Cameron would offer Nick exactly; maybe they have to have Vince, but that's humiliating to Brown (and in a way it wouldn't be to Miller Band or Balls...), we'd want Justice for the constitutional responsibilities but can you imagine either party wanting to make us responsible for prisons after how much idiotic crowing they've done about soft on crime...

Ultimately, the answer to every hypothetical hasn't changed since Ming was answering them four years ago; people elect their MP to represent them in their defined geographical area, and then those MPs go to Westminster and, through the Queen's Speech Debate, elect a Prime Minister. It may not have mattered that that's how it works for a good few years but, and this is my phrase of the election, that is the system we have. All we can control is who we send, through our ballots, to make that choice. And on that, the position has not and will not changed; the more Liberal Democrat MPs we elect, the more likely we are to see Liberal Democrat policies enacted in the next four years.

Glenn And Steve's Night With The Brain Cell

2010-03-20T07:26:00.001Z

Pretty much the first thing I ever blogged about was the curious comparison between the dying years of the Major government and the end of the Blair era; between a government working hard to find new ways to screw you with your pants on and one working hard to find its butt with both hands. In an odd combination of deja vu and whatever the exact opposite of nostalgia is, the evidence is building that Labour's new generation are similarly lacking in competence.

Because what we find in The Grauniad (which, let's be clear, I wouldn't touch with a barge pole if it wasn't the only news site that works well on my N900) is The Ed Miller Band pontificating on the manifesto what he wrote. He, of course, believes that it's a radical agenda, but what are we told is the talismanic policy?

The People's Bank.

Hmmm, now where have I heard the idea of the government providing alternative forms of financial institution? Gee, that sounds an awful lot like what Vince Cable had in mind for the nationalisation of banks! Ed, you remember Vince, don't you? He's one of those Lib Dems, that's right, the people you think are agitprop Tories. So an idea he had two years ago is what passes for radical now, is it? Oh, and by the way, given that the government owns enormous chunks of lots of banks, what do you want to base the People's Bank on?

The Post Office?

That's nice, Ed, but I don't know if you remember that three years ago there was this massive swathe of post office closures, a programme Mike German AM described as equivalent to Doctor Beeching in its intentional, fallacious, financially-driven destruction of infrastructure (hey, that's a good line, wonder where he got it from...) Which government was it that presided over that, despite being told repeatedly that the proper approach was to find ways to better use the network? Oh yes, that's right...

And while we're at it, I'm sure I've heard a provider of financial products describing them as "The People's". Who was it who was doing that? Ah, maybe all that time in the queues you made longer got to you...

Between an actual Labour party so devoid of ideas it may have passed the point of heat death and a trade union movement that still hasn't realised it's spent thirteen years paying for its right royal rogering and is now going to get it whether it likes it or not, only one question remains; how useless must David Cameron be if he can't definitively say he's going to beat them?

A Cut-And-Paste Job (Or Two)

2010-03-13T09:26:00.000Z

Hmmm, I'm sure I promised either here or at Y Barcud Oren that I'd post my European Law essay on the difference between the Lisbon Treaty and the EU Constitution, but I can't find the promise. Still, thanks to the surprisingly effective wonders of cut-and-paste, please find enclosed 1,400 words of legally analysed goodness...

The entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon^ⁱ on December 1^st, 2009, was the culmination of a decade-long process of reform that started with the failed Constitutional Treaty^ⁱⁱ. Much of the rhetoric surrounding Lisbon in the UK has focused on the question of whether it is entirely or substantially the same as the Constitutional Treaty, making that comparison an important issue for academic lawyers.

From their outsets the two processes involved were very different. In establishing the Convention on the Future of Europe, the Laeken Declaration^ⁱⁱⁱ asked the convention to consider; simplification of the treaties, division of powers in accordance with subsidiarity, the status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union^{^iv} and the role of the institutions and of national parliaments within the institutional structure.

The Berlin Declaration, however, merely stated an aim of “placing the European Union on a renewed common basis”. And while the Convention spent eighteen months of plenary sessions considering the questions before it, Berlin's aims were achieved by way of a rapidly executed intergovernmental conference.

This difference is reflected in the structures of the respective treaties. The Constitutional Treaty would have replaced the existing treaties with a single document organised in an entirely new fashion. Lisbon, by contrast, is an amending treaty in the same way as Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice and leaves the existing treaties in place, albeit with the Treaty Establishing the European Community renamed the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). An unfortunate result of this structure is that there are now three different numbering systems for the treaties; the original system, the Amsterdam system and now the Lisbon System^{^v}.

The clear intent of the Berlin process was to ensure that the most important reforms proposed in the Constitutional Treaty were enacted and the content of Lisbon is testament to that goal. Certainly, fundamental organisational changes such as the transfer of legal personality from the Community to the Union, reform of the pillar structure and changes to the institutions such as the reallocation of seats in the European Parliament have largely survived.

Equally, the structural differences in the Lisbon Treaty do have an effect on even these most basic of reforms. The Constitution, for example, would have abolished the pillar structure outright, with a single treaty governing all three areas equally. But while Lisbon firmly integrates Police And Judicial Co-operation In Criminal Matters with the European Community in the TFEU^{^vi}, the Common Foreign And Security Policy remains within the Treaty on European Union and subject to specific rules of its own^{^vii}. As a result, CFSP remains more intergovernmental in nature and does not become subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice as PJCC does.

One of the more obvious omissions from Lisbon is, ironically, an element of the Constitutional Treaty which changed very little, namely the explicit statement that Union law has primacy over the law of member states. This was already well-established in jurisprudence, dating back to Costa v Enel^{^viii} and its predecessors^{^ix}, but was not explicitly stated in the treaties. Lisbon, by contrast, merely provides a declaration that the case law exists and is unaffected by its absence from treaties themselves^{^x}.

Further differences between the treaties resulted from the negotiated compromises required to ensure assent to Lisbon by various member states. Poland were a key player in this, achieving something of a resurrection of the Ioannina Compromise in relation to qualified majority voting and obtaining a Advocate General post by way of an expansion of that role. The failed Irish referendum of 2008 also led to significant concessions, notably the retention of the existing system of one Commissioner per member state; further guarantees on policy matters including abortion, taxation and neutrality are also due to be added to Lisbon by way of a protocol to Croatia's accession treaty due to be concluded by 2011. Ireland and the United Kingdom had also already obtained an opt-out from changes to qualified majority voting in PJCC matters.

The negotiation process also threw particular light on the changed status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This would have been fully incorporated as Part II of the Constitution, but under Lisbon it is merely elevated to a position equal to that of the TEU and TFEU. Furthermore, while the Charter's new status is generally intended to give make it binding, this is not the case for Poland and the United Kingdom as confirmed by protocol. During the ratification process the Czech Republic sought confirmation that the Charter would not apply retrospectively, particularly to claims by Germans expelled from the former Czechoslovakia after World War II and this was subsequently confirmed.

Of all the differences between Lisbon and the Constitution, however, it is perhaps the very word constitution that is most conspicuous by its absence. As a change of approach it informs pretty much everything else that follows it, removing the driver towards a single document and opening the door, at least philosophically, to the amending treaty process that begat Lisbon. Politically it was also hugely important; between the elevation of the status of the symbols of the union (e.g. the flag and the anthem) and the terminology surrounding the President of the European Council and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, there was a great deal of popular criticism of the quasi-national status accorded to the Union by the Constitution^{^xi}. With the terminology softened to refer to a treaty rather than a constitution and to the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, such criticism was substantially mollified.

It is vital to recognise, however, that the removal of the word constitution does not in any way prevent Lisbon from being one. Organisations of all shapes, sizes and purposes have a document or documents that govern the relationship between their members, be it the Articles of Association for shareholders in a company, the constitution of a social society or sporting club or the formal written constitution of a country. All of these fall within the general definition of a constitution, whether they purport to ascribe national status or otherwise.

The constitutional status of the Treaties of Rome was thus established long before the Constitutional Treaty was envisioned; the ECJ had referred to the EC Treaty as such in Parti Ecologiste Les Verts v European Parliament^{^xii} and in a later opinion stated that the treaty, “...nonetheless constitutes the constitutional charter of a Community based on the rule of law”^{^xiii}. Regardless of the terminology employed, any later revision of that treaty was bound to retain that status, whether for the Community or, as now post-Lisbon, for the Union.

Ultimately, then, it should be no surprise that Lisbon is as similar to the Constitutional Treaty as it is, given that both processes needed to cover the same ground. It is difficult in those circumstances to justify the assertion that ratification of Lisbon is discredited by its similarity to the Constitutional Treaty; the opposition to the latter was based not on its status as a constitutional document for the Union but on the broader, quasi-national aspects of its approach. Moreover, in the case of the United Kingdom the assertion became necessary in the pursuit of the technical challenges to ratification in which context the asserters were not especially concerned with the practical, as opposed to purely textual, veracity of their assertion^{^xiv}. Either way, it is clear that the transition from the Constitutional Treaty to Lisbon has introduced substantial changes that will have real implications for the operation of the Union going forward; whether those changes improve matters remains, at this early stage, to be seen.

iTreaty of Lisbon Amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty Establishing the European Community, [2007] OJ C306/1

iiTreaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, [2004] OJ C316/1

iiiLaeken Declaration on the Future of the Union, [2001] SN 273/01

ivCharter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, [2000] OJ C364/1

vSteiner, J. and Woods, L., “EU Law”, 2009, 10^th Ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press

viPeers, S., “EU Criminal law and the Treaty of Lisbon”, [2008] 33(4) EL Rev 507

viiCraig, P., “The Treaty of Lisbon: Process, Architecture and Substance”, [2008] 33(2) EL Rev 137

viii6/64, Flaminio Costa v ENEL, [1964] ECR 585

ix26/62, Van Gend en Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen, [1963] ECR 1

xGriller, S. and Ziller, J. (eds), “The Lisbon Treaty: EU Constitutionalism without a Constitutional Treaty?”, 2008, Vienna: Springer-Verlag

xiKumm, M., “Why Europeans will not embrace constitutional patriotism”, [2008] IJCL 117

xii294/83, Parti Ecologiste ‘Les Verts’ v European Parliament, [1986] ECR 1339

xiiiOpinion 1/91, [1992] OJ C110/1

xivR, on the application of Wheeler v Office of the Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Speaker of the House of Commons, [2008] EWHC 1409

George Osborne: Hell Freezes Over

2010-02-22T09:47:00.002Z

It'd be easy to dismiss George Osborne's "Sid The Banks" announcement as just another plucked-from-thin-air policy from a Shadow Chancellor swimming further and further out of his depth. And while those things are true and the blogosphere has done its usual excellent job of exposing the idea's flaws, we should reflect that it's not the first Tory policy announcement this month that suggests they may be embarking on their Greatest Hits tour.

After all, from our position of 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to say that another public share offer won't produce a share-owning democracy because those in the 1980's didn't (emphasising of course that failing to recognise that people buying purposely undervalued assets will be offered and take a quick profit from institutional investors who are willing to pay something approaching the true value of those assets is just the sort of economic illiteracy we've come to expect from Georgie...)

But did you need 20/20 hindsight? Sid may be the exemplar of the big Thatcherite privatisations, but that was December 1986; BT had already gone in December 1984 and the electricity companies would not be sold for another five years. Is it credible to think that the Tories didn't know how those later privatisations would work out? Or is it more likely that they knew but didn't care?

What worries me, however, is that not every Tory privatisation was a Sid job. The rail franchises certainly weren't and neither were their oft-forgotten predecessor, the bus companies. In both cases, many of the resulting companies were management buy-outs later absorbed into bigger concerns. Gee, do you think the Tories might propose something akin to management buy-outs in other areas of the public sector so that big companies can once again snap them up later on so it's not so controversial as direct privatisation while providing a juicy dividend to the workers involved?

Okay, the Tories might have had a Damascene conversion to co-operativism, but then I might be signed to play power forward for the Los Angeles Clippers. It seems rather more likely that as the individual elements of the grand Tory scheme emerge, we'll find that many of them are similarly designed, to disguise the real intentions. And hey, if you were proposing some of the things the Tories were, wouldn't you be ashamed of them too?

Saying The H Word

2010-02-05T16:54:00.000Z

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.

A Very Corporate Wardrobe Malfunction

2010-01-30T13:56:00.000Z

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...

Choose Life, Choose Method Of Choosing

2010-01-11T13:53:00.002Z

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.

The ECB Leading The ECB

2009-11-13T23:04:00.000Z

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.

Hasn't Got No Platform To Stand On

2009-11-06T09:23:00.001Z

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.

Ding Ding Ding! Jackpot!

2009-10-30T20:46:00.004Z

And there was I worrying that it hadn't been a truly classic year for stupid political quotes...

I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy

With that, I'm delighted to award Alan Johnson the 2009 Scunner Broon Award for Stupidest Political Quote Of The Year. Because you know what Alan? When you stop being completely bumfuzzled by the difference between scientific advice and policy, then you can lecture the rest of us on it. Until then, shut the hell up, you condescending little...

The Speeches What I Wrote

2009-10-20T16:29:00.000+01:00

When you blog as infrequently as I do, it's important to ensure that anything you write gets put down for digital posterity. To that end, here are the two speeches I gave at Welsh Conference last weekend in Wrexham (of which more anon...) First, in the transport consultation debate;

Never has a government rested quite so luxuriously on its laurels than the Labour/Plaid coalition has on transport. In the early days of devolution there were real achievements; the Vale of Glamorgan Line, the Ebbw Vale Line, concessionary fares...

But while our new Minister has delivered quite nicely for his own vanity (it's called Ieuan Air for a reason) the projects that matter have stagnated and even the misguided projects they were pursuing, they can't afford. Heck, they can't even manage to get Cardiff's Eastern Bay Link Road, the main road between the Assembly and the M4, going and if you can't rely on the naked self-interest of politicians, what can you rely on?

Meanwhile, they just peddle the same old line as Westminster; longer platforms, longer trains. But while those are undoubtedly necessary, if Dr. Beeching taught us anything its that the railways must go directly to people in their own communities. Thanks to our since-abandoned industrial heritage, the scope for expansion in Wales is enormous; the Swansea District Line, the Aberystwyth-Carmarthen Line, the Fairwater-Creigiau Line and ten new stations in Cardiff, plus Carno, Rossett, Caerleon and all the rest.

Particularly in the downturn, we need a step change in our ambition for the railways. To deliver that, we need a step change in the way we operate, from franchises to regional transport consortia and I'm particularly glad the consultation document recognises that.

We talk so often about the things devolution can't do. Transport is something it can do. Labour and Plaid should be ashamed at how little they've done with it and we are perfectly placed to show them what they could have won. Heck, at least that speedboat might have been more use than Ieuan Wyn Jones has...

And then on tidal power;

I should really start by declaring something of an interest; once upon a time I worked for an electricity generating company and I have a Masters degree in Nuclear Reactor Technology. I think it's safe to day, therefore, that if anyone was going to stand up here and push for the biggest, shiniest engineering boondoggle imaginable, it would be me.

I'll admit too that I was rather worried about this report before it came out, because if there's a wishy-washy, half-arsed, wouldn't hurt a fly energy policy out there then by gum we'll try it!

I'm happy to say, however, that this report is nothing of the sort. It's a recognition that if we want to replace the fifty billion kilowatt-hours of electricity we use that is produced from carbon-emitting sources, we must take advantage of the unique tidal resource we have in the Severn Estuary.

Equally, however, it recognises that there is so much more that you can do than has been proposed so far. The existing barrage proposal has been around for so long it has become synonymous; Lavernock Point-Brean Down is the barrage, the barrage is Lavernock Point-Brean Down. But as the report shows, the Lavernock Point-Brean Down barrage is too slow and not the best way to maximise the power output of the estuary.

The thing I think you should bear particularly in mind, however, is the additional infrastructure these proposals would allow. A rail link from Penarth to Weston would be slow, difficult to build and do little to boost usage. The Shoots barrage, on the other hand, is a perfect replacement for the 125-year-old Severn Tunnel. The Aberthaw-Minehead tidal reef would be a significant shortcut between South Wales and the South West, get the West Somerset Line reopened and potentially provide flood defences for the whole of Somerset.

In conclusion, this is a comprehensive, ambitious policy and I urge you to support it.

And in both cases, they did.

Meltdown Of A Meltdown

2009-10-10T10:47:00.001+01:00

I don't really have the qualifications for a blogospheric book reviewer, what with the intermittentcy, the near-hostility to topicality and the extent to which my reading choices are dictated by whatever's in the 3 for 2 at Waterstone's at the time. But with hopefully two years of law textbooks ahead of me and little extra-curricular reading in prospect, I thought I ought to review my last pre-university book, not least because its contents are worth a look and unlikely to be seen.

It was while exploring the Oxfam bookshop in Cardiff with my good friend Justine Hall (who we'll have to forgive for being a Euro candidate for the Greens) that I ran across a copy of Meltdown: The Collapse of the Nuclear Dream. Besides being a book on nuclear politics and thus right in my wheelhouse, it had the added benefit of being written by Crispin Aubrey and bearing a puff quote from Paddy Ashdown.

Crispin's qualifications (for want of a better word) were fairly clear; an investigative journalist by trade, he moved to West Somerset just in time to become a staff member for Stop Hinkley Expansion, the campaign group that co-ordinated opposition at the public inquiry for the planning application for Hinkley Point C. As such, he was at the centre of what environmentalists tend to think of as their golden age, that stretch of time from Sizewell B through Rainbow Warrior via Newbury and Twyford Down to Manchester Airport where they could point to perceived accomplishments.

The subsequent loss of direct action has clearly hurt; the ongoing efforts to rewrite the criminal damage, trespass and assault laws by seeking justification through the courts to invade power plants are evidence enough of that. In that sense, environmentalists would really welcome some new nuclear power stations as an opportunity to revive the golden age, with the events described in Meltdown as the playbook.

Meltdown starts where all anti-nuclear tomes must, inside the exclusion zone at Chernobyl. For a book published in 1991, that's a pretty dumb place to start. During the Hinkley C inquiry ignorance of the facts of the Chernobyl accident was forgivable as the Soviet Union had done a pretty good job of covering them up. But by 1990 the facts had come out, not least in Zhores Medvedev's definitive The Legacy Of Chernobyl, which Crispin references without dealing with its contents which spell out in pretty stark detail just how irrelevant Chernobyl is to nuclear power in Britain.

Still, after such an inauspicious start Meltdown settles down with some useful history, both of the development of nuclear power in the UK and of the development of the protest movements against it. Equally, as that history passes you can see how the logic starts to go awry; there's an entertaining enough tale of some geologists doing preliminary investigations for a deep-level waste repository being chased out of Machynlleth by the local farmers, but the stated moral of the tale is that "it was clear that the scientists had been sent back to their drawing boards". We've been told for years that scientists don't know what to do with waste, but the tale that's told here is of protests leading to a political decision and the politics don't invalidate the science; indeed, thirty years later after Tom King (ironically, the MP for Hinkley Point) decided to abandon work on the repository, Finland are already building theirs and it remains Britain's intent to have one.

It's a tale we've seen only recently with Kingsnorth. I'm no fan of the place by any means, but while the Climate Hi-De-Hiers proclaim victory, I have to ask myself which is more credible; that E-On caved in the face of a bunch of criminals (which, let's be clear, is what they are) or that the project has become somewhat less attractive because of that minor thing we call the credit crunch. Somehow, I get the feeling it's the economy, stupid...

Soon we reach the main event, the public inquiry itself. The account is, unsurprisingly, one of a gallant battle against faceless bureaucrats to allow the voice of the people to be heard. On its own that's fair enough, but underpinning it is the idea that the emotional response of the public should have, not just weight, but decisive weight, in the planning process. Now I'll be the first to say that planning law is too restrictively drawn and that at the local authority level there should be additional grounds that can be considered. But one thing the planning system is very clear on is that the decision should be rational and based on the facts; supplanting that sort of system with mob rule is self-evidently nonsense.

The role of local authorities in marshaling that public opinion is also intriguing. One of the key turning points at Hinkley comes in 1985 when the Liberal Democrats take control of Somerset County Council, without which change the public inquiry might not have happened at all. A motley alliance of local authorities from around the Bristol Channel eventually forms, though this is founded on a base of opposition in South Wales which is rather more pro-coal than it is anti-nuclear.

But the most surprising revelation in that direction is that by 1988, even Anglesey District Council (as was) was prepared to state its opposition to new nuclear power; this on an island where Wylfa Power Station was the biggest employer and Anglesey Aluminium (powered by Wylfa) was second. Crispin sees this as a great moral victory; I'd hazard that it's just possible that a council long dominated by independents unable to form a single cohesive strategic thought was more than able to recognise a populist bandwagon when it rolled into town. In any case, strategically challenged as they were (and indeed remain), at the peak of the boomiest boom for decades it's possible that they may have taken their eye off the economic crystal ball for a moment, something I'm sure the hundreds now being made redundant at Anglesey Aluminium thanks to Wylfa never having been replaced are particularly grateful for.

Either way, by the end of the inquiry and much as they did at Sizewell B, the campaigners conclude that they have won. It's that conviction that the environmentalists are clinging to even now; the idea that even if the government gets its way and someone does try, they can defeat it at the public inquiry.

There are three tiny flaws in this theory. In the first instance, the victory has now been rendered rather pyrrhic. After the year-long Hinkley inquiry and the three-year long Sizewell inquiry with its 340 days of public session, governments came to recognise that actually, a similarly lengthy inquiry on an application by a private company would probably end up mired in both judicial review and misfeasance suits. The Labour government's response, the Infrastructure Planning Commission, is undoubtedly horribly quangocratic but at the same time, if you set out to abuse the public inquiry process you shouldn't be shocked if you have it taken away from you.

Even if you got a public inquiry, the original victory is in any case irrelevant. Because Hinkley C was to be built by the CEGB, a nationalised industry, the public inquiry was allowed to consider, and indeed obsessed over considering, the relative economic merits of it being a nuclear power station. The campaigners sense of victory came largely because the inquiry came right in the middle of the privatisation process which was appallingly botched; it was a late-Thatcher privatisation, that it was appallingly botched was a given. When, however, Electricite de France come along with their new application and the man from Greenpeace asks them about the economics, EdF will tell him or her that it's a commercial matter for EdF and would he mind awfully effing off, preferably at some speed.

Beyond the pyrrhicism and irrelevancy, however, it's most important to note that the victory also never happened. Ultimately, the CEGB's application was approved and the station only failed to be built because the eventual successor companies (the nationalised Nuclear Electric and the privatised British Energy) were never equipped with the resources to do it, again thanks to Maggie's munificence. Should they continue to rely on something that didn't happen twenty years ago and couldn't happen now, I fear the greens might be a mite disappointed.

As for the epilogue, the peer into the future of nuclear, I can't really blame Crispin, writing in 1991, for underestimating just how crucial climate change would become at a time when it was still just the greenhouse effect. His effort to sketch out a low-carbon Britain is still pretty admirable, even if some of the things that have been done (low-energy lightbulbs) haven't stopped the upward trend and some of the things that should have been done (the Severn Barrage) haven't. I'll even allow the primacy given to energy efficiency in general (though I will once again point you to the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, the Jevons Paradox and the rock I'm throwing at your head) and the lack of understanding of operating margin in the grid.

At the end, however, you're left with the feeling that despite having lived with the gorillas in the mist, Crispin hasn't understood them. For even his plan foresees significant investment in gas (which we've done, though only so Maggie could be mean to the miners) and clean coal, the very thing the environmentalists are now breaking the law to try and stop. With those elements, it's merely quite far-fetched; without them it's both a pretty good statement of Green policy twenty years on and completely off its tree.

I suppose I should conclude happy in the knowledge that those I oppose live in carefree delusion to what's about to hit them. Until my own party stops living that way, however...

I Am Not A User (Official)

2009-09-27T18:15:00.000+01:00

One of the results of going back to university is that I'll be spending an awful lot more time on trains. While I am, as you'll have anticipated, not entirely unhappy with that, I am a bit miffed that officially, none of it will happen at all.

The recent proliferation of automatic ticket barriers notwithstanding, the railway industry actually has very little data on exactly what journeys are made on the network. While there's a wealth of ticket purchase data available, that isn't as reliable as you might think. Simple tickets from station A to station B are easy enough, but there's a whole range of tickets (rovers, London travelcards, metropolitan zonal tickets) that don't identify specific destinations or that can be used on trains but bought elsewhere.

Then there's the vexed question of station groups. In most places with multiple stations you can buy a ticket to each station individually or to the group destination, so a ticket to "Warrington" is valid at both Central and Bank Quay. For many years, all such tickets were attributed to an identified main station in the group, thus often penalising smaller stations in a group, particularly those without ticket offices where the guard was more likely to sell a group ticket rather than a named one.

Recently the modelling used to allow for all these effects has become much better (leading to some very odd effects like the apparent 127,000% increase in passengers at Thorne South in 2007/08) but it remains a model; the methodology alone runs to 22 pages. And there are still plenty of tickets that can't be attributed and which are thus not counted.

How does this affect me? Well I'll have to make two journeys regularly by train; Danescourt-Treforest and Treforest-Cardiff Central. Now I can make both those journeys with one season ticket, but season tickets are counted as an estimated number of journeys between only the two named stations. My purchase of a season ticket will therefore only benefit the numbers of the stations at either end and not those of Danescourt in the middle. As the councillor for Danescourt and for two other stations on the same line, I'd really prefer it if both the station and the line were credited with my custom; after all, the more passengers they have, the more important they will be to the train company.

And as an added bonus, because fares on the Valley Lines are zonal, my season ticket isn't to Treforest but to Abercynon; it costs the same and I'm sure I'll have cause to pop up to help Mike Powell become the next MP for Pontypridd. But it does mean that even Treforest station won't see any benefit from my becoming a student.

Of course, if we ever manage to stop seeing Oyster as something nice for Londoners but not especially necessary for everyone else, we could have real data for every station. Ieuan Wyn Jones has already announced something similar for Wales, but I'd be more convinced if the Assembly Government hadn't spent so long pfaffing about smartcard standards that Cardiff Bus has had to go it alone and launch its own system. Time will tell, but there's not a lot of breath holding going on around here...

My Blog's Birthday And Other Animals

2009-09-24T07:47:00.002+01:00

Wow, so much has changed in the three years since I started not really blogging properly. We've got a tired, fiercely unpopular Labour Prime Minister and a Conservative Leader of the Opposition of whose policies we know nought (and it's unclear which is more tragic, that the former describes a different person or that the latter describes the same one...)

What's more, I'm not at Conference because I'm a fresher. Then it was my Masters in Manchester, now I'm at the University of Glamorgan doing a law conversion course and, of course, manning a Freshers Fayre stall (though thankfully not running it, my dues to society having been well and truly paid on that front!)

Oh, and while we're on the subjects of songs remaining the same, we have a leader who's spending his conference picking fights with the party. It's a strategy that's never demonstrated leadership at the best of times, but picking a fight over the process and doing so when you've already lost to the FPC on the issue is just barmy. Even if the FPC weren't unanimous on the issue, you can bet your ass they'll be unanimous on the process and so it has proved.

James Graham's analysis of that is spot on, as is his questioning of the role of the Chief Officers Group. Indeed, the question I've been asking myself from my armchair all week is, "How on Earth did no-one see this coming?" This whole saga would make some sense if there was a clearly defined purpose to it. However, not only is it unclear as to what advantage was being sought, I'm bound to ask how it is possible that no-one in the upper echelons anticipated that the coverage of what was being done would be exactly as it has been. That much, at least, should have been entirely predictable.

I mean, okay, if you've identified "honesty over the state of the public finances" as a good issue that builds on Vince's reputation, fair enough. If you've decided to combine that with trying to tackle "unrealistic wish lists of policies" as a reason for people not voting for us, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt (though I'll point out that there are probably some issues you should be dealing with before that one.) But it should be patently obvious that if you do that by taking "distinctive policies that show we're different to the other parties" and bringing them into question in a way that raises the spectre of "party split with leadership", those will be the issues that dominate and any coverage of the things you're trying to pursue is going to be pushed back into the arts and leisure section.

And yes, of course any leader would like to have a Clause Four moment, but you have to remember that the Clause Four moment itself worked for Blair because the policy Clause Four represented was massively unpopular and the people in his party were ready to acknowledge that. Cameron, on the other hand, can't have a Clause Four moment (because the people in his party aren't ready to acknowledge the unpopular bits and actually still believe that those bits are popular) so he just doesn't talk about those bits and hopes no-one else does; so far, so good.

I suppose the problem with criticising what's gone on is that I don't know what the answer is; I don't know how you get the sort of narrative-changing impact being sought on the issues being used without opening yourself up to the alternative formulation we've seen in the press all week (it's at times like these that I need Neil Stockley!) But either way, what has happened should have been anticipated and avoided and if that meant making less of an impact, so be it.

Evan Harris' point about good leaders and great leaders missed one crucial factor; Lib Dem leaders can't be great until they get the coverage of an election campaign. What's happened is fixable, and I say that as someone who'll be getting questioned about it all through tomorrow at a Freshers stall (I know what my answer to the questions will be and I'm confident in it). In the meantime, we should have faith that the run up and the campaign itself will vindicate both the party and its leader.

Less For More The Rail Way

2009-08-28T17:38:00.000+01:00

Last year's changes to the train ticket system were supposed to signal a radical shake-up of the sorry mess that had gone before. How are they doing? January's news about split tickets (a Lib Dem rail story I unaccountably missed) didn't exactly bode well, but my journey today pretty much sums up just how far we've come;

Cardiff Central - Gloucester Off-Peak Return - £18.30
Cardiff Central - Gloucester Anytime Return - £15.50

The prosecution rests, m'lud...

When You Go, Will You Send Back...

2009-08-15T09:43:00.000+01:00

So the NHS has had quite a week, between Graham Linehan's defence of it and Peripheral Vision's attempt to get rid of it (or is it Liberal Vision's attempt? I've read through both websites and I still can't see any reason for the distinction beyond Mark Littlewood trying to become Darth Vision by establishing a Stelios-like grip on the word...) For those of us who have been watching the progress of US healthcare reform for a while, it's nice to have you all on board at last.

It's been particularly strange watching those developments from Wales, the one place where socialism in the NHS still lives and breathes, where Aneurin Bevan is not so much respected as worshipped. Indeed, the Welsh perspective makes the argument that we shouldn't run headlong into unconditional defence of the NHS even easier to understand. But equally, we should reflect on what #welovetheNHS is doing and why.

The Republican Party is dying. Conservatism in America is alive and well, but is now led by the cast of the multimedia conservative freak show; Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Coulter. Meanwhile, the Congressional Republican leadership is an irrelevance and the only Republican outside Congress offering any leadership is the one Republican outside Congress incapable of delivering any (or, indeed, any form of independent thought.) In the face of such organisational decay, the Republicans are being dragged to the extremist fringe in a way we probably haven't seen since Labour's pits of despair between 1979 and 1983.

Healthcare, however, is an issue they can unite behind and one where they can unleash their favourite weapon; fear. They've got plenty of practice using it too; Republicans have been having Democrats kill your grandmother since 1993, when Harry and Louise famously destroyed Bill and Hillary's reform package, albeit at the cost of one of the great comic moments in political history;

Today's Republicans, on the other hand, aren't nearly clever enough to deliver another Harry and Louise. All they have is rage, not at the relative merits of particular policies, but at the very idea of actually doing anything at all. The Obama plan isn't not as good as what they've come up with, because they haven't come up with anything at all. Instead, the Obama plan has to be tantamount to treason, fundamentally anti-American and the first step on the road to the United Soviet Socialist Republic of America. And so, while the Obama plan has almost nothing to do with the NHS, because the NHS is supposedly the anti-thesis of the American (read: anarcho-capitalist) way it becomes the exemplar, the font of all horror stories, the inexorable consequence of the thin end of the Obama wedge.

If the debate remains locked in that cycle of paranoia, reform is doomed to fail. What America needs is a debate about the reality of its healthcare system. I wish I could remember exactly who it was who described American healthcare as a Rolls-Royce system; able to do anything so long as you can afford it. For all the miracle pharmaceuticals developed and all the multiple-transplant surgeries it develops, American healthcare continues to deliver measurably worse outcomes on almost all chronic conditions at almost all income levels; the headline figure of the uninsured is scary enough, but the relationship between income and healthcare outcome at all levels is positively terrifying. What's more, you don't need me to tell you that it does so at the highest cost (both relative and absolute) on the planet.

But even more importantly, while the debate is about the morality of a supposedly un-American system it won't manage to be about a fundamentally un-Christian one. To me this is the most confusing element of the lot; Republicans have absolutely no proposals for healthcare reform, save virtually indemnifying doctors from malpractice suits to reduce insurance premiums (although at the expense of accountability for medical competence.) And yet the Christian base of the Republican party continues to support a party platform that condemns millions of Americans to death and suffering. If that base can be made to think of that for a moment, it might notice that actually, the Republican position is according to their morality positively evil and will lead to them rotting in hell.

So by all means let's have a real debate about the future direction of the NHS and let's be honest about what it can and must do better. Equally, however, let's remember that the way the NHS is being portrayed by Republicans right now is positively fraudulent and that if we allow such criminal distortion of the truth to continue, we will all be just as culpable for the millions of Americans living in real fear, not of socialised medicine, but of no medicine at all.

R&A and IRB vs. IOC

2009-08-13T22:19:00.000+01:00

Honestly, people are going to have to stop doing things I want them to do, that's twice in one lifetime now... Then again, with the IOC Executive Board's decision to recommend that golf and rugby sevens join the Olympic programme in 2016 still needing to be ratified by the IOC congress in October in one of the most political arenas in world sports, it's worth taking this opportunity to restate the case for their inclusion.

With sevens the headline case is simple; nothing will make the main stadium, the great elephant on the back of all Olympic legacies, come alive once the athletics is over than a sevens tournament. The Rugby World Cup Sevens and the Commonwealth Games tournaments have been fiestas for the game and an Olympic tournament should be even more so; the increase in foreign visitors to the Games will I'm sure have been a major factor in the recommendation.

The effect on rugby in general will also be enormous. Sevens is already pushing the frontiers of the game outwards, with Argentina and Kenya having real medal chances for 2016 and places like Portugal showing genuine promise. The lure of Olympic places might also stem the damaging flow of talent from Fiji, Samoa and Tonga to New Zealand, bringing those nations back to the fore at both seven and fifteen-a-side.

The real prize from Olympic sevens, however, is the USA. With American Football leaving increasing numbers of college players on the scrapheap, Olympic funding for sevens should give that talented athlete base an alternative avenue for their skills. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised to see the odd NFL player try for a place at the big show (the timing of the Games fits reasonably well, there's no lack of patriotism in the league and plenty of open-field running skills that should transfer nicely to sevens.)

Golf is a more difficult case and one where I fear the governing bodies may already have shot themselves in the foot somewhat. The fundamental criticism that an Olympic tournament won't be as important as the majors isn't unreasonable, at least on the men's side; as was the case with baseball and softball I suspect the women's title will be somewhat more relatively prestigious.

As much as anything, however, it's a problem of lack of imagination in the format. With golf and tennis, the Olympic tournament is only bigger than the four majors because of the gold medal at the end of it, but that doesn't matter so much so long as the tournament leading into it is of the same physical and competitive rigour. Unfortunately, the tournament the R&A and USGA are proposing isn't; three of this year's four majors had 156 competitors (the Masters had 96) but the Olympic tournament would have just 60. I suspect part of that will be down to concerns over the quality of the field; in individual sports countries are usually restricted to four entrants, something that will seriously affect the field in golf (where the USA has 19 of the world's top 60 and 64 of the top 156). I'd tell golf to instead embrace that limitation and allow the golfers of the world to compete against players they'd usually have no chance of sharing a course with; realistically, you're going to have a cut after two days and no-one will mind so long as the field after the cut is good enough. (The same is true of tennis, but I'll save that argument for the IOC congress...)

The headline case for golf is even more about the legacy aspect. Olympic host cities are by definition international cities, living on a diet of high finance and international commerce. Would any such city not benefit from a world-class facility for the business community's pastime par excellence? It may not be as cuddly as the regeneration-led legacy London are trying to push, but at least you can count on it.

As I say I'm sure I'll return to this topic as the IOC Congress approaches, but this a battle for sports lovers to start fighting now and right up until those delegates push the right buttons in Copenhagen.

Notes From The Witchsmeller Pursuivant

2009-08-12T07:51:00.001+01:00

James Graham's excellent contribution on libertarianism reminds me that I've said some fairly nasty things about libertarianism in the past (I believe I went for "it commits gross historical and sociological negligence" the last time) but haven't taken the opportunity to extend and revise those remarks.

It's worth reflecting, however, that I come at this as something of an amateur political philosopher. I'm sitting here with two degrees in physical sciences and with prior accusations of technocracy (charges that do tend to stick somewhat) and so with less of an interest in the minutiae of Mill, Hobbes, Locke et al. Nevertheless, I can see where libertarianism is coming from. The rights it proclaims and the moral philosophy it declares are hard to argue against.

The problem, however, is that the philosophy is exactly that; moral, not political. For all the talk of consistency in the libertarian position, where does maintenance of that position lead? Didn't the last country that tried to do things that way end with mobs carrying flaming torches and pitchforks leading noblemen to guillotines? Doesn't maintaining order in such a country require either a military police force that Stalin would have admired or a social hierarchy The Party would be familiar with? (This is where the historical and sociological negligence comes in, in case you were wondering...)

It's at this point that the religiosity of libertarian belief James points out betrays it. By obsessing over the righteousness of the morals they have identified, libertarians pointedly ignore the lessons of two hundred years of democracy in its various implementations; that people will guard their rights and ignore their responsibilities, that the exercise of those rights can constitute an assault on others even where none is intended and that there is a role for government in establishing not just fairness, but justice.

Not that libertarian philosophies are irrelevant by any means. They must inform our decisions, reminding us that government should be about enablement rather than coercion. Nevertheless we must be clear that libertarianism is not some pure, untainted version of liberalism that we should return to; rather, it represents an old ideal that liberalism has grown out of through sometimes bitter experience.

If such an arrangement will not suffice, however, I'd refer you to my original point; in a constitutional system that is broken, the Liberal Democrats must be a strong enough coalition to deliver the genuine reform we need and not the sticking plasters ordered by the decrepit hulks on the red and blue sides. For that, we must unite against the common enemy (no, not the Judean People's Front...)

Leadership By Statistical Inevitability

2009-07-24T20:01:00.001+01:00

The government's announcement that the Great Western Main Line is to be electrified leaves me with something of a quandary; how do I react to the government actually doing something I want them to do? At one level I suppose I'd have to admit that even a government that was trying its hardest couldn't get every single decision wrong and that statistically the odd correct decision is inevitable (even from Pa Broon). But equally you have to ask yourself how we got here in the first place...

Before British Rail, the only significant electrification project in Britain was the Southern Railway's effort on its commuter lines south of London. Overhead line electrification only began in earnest with the British Rail Modernisation Plan of 1955, which lead to the first main line electrification (of the West Coast Main Line between 1959 and 1974) and suburban electrification in Glasgow and East London. Over the years the suburban systems crept further outwards, joined by the occasional new project like the North London suburban system (1976 to 1983).

Nevertheless, when the time came to replace the remaining main line diesels, electrification was never a consideration as BR was pouring all its money into APT. The result of that was the HST, a pure BR product; designed in Derby, built in Crewe. But no sooner had HST made its debut than the suburban electrifications became full main line electrifications, reaching Norwich on the Great Eastern in 1986 and Edinburgh on the East Coast in 1991. Then privatisation kicked in and suddenly no-one was interested in new anything. Except Heathrow, which wanted a fast rail link to keep up with the airport joneses. One fairly chunky tunnelling project later, Heathrow Express opened in 1994, complete with the first piece of electrification on the Great Western, from Paddington to Hayes and Harlington.

And then New Labour enter our tale, demonstrating their deep commitment to strategic thinking in the railway industry by handing it off to a quango with no actual power. But while transport planning was one thing, sucking up to City bankers was quite another and thus Crossrail was (re)born to make their commute from Berkshire to the Bank easier. A literal hole to pour money down though it is, Crossrail does at least extend the Great Western electrification to Maidenhead.

Meanwhile despite a highly successful engine replacement programme the HSTs will fundamentally be forty years old in 2016. As we've discussed previously, the government had to step in to procure a replacement, at which point they will have discovered how difficult that is when the factory that built the originals has closed and we're virtually the only country with high speed diesel trains. But with the specification for the Intercity Express Programme written to require that the trains be deliverable as diesel, electric and dual-power, the government will have had to ask itself whether it should electrify.

Now once you've got to Maidenhead you've already covered a significant proportion of the commuter services as it is and pushing on to Oxford and Newbury gives you complete coverage. Oxford takes the main line electrification to Didcot which means you're already half way to Bristol. If you go to Bristol you probably have to use both routes (Bath and Bristol Parkway) and if you get to Parkway you're virtually in Wales anyway so why not at least go to Cardiff, but if you only go to Cardiff half the trains there will still be diesel anyway as they continue on to Swansea so you might as well go to Swansea too and do the whole job... And suddenly you're there. One horribly bad decision eventually begets a good one, something for which I'm not sure we should be doling out enormous amounts of credit.

But I suppose some is due to Labour, if only to underline that absolutely none is due to Plaid Cymru, who've been on the blogs and in the papers spinning the announcement as a triumph for Ieuan Wyn Jones as Assembly Transport Minister. Which is fine, except for the extent to which the logic for electrification has everything to do with how you run a railway and nothing to do with the politics of nationalism, the mounting evidence that Ieuan is desperately trying to cover up diverting funding from east-west transport projects against the advice of civil servants (which has everything to do with the politics of nationalism) and particularly except for his "National Transport Plan" which basically listed all the things he'd already announced he was doing and then said which ones he was cutting...

So let's be happy that we're getting the electrification we need but if the Assembly want any credit from it, let's see them ditch their pathetic plan and support the electrification the way it needs to be, with investment in electric local trains for Cardiff-Swansea and electrification of the Valley Lines. Until then, they and the Labour Party in general can shut the hell up.

Jeremy Paxman Ate My Earlobes

2009-07-21T07:53:00.001+01:00

Among the many sacrifices I make to serve as a councillor, missing University Challenge is, in the grand scheme of things, not exactly life-changing. Still, when your alma mater is on one of the most successful runs in series history (semi-finalists each year since 2005 with three finals appearances and two-ish wins) and you had more than a little to do with that, there's an emotional bond that makes it hard to give yourself up to the delights of group meetings (two Mondays a month here in Cardiff.) And while there is always iPlayer, it's not the same when you've missed your institution in the most hyped final in history as I did earlier this year.

Still, occasionally you're rewarded for sticking with it and I thought I was going to be tonight when the boy Paxo opened up a set of bonuses with, "Which British city includes the wards of Adamsdown, Butetown..." Apart from decrying the laziness of the question setter in using the wards in alphabetical order, I thought all was well.

There then followed the most painful mangling of Cardiffian mispronunciation I've heard in quite some time. To set the record straight, it's CAN-tun (not can-TON) and ka-TAY-ze (not KATH-ays). Given that little display I'm unsurprised the poor Loogabaroogans misidentified it as Manchester (although in fairness, they might have noticed that none of those names are nearly northern enough...) But then it got worse, for the next two bonus questions were about the same ward.

My ward. Which apparently is called hlan-DARFF, so much so he said it twice.

Now unless it has it's hat on (as in Cwmbrân) that vowel sound is an ah, so in Welsh it hlan-DAHV and in English it usually becomes LAN-dahff.

Still, thanks for trying, I suppose...

Bring Me My Arrows Of Desire On The Chattanooga Choo-Choo

2009-07-17T23:37:00.001+01:00

The American constitution, as we know, cares little about the dangers of widespread possession of guns. Which makes what the American justice system does care about in the field of firearms even more remarkable...

Steve McNair was quite the All-American story. Born and raised in small-town Mississippi and educated at a historically black university with no great sporting reputation, he developed into one of the great quarterbacks of his era, sharing the NFL Most Valuable Player award in 2003 and leading the Tennessee Titans to within inches of a Superbowl title in 2000 before retiring in 2008 to tend his Mississippi farm and work on various business interests in Nashville.

The details of his death two weeks ago were therefore all the more shocking. McNair was shot dead by his 20-year-old mistress in a murder-suicide in an apartment he owned near the Titans stadium. Although initial reports suggested that he had already instigated divorce proceedings, it turned out that his wife (the mother of his four children) had been completely unaware of the affair.

But it's today's arrest in the case that is particularly bizarre. Adrian Gilliam, convicted in Florida in 1993 of murder and attempted armed robbery, is charged with supplying the gun to McNair's mistress. Or rather, he isn't, for while licensed firearms dealers can't sell to anyone under 21, private sellers are only restricted in selling to under-18's. Instead, the charge is that as a convicted felon he is not allowed to possess a gun. And even then, the law specifically says that possession is only an offence if the gun has been subject to interstate commerce, i.e. it was made outside of Tennessee.

And so on the perversest of technicalities, a man who by all accounts was a relatively innocent party in matters (he had no record beyond 1993, the gun was purchased shortly after a burglary at his house and was sold at no profit to the mistress who he met when looking to purchase a car from her) faces 10 years in federal prison. A satisfactory outcome it ain't...

Putting The National Into Express

2009-07-02T07:27:00.000+01:00

So the East Coast Main Line rail franchise has collapsed. In other news, after their exhaustive review into toilet provision bears have announced a ten-year extension of their contract to use the woods for their defecatory needs...

What's surprising is that it took until the late bulletins to catch up with the fundamental point that all this has happened before. If AA's definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, I don't know how else to describe the government's bungling of the East Coast Main Line franchise. Having demanded ludicrous amounts of money from GNER and ended up bankrupting their parent company, they demand even more ludicrous amounts of money from National Express who end up telling them where to shove it.

Heck, I'm this close to giving Lord Adonis' comment, "the rail franchising system as it now exists, and is broadly running successfully" the Scunner Broon award for the sheer boldness of its naivete. For starters, the basic fact in this case is that rail subsidy has soared so much since privatisation that a desperate government is trying to force franchise bidders to pay enormous amounts back to them so they can get the sum down.

Consider also that the East Coast Main Line is the only intercity franchise that has not purchased any new trains, ever. Indeed, ECML services to Aberdeen, Inverness, Skipton and Harrogate are amongst those set to benefit from the Intercity Express Programme which was established expressly because train operators couldn't deliver major capital investment.

And then there's my personal favourite. The greatest single failure of privatisation has been competition, a beautiful idea that died about five minutes after the franchises were granted (specifically when Virgin told the government to guarantee them no competition on the West Coast Main Line or the deal was off). Still, in the few lucky places where there are different services on different lines, competition has been a success, places like Birmingham, Exeter... and Southend, where the Great Eastern and London-Tilbury-Southend lines head to Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street respectively. And who has the franchises for those lines?

National Express.

So while Lord Adonis goes round complaining that National Express get to keep both those franchises, be in no doubt that that is the result of a system that the government he serves in has done nothing to reform and has used so as to make things worse. What's more, it's a system that is beyond incremental changes and needs a bomb sticking up it; I liked Mark Valladares' ideas on that but I suspect that there's no route from this system to a fundamentally different one that doesn't go through nationalisation and if that's the case we should screw the fruit loops and get the hell on with it.

When You've Got Them By The TOCs

2009-06-30T13:33:00.000+01:00

*Evidence of the stress engendered by moving house No.94; it even managed to stop me blogging about trains...*

For a railway-inclined politician it's often difficult to know who to hold in more contempt. On the one hand there's Network Rail, who I described at a recent scrutiny committee meeting as "the least imaginative, least ambitious organisation ever dreamt up by a group of human beings" (and that was the polite version). Then again, there's always the Department That Thinks Transport Is A Jolly Good Idea And Somebody Should Definitely Look At Doing Some (for whom Dudley Moore's phrase, "the Government's... what for want of a better word we'll call policy...", was invented)

And then there are the Train Operating Companies themselves, whose impact has been restricted to the occasional shiny new train or livery and a legacy of micromanaging the crap out of their cost base with little or no consideration for anything so mundane as quality of service. Now, however, there's welcome evidence that they've reached the limits of endless price-hiking and seen the light.

For while they may not be anything like as ambitious as our plans (still criminally unavailable on the party website), ATOC's report on line and station reopenings is a pretty decent start. It proposes seven new stations on existing lines and fourteen new lines (mostly short branches) with a total capital expenditure of around £500m. That alone puts it way ahead of Network Rail's Route Utilisation Strategies, which tend to focus on how to thrash the existing network to within an inch of its life. Perhaps more importantly, ATOC also appear to have realised that these decisions are about more than instant economics, relaxing their cost-benefit criteria to take regeneration benefits into account.

Then again, it's not as if the operating companies are planning to fork out any of their own cash, relying instead on future fare income and the public sector to deliver. That faith in government unfortunately also extends to the scope of the report which only considered England because the devolved administrations have developed strategies; that may well be true of Scotland, but the Welsh Assembly Government's rail strategy doesn't extend beyond "Look at the Ebbw Vale line, isn't it shiny!"

Still, it's a welcome policy shift from the organisation that holds the balance of power in the rail industry and if they decide for the first time in their lives to wield that power for something other than evil, that would be even more welcome.

Ah, So That's How Much You Respect Our Country...

2009-05-28T23:56:00.000+01:00

When the historians look back at the 2009 European Elections, I suspect they will marvel at the extent to which the field was already full of "You know they're corrupt, vote for me because you don't know I am" candidates before the Torygraph brought the roof of the House of Commons crashing down around MPs ears. It's a shame that it will have to be the historians who do the marvelling, because they deserve a lot more scrutiny (read: pointing and laughing) than they're getting.

UKIP do get coverage (if not especially scrutiny), but they don't count since their message is more "We are corrupt, but not as much as they are". Jury Team had their little blaze of launch-related glory, but once it became absolutely clear that they were just a massively multiplayer experiment to determine whether Paul Judge's ego was bigger than his wallet, the whole thing disappeared faster than Cristiano in Rome...

And then there's No2EU, or as they might more accurately be described, UKIP For Communists. They are of course their own ego trip, this time for Bob Crow, the man who thinks he's Robespierre. Still, you have to take an organisation seriously when it constitutes an alliance of the RMT, the Alliance For Green Socialism and the Liberal Party and when its most experienced candidates are Tommy Sheridan and Dave Nellist...

Still, if by a man's actions you shall know him, my encounter with one of their number this evening was instructive. Walking home from work I found a man flyposting for No2EU on the billboards at the junction of Callaghan Square and Tyndall Street. Now, I didn't mind him doing the one on the left (which currently bears the UKIP poster from blogs passim) but when I caught him, he'd just started on the one on the right.

Which is advertising the British Army.

I tried to take a picture of him, but my phone decided to have a funny turn and switch to video mode, so I had to make do with making him scarper for fear of being caught with the vandal's brush in his hand. Still, it's nice to know that the eurosceptics of the world know how to behave with respect to our fighting men and women...

A Haymaker For A Hay Maker

2009-05-27T14:16:00.001+01:00

Few tales have humbled me as an elected politician more than the curious case of Leo Blair's MMR jab.

As we are reminded by the ever-excellent Dr Ben Goldacre in his book, Bad Science (accompanying his weekly column in The Grauniad and his blog) the MMR scare did not begin with Andrew Wakefield's study in The Lancet in 1998; it had just gotten going in 2001 when Tony and Cherie were asked whether baby Leo had had the jab. Somewhere between their refusal to confirm or deny and Sylvia and Carole Caplin's perceived influence and vocal opposition to MMR, 2002 was the year MMR leapt out of the hands of the science correspondents and into the grubby little protuberances of the columnists.

The results we all know about; reams of evidence showing no link between MMR and autism going ignored by meeja hors assuming smoke as proof of fire, while vaccination rates plummet and more and more children needlessly face death and disablement. Indeed, today brings us news that there are over 200 cases of measles in Wales at present, as average vaccination rates of just 82% (against the 95% herd immunity threshold) have allowed outbreaks to take hold from Llanelli to Llandudno.

I was therefore furious to read in yesterday's South Wales Echo that Neil McEvoy, Leader of the Plaid group on Cardiff Council and a Deputy Leader of the Council, is considering taking his daughter abroad to get the single mumps jab.

Now don't get me wrong, the decision is one for Neil and Neil alone and it's not the gross negligence that failing to immunise at all represents. But that argument swings both ways; if it's Neil's decision and Neil's decision alone, why the hell am I reading about it in the Echo? I mean, didn't using your children to make a political point pretty much go out of the window with John Selwyn Gummer?

But what's more, by endorsing all the anecdotal evidence (and how I wish Dogbert's pronunciations on that were available on YouTube) you reinforce the cycle of fear that's gotten us where we are already. That's not the act of a supposed leader of his community, particularly one whose community includes some of the poorest parts of Cardiff where parents can't even dream of taking their children abroad for vaccinations and where health levels are already appalling. It's also not the act of someone who shares with all of us the responsibility of acting as a corporate parent for looked after children.

I hope Neil's comments don't have that effect, not least because I can remember what it's like to be on the other side of the coin. I was born just too early to receive MMR and as a result, I got all three; rubella at six months, measles at one year and mumps as a six-year-old. Mumps, of course, I remember vividly, and let me tell you, it is by no means flu with a kick. And heck, I was the lucky one, recovering with no long-term damage. I have school friends who cannot say the same. I'd very much prefer it if my children did not end up in that position too.

What A Bunch Of Boobs...

2009-05-24T18:13:00.000+01:00

As seen near Gloucester Bus Station;

The prosecution rests, m'lud...

The Curse Of Brownite-Moranist-Petardism

2009-05-21T23:33:00.000+01:00

A spot of late-night filing with BBC1's "MP Burning Night" leads to an funny little discovery.

Among the many pieces of paper that regularly get shoved through my door as a councillor is the cunningly-entitled C'llr, a magazine of "Information and Inspiration for Councillors from the Local Government Information Unit". Amongst the inspiration is the back page feature, "In My Day", where parliamentarians talk about their time in local government. And who should we find on the back of the March 2009 issue?

Margaret Moran

And on what is she to be found opining?

Social housing, and how the government shouldn't be in the business of building any.

Well if the government investing money in the housing stock is good enough for you...

And We Think Our Sporting Heroes Are Stupid...

2009-05-18T07:42:00.000+01:00

In case proof were needed that American politics is a foreign country, news from Delaware, where legislators have voted to legalise sports gambling.

To explain; while horse and greyhound racing are fairly commonplace across the United States, other forms of sports betting were generally frowned on by the states until a federal ban was introduced in 1992. Four states had specific exemptions from that ban for activities that were legal in those states at the time the federal ban was imposed; Delaware's exemption related to a sports lottery (wherein punters bet on the cumulative outcome of a large number of games, the result being akin to a small stake on a big accumulator) that failed back in 1976 but is now one of the centrepieces of new Governor Jack Markell's deficit-reduction plan.

It's hard to argue with the logic, because betting now occupies a more significant place in American sporting culture than in perhaps any country since the height of the football pools in England, be it through the endless journalistic discussion of spread betting prices or the proliferation of college basketball pools even unto the Oval Office.

The source of the obsession is easy to trace, for while Montana and Oregon also have exemptions for lotteries, only one state has legalised betting on individual results. Coupled with Las Vegas' inexorable rise as a cultural venue, Nevada's unique legal position has allowed sports betting to flourish in the American consciousness. Betting from outside Nevada by telephone or internet is of course illegal, but a nod remains as good as a wink to a blind bat...

But despite all that, there is fierce resistance even to Delaware's return to the gambling fold, let alone to any relaxation of either the out-of-state or in-state bans. What's most remarkable, however, is that that resistance is lead not by the political or religious conservatives, but by the sports themselves, with various governing bodies having already threatened sanctions against Delaware teams.

The concern is the exact opposite of the one that gripped Britain for so long; while we were obsessing over lotteries being games of chance, the governing bodies are terrified of the skill element in sports betting and the scope for match-fixing. Some of that goes back to the early days of professional sports and the Black Sox scandal, but compared to the experiences of professional sports in Europe and considering the enormous salaries involved in America such a level of paranoia doesn't seem credible.

Betting exploits of individual players cast an equal shadow over the debate. Baseball remains obsessed with the downfall of Pete Rose (possibly the best pure hitter in history, banned for life after being caught betting on games of the Cincinnati Reds team he was manager of) and basketball is awash with rumours that Michael Jordan's abortive baseball career (as chronicled in that classic documentary film Space Jam) was a cover to allow him to serve a gambling ban without having to admit to doing so.

I wish I had a clever conclusion to all this, but I guess it should just speak for itself.

Births, Marriages And Especially Deaths

2009-05-14T07:42:00.001+01:00

On one level, the decision of the majority of Plaid AMs to ignore party policy and back their coalition partners in introducing top-up fees in Wales is a tragedy for every Welsh student, present and future. But on another level it's a far more profound political event, my feelings about which are best described thus;

CYMRU
Plaid

Suddenly on the floor of the Senedd on Wednesday May 14th 2009, aged 84, of an overdose of cowardice in response to a morbid desire for ministerial car-related buttock comfort. Beloved father of Leanne and Bethan. Resting at Ty Gwynfor, Atlantic Wharf, Cardiff. Funeral service at the ballot box across Wales before June 3rd, 2010. No flowers.

As Spike Said To Mr Justice Caulfield

2009-05-01T19:33:00.000+01:00

See, I take a post-conference break from blogging for some application form-related torture and the Welsh blogosphere decides to set itself on fire. And while peace has broken out on some fronts (something I'm all in favour of) there's clearly some outstanding business to be attended to.

So, for the wilfully ignorant and the plain stupid alike, let me restate the position in words of as few syllables as possible; there's nothing wrong with attack blogs that stick to known facts and public statements and there's nothing wrong with party staffers and Assembly Member Support Staff blogging. But when Plaid staff and AMSS blog on Welsh Ramblings and Guerilla Welsh-Fare, they do so anonymously in the worst attempt at astroturfing since the Metrodome; when Lib Dem staff do so at Freedom Central, they sign their bloody names to it! Honestly, what part of anonymous are you not able to understand here?

Either way, the whole saga brings my thoughts round to a matter I've been mulling for a few months, namely the difficulties of linking in the Welsh blogosphere. When the new Blogger template came along with its blog list widget, it seemed churlish not to make use of it and as at the time I was only listing my Liberal Democrat favourites, using authors real names was more aesthetically pleasing and fairly easy to achieve. When a Welsh Lib Dem list became necessary (in the days before WelshLibDemBlogs) the names were again not a problem. But now that I'm writing Y Barcud Oren, I'd like to be able to provide my non-Welsh readership with a decent selection from the rest of the Welsh blogosphere, and that's a more difficult proposition.

For starters, much as the real names are an aesthetic choice, there is something to be said in a democratic society for standing up and being counted. Sure, there are some people who do have a legitimate reason for pseudonymity (and that does not include Julian Lewis who continues to waste Parliament's time bleating on about how vital it is that his home address not be published lest he be assassinated by the militant wing of CND...) but they are generally up front about it, something I'm not aware of any of Wales' pseudonymous crowd having been (though I'm happy to be corrected on that point).

And even in the world of the identifiable, there are limitations. I won't, for example, link to blogs by current, former or future AMs or MPs of other parties; they can waste taxpayer's money advertising their own bits of electronic real estate without me using my turf to help them out. And in any case, it's not as if I'd recommend any of the current blogs in those categories because of the brilliance of their intellect or the soaring power of their rhetoric...

There's always the journalists to fill out a few slots and I'm not unhappy to have them there as I tend to think they're all right as bloggers; the problem is that some of them are a heck of a lot better as bloggers than they are as journalists and even that often isn't saying much... Beyond that, there's Dylan Jones-Evans (who I grant an exception as his academic standing outweighs his party affiliation) Alwyn ap Huw, Ian James Johnson and... well...

So I don't know. If anyone can recommend someone I've missed I'm happy to check them out, but I've done plenty of trawling of other people's blogrolls with very little to show for it. That lack of talent willing to stick its head above the parapet doesn't say much for the "Ie Gallen Ni" generation.

The Other Kirsty's Unliveblog

2009-04-22T15:21:00.000+01:00

A confession, then; I wasn't actually in the hall for the leader's speech at conference. In my defence, as a man of Gloucester I was next door in Dempsey's being ritually humiliated by the Cardiff Council section of the Blues fan club. Still, when the other Kirsty (as opposed to my Kirsty) beat that confession out of me in the traditional politician's manner of being nice to me, I could at least promise that I'd get out the iPlayer and do an unliveblog of it, so here goes...

Let's not kid ourselves, it's a tentative start, but as Daran Hill said in the build-up, it probably ought to be. Then again, it's not a text that's lending itself to quick hits, though I suppose front-loading the facts of the first 100 days is a necessary evil in this scenario. But while it's all very true and very worthy, you can see from the hall that it's not exactly exciting stuff, talking more to the room than the cameras.

And then the first punch-out line is punctuated by a very unusual usage; girl as an interjection instead of boy. The etymologists will have to judge on whether that's actually the unnecessary regendering of an expression that it feels like, but I suppose if you're going to underline the election of a female leader, you might as well go the whole hog with it.

Still, it takes us onto the traditional Lib Dem turf of civil liberties, which in the Welsh context is exactly what's required. At the UK level we spend far too much time ploughing our safe ground when we should be kicking Labour and the Tories off theirs; in Wales, the way to kick Plaid off their supposed safe ground is to point out that it isn't their safe ground at all, that while they are left-wing, they are communist, not progressive and certainly not liberal.

The text is starting to come alive now, and much as Toby would criticise Will for it you have to love a line like "where your character and not your credit limit opens up opportunities".

And again this question of what conference is for. As someone who feels we must trumpet the open debate of policy that characterises our conferences (if only to put the lie to the idea that Labour members can absolve themselves of the sins of their government by claiming "well I'm still a socialist" when their party inherently doesn't give a toss what they think) the BBC coverage was hugely frustrating for the extent to which it doggedly stuck by the idea that the purpose of conference is for the leader to take on the party and win. We demonstrate our power in a different way and at this conference we did that and then some.

Speaking of the powerlessness of Plaid members, now we're getting somewhere, because as Kirsty is saying the Plaid U-turn on tuition fees is about more than an electoral edge in Ceredigion. It's about nothing less than the moment Plaid became New Labour. Because when a party that thinks it is led by its members is told by its leader "I want to ignore the policy you have decided upon and this is a matter of confidence in my leadership" your only option is to kick the living crap out of him. Anything else is an admission that you care more about being in office than delivering your ideas, and from that day on your party has a blackened heart.

It's this issue that is the stick that Kirsty needed to be poked with to really get going; I wish there was a better metaphor for it, but there's no denying that her oratory takes a massive leap when the passion gets behind it. We're getting a tour of all the right issues, including many that aren't covered enough, like how the bust is hitting many places that never had the boom in the first place.

And for a final thought, that distinction again, between slavish left-wing rhetoric of change for change's sake and purposeful change that addresses the systemic flaws as well as the operational minutiae. It's a good place to close because that is the challenge; we're not short of ideas and every day proves yet further that those ideas have been right from the start. What's needed next are the votes to make those ideas real; with more performances like that, both in the Senedd and around the country, those should start to be more forthcoming.

Using The Silver Bullet While It's There

2009-04-16T13:51:00.001+01:00

Ah, the joys of a Lib Dem conference agenda. Sid and Doris will know that it's been quite a while since I managed to get to any form of one (pretty much bang on two years, as it goes) and while things are being made fairly easy for me this time, it would be churlish not to go when it's pretty much as close to Cardiff West as it's possible to be without being in Cardiff West (and we'll gloss over the fact that both the Tories and Plaid actually did have their conferences in Cardiff West, splitters...)

Still, it's great to finally be able to get stuck in, if only to help put the lie to one of the more corrosive elements of Plaid's rhetoric. I have no problem with them banging on about how Tory and Labour policy is imposed by diktat from London; that happens to be true. But Welsh Lib Dem policy is made in Wales, by Wales and for Wales and no level of amateurish tubthumping on Plaid's part should distract anyone from that. Then again, I guess you can't expect much from a party whose ignorance of how the Liberal Democrats work (mixed with a soupçon of cowardice) cost them a shot at running the show...

(Oh, and by the by, I wrote that paragraph before I saw Welsh Ramblings “independent” post outlining how they're sufficiently stupid not to understand what federalism is...)

It's a packed weekend of policy, covering topics ranging from repossession support and affordable housing to high-tech jobs and infrastructure. I'm also duty bound to give a trailer for the motion on retrospective planning application (given that my ward colleague Kirsty Davies is proposing it after we got a similar motion passed by Cardiff Council a few months ago) but I'm hoping that one won't reach any sort of level of controversy. There are undoubtedly some battles to be fought over the weekend, however, although none of the “I'm a new leader hear me roar” type (and let us reflect once more on how impressive Kirsty's comments on the policy making process during the leadership campaign were).

Wrexham and Clwyd South's motion on tackling alcohol abuse is very welcome, and it comes with an interesting amendment calling for the party to oppose minimum pricing of alcohol. It's an important debate and one that should get the philosophy buffs going at full tilt. I suspect I'll come down against the outright statement of opposition; while I have no doubt that the SNP would cock the whole thing up if they introduced it in Scotland (they being, after all, the SNP) I think there are ways to make it work (as I've previously stated with respect to the VAT system generally) and I'd probably prefer to give the Assembly group the discretion to look at it in that context.

IR Cymru (the youth and student wing formerly known as MIDR) have a pretty comprehensive motion calling for compulsory social and sex education in all schools, regardless of ownership or faith status. You'd hope from the constructive nature of the amendments offered that this important change would be backed, but compulsion in education, particularly in the faith sector, is always likely to be divisive.

And then there's the question of direct elections to police authorities. Now I can quite understand why Rhondda Cynon Taf have raised it; the recent shambles of the South Wales Police Authority's budget setting process is well documented and Labour's dominance of that authority was undoubtedly a prime factor in that debacle. Indeed, you may well say that the crippling of South Wales Police because of an edict from Transport House that the council tax precept must not go above five percent had rather a lot to do with the fact that Labour's lead Euro candidate sits on the authority and doesn't want to be branded as a council tax hiker; you may very well say that, I couldn't possibly comment...

It's also worth laying much of the blame for the shambolic nature of the process at the part-time chair of the authority, Russell Roberts. I say part-time, because Russell (who owes his position on the authority to the fact that, outside of the Lib Dem-controlled councils, a seat on the police authority is clearly regarded as being one of the perks of being leader of the council) is also Leader of Rhondda Cynon Taf and Chair of Cwn Taf NHS Trust; can anyone else say Three Jobs Bob?

That being the diagnosis, is direct election of all non-council appointed members the cure? As the motion points out, it's a better idea than the Conservative proposal for directly elected sheriffs (and if you need proof that a single elected official shouldn't be in charge of policing in an area, I'd refer you to a certain B. Johnson, Esq.)

But the existing independent members of the authority aren't the problem and direct election would entail a massive change in their role and function. Certainly, they could be more representative of the communities they represent and more formally in touch with the public (as the Swansea and Gower/Newport amendment suggests) but directly electing them does not necessarily deliver either of those changes.

As for the political side, in case we hadn't noticed we already have the solution; a little thing called PR. Heck, there's even a fringe on that very subject on Sunday lunchtime (and I suspect I'll give in to my inner geek and go to it myself). For all that our opponents may deride us for our commitment to it, we should never forget that it is the biggest single thing we can do to improve the way Britain is governed at every level.

What A Bunch Of Celts

2009-04-06T16:07:00.002+01:00

In these harsh economic times, it's nice to see that some organisations are still hiring. Take the Conservatives, who are advertising for a research assistant for Cheryl Gillan and David Mundell.

Yes, that's right, they want one member of staff to work jointly for the Shadow Secretary of State for Wales and the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland. Because obviously, those two nations are easy to treat as one big whole, being only 155 miles apart and possessing of entirely different legal and political systems...

They can spin 'till they're blue in the mouth, but ultimately, to the Conservatives Wales is still the pink bit 8 inches west of Henley and Scotland is still the pink bit two feet above Potter's Bar.

Less Than Twitterpated

2009-03-06T18:49:00.001Z

As I've hopefully mentioned several times before, my two favourite columnists (pipping my British favourite, Howard Jacobson, to the post) come not from the worlds of politics or news journalism but from American sports. Gregg Easterbrook and Bill Simmons of ESPN combine weighty sporting analysis with insights into American politics and popular culture from their day jobs (political journalist and comedy writer respectively).

I mention this because I've been watching the blogosphere's love affair with Twitter for some time and feeling unusually stuck in the mud about it (early Facebook adopter as I was, though that was more to do with my fan club than anything). And then Bill posted this in answer to a reader's e-mail...

The more interesting angle for me is how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, "Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?" (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter.

As for Facebook, I don't mind getting status updates and snapshots of what my friends' lives are like as long as they aren't posting 10 times a day or writing something uncomfortable about their spouse/boyfriend like "(Girl's name) is … trying to remember the last time she looked at her husband without wanting to punch him in the face" or "(Girl's name) is … just going to keep eating, it's not like I have sex anymore." Keep me out of your personal business, please. Other than that, the comedy of status updates can be off the charts. Like my college classmate who sends out status updates so overwhelmingly mundane and weird that my buddies and I forward them to each other, then add fake responses like, "(Guy's name) … snapped and killed a drifter tonight" and "(Guy's name) … would hang myself if the ceilings in my apartment weren't too short." It kills us. We can't get enough of it. We have been doing it for four solid months. And really, that's what Facebook is all about -- looking at photos of your friend's kids or any reunion or party, making fun of people you never liked and searching for old hook-ups and deciding whether you regret the hook-up or not. That's really it. All in all, I like Facebook.

And now I feel much better about my future as a semi-professional curmudgeon.

British Ballsless Corporation

2009-03-03T23:39:00.000Z

It says something about the poverty of political journalism in Wales, and indeed the recent introspection of the meeja hor brigade, that I've had more calls from the press about the University Challenge saga that I wasn't involved in and haven't written about (namely three) than about the controversial council meeting I was involved in and have written about (namely zero).

Of course, when the subject of discussion was just the meeja hor reaction to Gail Trimble I really didn't want to write about it; anything I could say as an alumnus of the defeated university and as one of her predecessors as brainbox of the series would have sounded like sour grapes, and in any case if I want commentary on the proclivities of the modern news media I'll happily get it from Private Eye rather than trying to produce any of my own.

But then the whole thing turned into Corpusgate and I started getting phone calls (not least from BBC Radio Gloucestershire, on whose air you can hear me expounding at around the 2hr50 mark in this programme) and it struck me that, as one of the few people who knows something of what the Corpus team will have experienced over the last six months, I should put what I know on the record.

Unlike the egregiously inaccurate Starter For Ten, the actual University Challenge process starts with applications and auditions around March/April (making this year's furore doubly problematic because it comes at exactly the time teams will be forming up and down the country). The show is then filmed over three weekends; the first round in June, the repechage and second round in July, and the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final in October.

That filming schedule is necessary because the series is broadcast in the autumn and winter, or at least was; in 2006 the series ran from September to May (I should know, I appeared on both the first and last shows!), but that's crept backwards recently so that this year it was July to February. Broadcasting the show during the academic year when the student bodies can get excited about it is only natural and entirely sensible, but it does leave you with the fundamental problem that contestants are being recruited in one academic year to appear in the following one. For that issue, the application form has the following to say for itself;

Students taking their final exams... will not be eligible unless they intend to return to the same university/university college to study as post-grads.

Now this is the rule that allowed me to compete in 2006; when the first round was filmed in June, I had applied for and been accepted onto my MSc course but had not had my final exam results and thus was not conclusively guaranteed of my place. Of course, I got my Desmond and went on to get the Masters as well, so I was fine. Without the evidence that the Beeb had, we cannot know how they interpreted Mr Kay's intent and it's a row the barrack room lawyers can have to their heart's delight.

At the most fundamental level, I absolutely agree with the Manchester team themselves (and if you haven't seen their appearance on BBC Breakfast, do take a look at it) and wouldn't wish to editorialise their sentiments about the decision that's been taken in any way; I fear it's unavoidable that I will do so and I can but apologise to them in advance for that.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the decision that was taken in this case, I can't help but feel that Auntie backed herself into a corner and got burned as a result. It would be perfectly easy and perfectly clear for the BBC and Granada to have an eligibility rule like age-level football does, namely that if someone qualifies at the start of the process, they qualify throughout the competition even if they cease to meet the original criteria later on. Instead, the rule they have reeks of ambiguities and to no readily identifiable purpose.

What's more, as this evening's coverage testifies, those ambiguities have been alive and well for a number of years. The Beeb may be considered unfortunate that Kaya Burgess, a journalist on The Times, was not only a contestant on this year's series but one who broke the same rule herself, leading to the digging that uncovered two more cases of victors with ineligible team members who are probably the tip of the iceberg. But having had the same rule in place since the series was revived in 1994, when the Beeb span the Gail Trimble story into acres of press coverage and record breaking ratings (5.3m, as opposed to 3.1m who watched me three years previously) they were begging to be hoist by their petards, and so it was.

Most of all, though, I feel terrible for Gail, who despite being a blameless bystander in this saga was prominently featured, on her own no less, on several front pages today (indeed, that little example of Fleet Street dicklessness was the final straw in my determination to blog on the matter). As I know from my seven months between winning in the studio and winning on the screen, the initial catharsis of victory turns to an agonising wait for the climax of brief national acclaim. To have that moment snatched away almost as it happens must be heartbreaking.

And let's make no bones about it, both she and her team deserve it. While I may not buy the hype of it being the best final ever (I tend to prefer my team's win by ten points, but I'm understandably biased), the statistics don't lie; the Corpus team scored more points than any in the Paxman era and Gail herself almost certainly took the series and single game records for starters answered.

Ultimately, however, the politician in me reflects that this is yet another step in the BBC's relentless self-immolation, a process itself based to some extent on rules with no real purpose being applied too late. I hope the name suggested in the title (as shamelessly stolen from Bill Simmons) doesn't become real, but it's getting there, and coming from Wales, where the television news battle will soon likely as not be between the English-language Beeb and the Welsh-language one, it's a terrifying prospect.

Adventures In Experimental Meeting Technique

2009-02-27T02:16:00.000Z

I hadn't been expecting to write about tonight's budget meeting; after all, the proceedings do look rather different when your party is leading the ruling coalition. But after what happened tonight and in view of the level of coverage it's likely to receive, there should be a record of what actually went on.

At the start of the budget debate, the Lord Mayor went through, in some detail, the protocol for the debate that had been agreed by the Business Committee. The explanation wasn't helped by the complaints of the Labour group, who managed to forget that the Business Committee is a public committee and not some secretive coven.

In any case, once all the motions and amendments has been formally moved, the debate started with the Executive Member for Finance introducing the coalition's budget proposal. The various Executive Members then spoke in turn, followed by the proposer and seconder of each group's amendments. In all those cases, the members in question were allowed to forego those speeches in order to contribute later if they so wished, and several did so.

The floor was then opened up, and in accordance with the agreed protocol each party was limited to a particular number of speakers, including all the proposers and seconders according to proportionality. The first Lib Dem got up and spoke and as she sat down, your correspondent, in a moment of historic poor timing, got up to answer the call of nature.

But as I sidled out of my seat, there was a marked pause. On the screens that display the list of speakers, nary a name was to be seen. Remarkably, at the height of the budget debate, the three opposition groups were playing exclamatory chicken. With no one willing to speak, what was our chief whip to do but call to go straight to the vote?

Of course, immediately the call was made, everyone pressed their buttons, but it's difficult to have sympathy for people who are less eager to convey their points than to achieve the perfect grandstanding position. In any case, by then it was too late; the Lord Mayor had to consider the motion once it had been tabled, and soon both it and the coalition's budget were passed.

During the break after the budget debate, it became clear that the opposition unhappiness over proceedings was going to escalate, thanks strangely to a question about a Focus leaflet. To explain; Cardiff's Labour group leader, Cllr Ralph Cook, now represents a split ward, after we took one seat from Labour in May. Ralph was especially unhappy about this development, and in his "Thank You" leaflet, complained bitterly of Lib Dem "stormtroopers" engaged in a "blitzkrieg" of leafleting.

Tonight, Ralph asked a question about a Focus leaflet which included a photograph of our councillor with two Communities First officers. At the end of a lengthy answer to his question, he was reminded of his earlier transgression and that he had never apologised for it. Ralph's response was that the terms "stormtrooper" and "blitzkrieg" were coined in WWI and do not specifically refers to the Nazis and to ask why, after what had happened, it was unfair to associate our behaviour with that of the early Nazi regime (as if Dachau hadn't opened in 1933 and there was some mythical period when they were just a bit nasty to the Social Democrats on their weekends off...)

Answering the question, the leader of the council understandably demanded that statement be withdrawn, but Ralph only made a vague, mumbled gesture. A few minutes later, I asked a question about Ramesh Patel's "ethnic cleansing" comments and mentioned Ralph's behaviour in my supplementary. During the answer to my supplementary, it became clear from Ralph's heckling that he hadn't withdrawn his earlier comments and when asked formally to withdraw them by the Lord Mayor, he repeated his excuses and walked out.

Only time will tell what consequences will befall Ralph for his remarks tonight. I for one hope they will adequately reflect the heinous nature of their content.

£7bn (Or, What You P****d Away Before Lunch)

2009-02-12T13:12:00.000Z

It's fairly rare, even in the "We could have fought an election on the issue of competence" era, for a minister to get their political willy out and wave it in the air shouting "Look at me, I'm a complete and utter moron". We should therefore hold today's example of that art in the highest regard.

It comes from Geoff Hoon, whose Department That Thinks Transport Is A Jolly Good Idea And Somebody Should Definitely Look At Doing Some today announced the preferred bidder for the £7.5bn Intercity Express Programme. The announcement was accompanied by a lovely computer simulation of what the new trains might look like (half of which focuses on what they'll look like on the inside in the vain hope that the shinyness will obscure the stupidity).

To explain, the HST fleet is rapidly reaching the end of its working life; having been introduced in 1976, the recent engine replacement programme should keep them going until around 2015. Replacing HST is the biggest single rolling stock upgrade the modern railway can undertake, with twice as many units as the Pendolinos and multiple operating companies involved. Given the amount of hassle it takes to get even one train operating company to admit to anything as sordid as capital investment, the government was forced to step in and procure the replacement itself.

There is, however, one further complication to the HST replacement that the Pendolinos did not face. For while Virgin's search for a high speed electric train could span the world (leading eventually to an off-the-shelf product from Italy based on technology originally acquired from BR), the list of countries with high speed diesel trains starts in the UK and ends here too. The press coverage of the announcement trumpets that the trains will be built at a new factory in Britain, but that was inevitable; no-one else has a diesel high speed train factory because no-one else has diesel high speed trains.

And neither should we. For all the swooshiness around the new trains being hybrids and dual-mode, they will still be fundamentally more polluting than electric trains. The government could have been really bold and electrified the Great Western Main Line, advantaging local services as well as expresses; instead, they're going to blow it all on something unimaginative but temporarily shiny.

Panic On The Streets Of W12 7RJ

2009-01-28T22:22:00.001Z

On the 10 O'Clock News, Vince Cable just appeared with the caption "Liberal Democrats Leader". I mean, honestly, don't they know the correct form is "Liberal Democrat Leader"? What kind of grammar are they teaching these caption writers, bloody media types, honestly. Hang the caption writer, I say...

Consultation (The Non-Dogbert Version)

2009-01-28T18:27:00.000Z

After last night's events, I guess it's about time to talk about Insole Court.

For fear of stealing the line from just about everyone, Insole Court is one of Cardiff''s hidden architectural gems. Built as a coal baron's mansion, the house and its estate were compulsorily purchased in 1932 to make way for Western Avenue. Over the years the house and its gardens became an important community facility, albeit one not much loved by the various councils that ran it; at one stage Cardiff City Council sold it to South Glamorgan County Council for £1, the citizen's hall was lost to arson and the house itself fell into some disrepair. Matters came to a head in 2006, when an asbestos find led to the house being closed.

Vigorous campaigning by the Friends Of Insole Court, the Insole Estate Residents Association and the Llandaff Society, together with unanimous support from all the ward candidates in last year's local elections, soon saw the council investing £600k in reopening the ground floor of the house in September of last year. Much work remains, however, with the upper floors of the house still needing over £2m of renovation.

Last night saw the first steps being taken towards that renovation as the council held a consultation event on the original plans for funding of the remaining work. Consultation has come in for plenty of stick in recent years (not least from me) but much of that criticism is a result of flagrant misuse of the term by a spineless government that can't get out of bed unless it can demonstrate public support for the idea.

What last night's event showed was what you can achieve when you get it right. The hundred-plus attendees (eat your heart out, Emyr Jones Parry) were presented with the facts, heard the case on both sides in a non-confrontational manner and discussed the issues in an informed and thoughtful manner. The result was a wealth of ideas for the site, which we as councillors are committed to ensuring are an integral part of the ongoing discussions as to the best future path for Insole Court.

The Unbearable Etiquette Of Security Passes

2009-01-26T18:12:00.000Z

I am, as Sid and Doris well know, a great procrastinator as a blogger, apt to store something up for ages only to release it at a moment whose logic is apparent only to myself. Such an experience came on Thursday evening, as I prepared to speak on a motion I was seconding on abuse of retrospective planning applications. With the eyes of the webcasting world about to be set upon me, I found myself pondering one of the great questions of modern councillor etiquette.

To wear, or not to wear?

I was never going to be particularly impressed with the security arrangements of democratic facilities; after all, the first security pass I ever possessed was for a nuclear power station, and they tend to take such matters to another level. Heck, I remember watching Peter Hain taking a tour of the control room at Wylfa and reflecting on the fact that I, an employee of the company, would not have been allowed through the front gate at Wylfa, let alone inside the building.

For the democrats it is, of course, a little different; as an old acquaintance from the Cabinet Office reminded me after my first trip to FPC, we have a right to lobby our MP's and that limits the obstacles that can be put in the way. But those inside can help out by their application of the system, which is where the etiquette comes in.

In Parliament I've always found the divide between the chambers interesting; Lords wear their passes, MP's do not. Cynics will of course consider this a symptom of the "don't you know who I am?" syndrome (or, from the opposite direction, of the "I'm a member of the House Of Lords, as if I'd do anything so grubby as turn up and vote" syndrome) and there may be something to that, but there it was.

Now, of course, I'm the one toting plastic, as it were, and the physical arrangements for using it are similar in County Hall and the Palace Of Westminster, obviating the practical need to wear the pass permanently. The split in use exists too, with some wearing theirs religiously, others shunning it except as a practical item.

As for me? It may not be especially obvious on the webcast, but I wear it and will continue to, if only to show solidarity for my former colleagues and the others around the country for whom that slip of plastic is vital to their safety and security.

If You Must Be Wrong, Do It Right

2009-01-13T01:50:00.001Z

As an early Facebook adopter for whom adventures in student politics were an important early activity in the world of social networking, my news feed is regularly stocked with advertisements for whatever cause my contacts from those days are promoting today. Usually there are a great source of entertainment in the "awww, bless, they still think Venezuela is the Garden of Eden" sense, but occasionally one comes along that demands a response.

Tonight's example came courtesy of the event, "Prayer for the Sanctity of Life - against passage of FOCA Bill". For a moment I thought I'd missed an acronym somewhere between FOCA and SOCA, but the legislation involved is not British but American. It's also quite odd. The Freedom Of Choice Act argues that, since pregnant women can and do cross state lines to obtain abortions and since private healthcare providers in the United States engage in inter-state procurement of staff and supplies, provision of abortion is covered by the Commerce Clause and is thus subject only to Federal law. It then prohibits government interference in the exercise of a woman's reproductive rights and applies this prohibition to every law at every level ever passed.

You might imagine that such a broad reform (amounting as it does to the codification in Federal law of Roe v. Wade and the abolition of all state prohibitions on abortion) would have no chance, even in a Democrat-controlled congress. Indeed, FOCA was introduced in 2004 and 2007 and bottled up in committee both times. But there is one little wrinkle, and it is to be found in the list of co-sponsors of the bill;

Obama, Barack (IL)

What's more, when asked in 2007 how he would preserve reproductive rights, President-elect Obama could not have been more forthright;

"The first thing I'd do, as president, is sign the Freedom Of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do."

And so FOCA is very much in play and the pro-life lobby is very afraid that, come January 21st, the bill will make its way down from Capitol Hill, through the post-Inauguration detritus, and under the nib of Barack's presidential pen, hence the Facebook event that led me to all this. It takes the form of an open letter to pro-life activists which claims that FOCA would remove all limitations on abortion in the United States and that this would lead to;

Catholic hospitals closing rather than be forced to perform abortion (FALSE - FOCA only requires that the government not prevent individuals from having any way to terminate, not that any government-funded healthcare provider must provide terminations)
Unlimited legal partial-birth abortions (FALSE - FOCA only protects the right to terminate unviable foetuses, except when the mother's health is at risk)
Banning of parental notification (FALSE - Well, okay, this one is a bit of a gray area, but I don't have any reason to believe this was a primary intent of the authors)
A minimum of 100,000 more abortions a year (FALSE - Hopefully I don't have to explain the utter stupidity of using the word minimum in this statement, as if the bill says 100,000 more abortions must be carried out)

Most incredibly, the letter claims that, because the bill puts the Federal government in charge of abortion, women may in future be forced to abort foetuses with Down's Syndrome or forced to abort if they have too many children (FALSE - What kind of "all government is inherently evil" Kool-Aid do you have to be drinking to be that paranoid?)

Well actually, I know exactly what kind of Kool-Aid you have to be drinking to be that paranoid, because the letter is signed by the person who's serving it.

David Alton

The moral question is one thing; David has every right to believe what he does now, just as he had every right to do so when he sat on our benches, and I would defend that right even though I fundamentally disagree with what he believes. But it is unconscionable for any parliamentarian, of whatever affiliation, to use their position to propagate such palpable untruths. As for the suggestion that democratically-elected parliaments are likely to order women to have abortions against their will, that flat out brings Parliament into disrepute, something for which Baron Alton should be subject to sanction by the house.

The Gravy Train Terminates Here

2009-01-09T20:41:00.001Z

Of all the various voices that provide announcements on Britain's railway stations, my favourite is Phil Sayer's, as heard at Birmingham New Street. And right now, I have one of his announcements swirling round my head;

"The next train to arrive at platform 4b is the gravy train from Privatisation. This train will terminate here. All change please, all change."

I have no doubt that today's news of 300 job losses at Southeastern heralds the start of yet another bout of poverty pleas from the members of the Association of Train Operating Companies. That such pleas will be, what's the technical term... oh yes, bollocks, goes without saying. Unfortunately however, there may be an unlearnt lesson from the credit crunch waiting to bite us all on the behind.

Much as I dislike Comrade Bob Crow, I can but agree with his analysis of Southeastern's position; I should think most businesses in Britain right now lie awake at night dreaming of 13% revenue growth (heck, the way things are going some of them probably really do lie awake at night dreaming of being spat at in the face, but here endeth the pop culture reference.)

Southeastern's answer to all this is very revealing, because what they blame is "reduced passenger journey growth". So the problem isn't that passenger numbers are falling, or that fares are going down; it's that, at a time when fares are going up, passenger numbers aren't going up fast enough.

Or in other words, it's not that they're making losses, it's that they're not making big enough profits.

I'm sure the economists will tell me that such behaviour is entirely normal and proper, and they may not be wrong. But this is something more than that. The original case for privatisation depended on massive passenger growth and as a result, the operating companies have been able to promise bigger and better profits for years. Now, with the economy in general failing to deliver passenger growth as it has previously and with the railway infrastructure unable to cope with the number of passengers already in the system, delivering on those promises is rapidly becoming impossible.

So, a company with a culture of sky-is-the-limit growth faced with a broader infrastructure that can't deliver its fundamental product fast enough to meet its promises? Doesn't that sound an awful lot like Northern Rock?

The biggest difference is that, with the train operating companies, HMG already has its hand in its pocket and a history of jacking up subsidies at the first hint of collapse. Still, if the culture in the train operating companies really is so rotten that they can't cope with running run-of-the-mill solvent businesses rather than glorified Ponzi schemes on wheels, yon Scunner Broon may find the dreaded N-word (i.e. nationalisation) coming over the hill, and with great big pointy teeth to boot.

Set Course, Smug Factor Five

2009-01-07T22:35:00.004Z

I don't get to gloat with this blog very often, so I'm not going to pass up the opportunity when it's handed to me on a plate. Regular readers (by which I mean Sid and Doris) may remember this piece from September, highlighting a study that assessed the performance of a future large-scale wind farm programme using Met Office wind speed data.

The primary finding of said study was that the peak winter electricity demand normally coincides with a cold snap caused by a stalled high-pressure system which, being a high-pressure system, produces very little wind.

A bit like the one we're having now, in fact.

I believe that great philosopher of our times, Ace Ventura, put it best when he said, "Can you feel that buddy, huh? Huh? Huh?"

An Unfortunate Echo

2008-12-19T16:22:00.001Z

Yesterday's Full Council meeting raised an important question of journalistic ethics; namely, should a journalist publish words that were spoken in a meeting but then struck from the record? Unfortunately for David James of the South Wales Echo, the answer is not if the reason they were struck from the record is as watertight as a mermaid's brassiere.

Perhaps inevitably there was something of an end of term feel to the meeting, with plenty of entertainment for the layman between two walkouts (one by the Labour and Conservatives en masse, the other by the Labour Group Leader in a bizarre fit of pique) an assortment of malapropisms and a devastatingly embarrassing performance from one Tory councillor as he tried to deny that a petition he'd submitted to the Welsh Assembly asked for what it said on the tin, namely concreting over part of an allotment.

The main order of business, however, was a Conservative motion calling for a zero Council Tax increase in 2009/10. The debate was lengthy and of a high standard, covering many of the technical issues surrounding local government financing and delving into the philosophical basis of property taxes. The mainstay of it all was the fundamental truth that actually, the Conservatives have been asking for this for years and every time they do, the alternative budget they come up with means cuts, cuts and more cuts.

Naturally, the Leader of the Conservative Group, David Walker, denied that this was the case (falling, much like his petitionally-challenged colleague, into the trap of of trying to deny the contents of publicly available documents). But as they went on, his relatively rent-a-Tory comments headed off on a tangent into bizarre (as in “I'll show you the proof, but not right now”) allegations of corrupt overtime practices in refuse collection. But instead of letting the ante-upping rest at corrupt, Cllr Walker decided to find a more powerful adjective.

Spanish

Cllr McEvoy rightly complained to the Lord Mayor and, to his credit, Cllr Walker withdrew the comment immediately. Unfortunately, this didn't stop the slur being repeated in the first line of the coverage of the debate in today's Echo.

I don't for a second believe that anyone involved meant any ill will by any of this. I do, however, think that the record should show that the slur did not pass unchallenged and that we took a firm stance on comments that, however traditional they may be, are clearly no longer acceptable.

Nice Rhetoric, Shame You're Such A Berk

2008-12-17T07:51:00.001Z

With the year drawing to a close it's time to get off the fence and finally announce the recipient of the 2008 Scunner Broon Award for Stupidest Political Quote Of The Year. As has been discussed previously, it's been a difficult one to judge, what with the number of exceptional individual candidates, the broad body of work of Sarah Palin and, ultimately, a winner whose reason for opening his big trap in the first place was an issue I fielded complaints about.

Investment in the library service has been one of the Liberal Democrats' proudest accomplishments during our time running Cardiff, with two new libraries built, one under construction and three planned, in addition to four refurbishments. The crowning glory of that investment will be the new Central Library, a replacement for the old library whose site now forms part of the St Davids 2 development.

As plans for the move, first to a temporary facility and then to the new building were developed, the status of the library's various special collections had to be considered. These collections, amounting to a total of some 18,000 items, were largely uncatalogued and unsuitable either for general use or for housing in general library facilities. Retaining the whole of the special collections would cost £2-3million (or to put it another way, 2-3% on Council Tax), approximately the same as their commercial value.

The commercial value matters because the powers that central government in its usual patronising fashion deigns to bestow on the council are quite unsentimental. As far as the law is concerned, these collections are an asset and as such, the council is required to achieve the best value if that asset is to be disposed of. As a result, in January 2007 the Executive (in a public meeting, no less) decided to seek a specialist auctioneer to sell those elements of the special collections that were not of specific local or national interest or in the Welsh language. The Minister For Smoking In The Eli Jenkins was fully appraised of the plan and raised no concerns.

Eighteen months later the first tranche of items was sent to Bonham's and duly appeared in a sales catalogue, at which point all hell broke loose. Academics protested to each other and to the council, the opposition groups on the council claimed they were duped, Private Eye got on its high horse and the now conveniently Minister For Not Smoking In The Eli Jenkins announced that he was in fact concerned and that discussions should take place between interested parties. Which is where we are now, with a group of interested parties from academia and heritage organisations working to identify those items that should be retained.

But where you may ask is the moment of utter verbal lunacy? (And more importantly, would you mind hurrying it along, you've already wasted plenty of my time going on about the minutiae of library administration...)

The important detail in all of this is that the Minister For Not Smoking In The Eli Jenkins is a member of Plaid. And as part of the unique constitutional settlement that Plaid seem to have developed with One Wales (you know, the one that goes “this Plaid is fictitious and any resemblance to Plaids that are members of the government coalition is entirely coincidental”) any statement by a Plaid minister must be accompanied by one from a Plaid backbencher in order to ensure deniability.

In this case it fell to Chris Franks, AM for South Wales Central (The bits that Leanne Wood doesn't give a s**t about) to respond for the 1974 Committee with this little gem;

“Cardiff is the only European capital city without a National Library or National Archive”

And this is the nub of the matter, because a large proportion of the special collections were donated to the then town in the late 19^th Century in order to bolster Cardiff's bid to house a National Library of Wales. After a long and bitter battle, Cardiff did not succeed.

Because Aberystwyth did.

As a quizzer, I am rather unforgiving of ignorance of fairly basic facts, particularly ones that have actually been the subject of questions on University Challenge this year! As a student of semantics in politics, therefore, I am especially unforgiving of statements like this that grasp the nettle in rhetoric, only to let go at the first sign of reality.

So Chris Franks, for boldly asserting in public that a major national institution should be uprooted from Plaid's top Westminster target seat and relocated to Cardiff, the Scunner Broon Award is yours.

Spotting The Difference The Llafur Way

2008-12-07T06:42:00.002Z

Things have come to a pretty pass when you can't rely on parliamentary researchers to bunk off properly. I mean, I'm fairly sure iPlayer works on Welsh Assembly computers, which means the Labour Party have no excuse for not realising that the viewing public would have access to all three versions of their Queen's Speech PPB and would thus be able to play a little bit of spot the difference.

The master template is, I suppose, inevitable; images of a fast-paced global economy interspersed with near-subliminal flashes of one B.H. Obama and lots of statesmanlike shots of yon Scunner Broon. But even the template is susceptible to change; while “Britain” and Wales enjoy a fade over a clip of the Bank Of England, Scotland gets a Saltire in front of a moodily sunlit tenement.

Scotland's slogan is also different; while Labour is Standing Up For “Britain” and Llafur is Standing Up For Wales, Labarach (and let the record show I had to dig that up from the Scots Gaelic version of Wikipedia, as neither Scottish Labour nor any of their parliamentarians appear to have bothered to have a Gaelic website) merely offer A Fairer Scotland, lazy buggers.

Speaking of inevitability, it's Wabbroon, live and direct from, well, the caption says UN Headquarters, but if that's any room in a building completed in 1950 I'm a monkey's uncle. Mind you, describing it as a Webcameron rip-off is the charitable interpretation; crueller voices might suggest that they're doing the whole thing on the cheap, what with the credit crunch and the corrupt party finances (not necessarily in that order...)

More statesmanlikeness, then a strange difference; while the “British” version lingers on a shot of Brown networking in a posh hotel room, the Scottish and Welsh versions cut back to the Wabbroon monologue. A few moments later, Scotland and Wales zoom in on a somewhat less subliminal Obama moment, while “Britain” jump cuts to the close up after a brief shot of a Brown/Darling press conference.

For a moment, I'm wondering if this is just a function of the production process, that a final version was sent to the Celts to add their own bits, only for the Anglo-Saxons to do some fiddling of their own. Then a third shared visual appears, and it's the strangest of the lot; while “Britain” gets a few seconds of the London Stock Exchange, Scotland and Wales see their umpteenth busy shopping street pass by, except this one is very clearly identifiable because Buchanan Street Station on the Glasgow Subway is very obviously slap bang in the middle of it.

Do we now have Wales receiving Scotland's leftovers from the editing suite? No, it turns out that we have an extra section that only appears in the “British” version. Over more images of stock tickers and the Docklands, Brown's monologue gains this;

"There are those like the Conservatives who want to let the recession run its course. They are wrong. Failure to act in the past has increased both the length and depth of recessions."

Now excuse me while I geek; a Midland Mainline Class 222 Meridian sweeps through the countryside, then we cut to Gordon and Sarah (surprised it took over a minute to get her in there) inside a Virgin Trains Class 390 Pendolino... [/geek]

Then the sort of difference that actually really angers me. In “Britain”, the caption proudly proclaims that we're seeing Gordon touring the Jaguar factory at Castle Bromwich; the Scots and Welsh are not so informed. Note ye that there are precisely zero car assembly lines in Scotland and Wales; do Labour really think we're stupid enough not to notice that a factory must logically be in “Britain” if we're not told that it is?

And lo, the opt-out arrives, signalled by another train image, this time a Virgin Trains Class 221 Super Voyager at Sandwell and Dudley station. I'm almost willing to let them have that one; since there's no type of train operated by any company that could pass through any station on the way to both Scotland and Wales, I'll take them at least picking a train travelling on a route that could lead to either.

The opt-outs themselves raise an important technical question because what we get are the Murphy Boys talking to camera. This isn't a particularly smart political move; after all, I'm actively interested in Welsh politics and even I couldn't give a flying **** what Paul Murphy does, so the chances of anyone less prepared for it caring are fairly remote. If it's a matter of the legislation requiring only parliamentarians appear in a parliamentary broadcast, fair enough, but in that case why did the SNP broadcast appear on Thursday in Scotland instead of the Conservative one? It must be on the basis of their position in the Scottish Parliament, because if it was based on their Westminster representation, the Thursday broadcast in Wales would have been the Lib Dem one...

And then we have three monologues instead of one, albeit with a little bit of cross-referencing. In “Britain”, Brown blathers on, listing just about everything any government might be called upon to do and suggesting it might be an idea that they do it well, bookended extraordinarily by a brief bit of walk-and-talk that almost looked human until he decided that he only had one hand gesture and by gum he was sticking to it.

In Scotland, Jim Murphy might as well have “The SNP Are Nutters” tattooed to his forehead and once he's got through his platitudes on employment, Iain Gray appears (adding more mystery to my point about the Murphy Boys) to push specific policies on apprenticeships and schools PFIs. Iain tries the walk-and-talk too, but is criminally let down by a less mobile camera that exposes his rather unusual gait.

As for Wales, it's the well-worn line about two Labour governments, in Westminster and Butetown, working together. Setting aside the evidence that this is bollocks (if it were true we wouldn't be having rows about the 27 Ways To Ditch An LCO) it also strikes me as pretty poor politics. Looking ahead to 2011, even if they don't want to think it'll happen, Llafur must recognise that they might need to play the anti-Tory duopoly card; trumpeting the advantages of the partnership now makes that card all the harder to play. Equally, talking about the government as if it's yours and yours alone can only help Plaid's clear One Wales strategy of denying all knowledge of being involved in it. Then again, that analysis presumes that Llafur can find their butts with both hands and it's not as if we have a great deal of evidence of that being the case...

Oh No, This Is The Road... To Preston

2008-12-05T15:52:00.003Z

Never let it be said that the British don't know how to milk an anniversary to within an inch of its life. Between the local authority and the combined forces of the road lobby, much is being made of the fiftieth anniversary of Britain's first motorway; not the M1, but the Preston Bypass (now M6 J29 to M55 J1).

To add to the joy, Britain's newest motorway also opens today. Or to think of it another way, Britain's oldest motorway gets finished today.

Laugh? I nearly cried.

It's a testament to the level of chaos that passes for administration in this country that the best record of how the motorway network got to where it is comes not from government but from the enthusiasts. It's a history that every politician at every level should acquaint themselves with, if only to understand just how ludicrously ambitious politicians can get; you haven't truly understood the political animal until you've considered the possibility of the M13 Southend Southern Bypass (give it a moment, you'll work it out...) or the extent to which the M25 is, in fact, two different motorways hastily cobbled together with the civil engineering equivalent of gaffer tape...

The result, half a century on, is a classic Whitehall bodge job that spent so much of its time and political capital on London that it never managed to develop a coherent strategy for the rest of the country. There are roads that are almost motorways but not quite (A55), roads that were originally meant to be motorways but aren't (A50), roads that are motorways but don't need to be (M180) and the biggest category of the lot, motorways that give up before they get there (M4, M5, M42, M56, M62...)

Perhaps the most surprising element for those of us brought up on the idea that all new roads are evil a la Newbury and Twyford Down is that things are still progressing. With the Cumberland Gap now filled there's a continuous motorway from London to Glasgow and work is due to start soon on the last section of the motorway from London to Newcastle. As ever with these things, the Scottish Parliament is pushing on too (the M77 Kilmarnock extension is already open, soon to be followed by the M74 Central Glasgow extension and the completions of the M80 Glasgow-Stirling and M8 Glasgow-Edinburgh routes) and the Welsh Assembly, erm, well, yeah...

Still, it's not exactly the awe-inspiring future the pioneers of 1958 had in mind and neither is it likely to make much of a difference to the daily jams experienced by so many millions of people. Until the political will exists to actually tackle any mode of transport head on (third runways notwithstanding) the future of the motorways, and indeed everything else, looks increasingly congested.

The Julian Lewis List

2008-12-01T12:31:00.001Z

One of the problems of having a memory like mine, and indeed a propensity for atopicality like mine, is the extent to which things will crop up long after they were said. The whole house moving process has brought one such nugget back to the surface as it has now become rather more relevant to my own experience than it was before. That nugget is the Freedom of Information (Parliament and National Assembly For Wales) Order 2008.

The John Lewis List's dominance of the nation's political discourse seems an age away now, but for a while it was the only story in town. True to form, Parliament leapt into action... to save their own skins. The result was an exemption protecting the home addresses of MPs, AMs and Lords from release under the Freedom of Information Act. The campaign to secure the exemption was spearheaded by Julian Lewis (no relation), MP for New Forest East, who spoke at length about the risk of an Al-Qaeda letter bomb-spamming campaign against MPs.

That's all very well and probably proper, although I don't share Dr Lewis's faith in the idea that his local militant cell will be unable to find the address information he and his colleagues are required to give at election time because it doesn't come up on Google. But while MPs were getting their knickers in a twist about a possible change to the status quo, it strikes me that they gave very little thought to the one area of government where disclosure of addresses already is the status quo; councillors.

It is true that councillors do not have to disclose their home addresses; indeed, of Cardiff's 75 councillors, five presently do not do so. Culturally, however, we are very much expected to do so and that cultural expectation does have a tangible effect on our work. I did not disclose my previous address as I was a lodger and did not feel it was fair to the permanent resident of the house to place their address on record; in that time, I definitely received less letters than my ward colleague whose address was and is disclosed.

Ultimately, not disclosing a home address does not make MPs or AMs appear to be less contactable; they have constituency offices and people are happy to write to the House Of Commons or the Senedd as they think of these places as the group of members. When writing to a councillor at County Hall, however, people think of it as The Council, a monolithic house of bureaucracy within which their letter will surely either be lost or “lost”. It isn't true by any means, a councillor's post is just as secure and just as sure to reach them via County Hall as it is to a home address, but the cultural perception is there.

Meanwhile, we councillors may be somewhat less subject to possible terrorist attack than our parliamentary colleagues (though in such matters it pays not to be presumptuous as to what Al-Qaeda may or may not consider getting up to) but we're no less likely to face identity fraud or physical or sexual harassment than them.

Unfortunately I don't have any clever idea for solving the problem; legislating against years of cultural expectation is rarely a fruitful task. What the whole sorry tale underlines, however, is the problem of Parliament's inflated sense of its own importance. The potential security implications for councillors weren't so much as mentioned; heck, I'm half surprised the Assembly even got a look in. As ever, until local government is considered part of the system rather than a separate adjunct to it, all of government will be the poorer for it.

Misuse Of The Journalists Prefix

2008-11-28T18:26:00.002Z

I think it's safe to say that the two weeks encompassing all of the hustings for your party's leadership election are a pretty bad time for a blogger to be distinctly unwell and in the middle of moving house. At such times, what you really need to get your blogging energy flowing is for a journalist to say something pathetically, moronically insulting.

Matt Withers of The Western Mail, you are the weakest link, goodbye.

In fairness to Matt, the offending article has the whiff of sub-editorial incompetence to it. With Patrick Jones' poetry and its non-reading still a live issue, I'll forgive him for taking a press release from an insignificant “religious discrimination” (read: institutionalisation of religious hatred) campaigner and turning it into a “controversy” over an appearance by Brian Gibbons AM, Minister for Social Justice, at a conference on religious equality organised by the British Humanist Association and funded by way of a £35,000 grant from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Then again, the press release is clearly a classic of blinkered stupidity, as the fuller quote reported in the Torygraph demonstrates;

"It's a bit like paying the Taliban to lecture on women's rights. There's nothing wrong with the British Humanist Association organising seminars, but it's the fact that they're getting public money. There is the question of whether this is what Government money should be going for, particularly in a time of recession. If we're having a debate on religion, should we be paying one side of the argument to hold it, especially with public money?"

I'll let the National Secular Society's fairly extensive list of government handouts to faith groups for propaganda purposes do the job of rebutting the “controversy” itself. I'll even allow the casual propagating of the Dr Death moniker for our own Evan Harris slide (but way to go cribbing from the Daily Mail there!) No, what got my hackles up was the opening paragraph;

"The Assembly Government has defended the decision of a senior Minister to speak at a controversial conference organised by an anti-religious group."

Let's be absolutely clear; neither the BHA nor the many thousands of humanists across the country (myself included) have any problem with any individual practising any religion of their choice. We do however have serious concerns about the institutionalisation of religious privilege in service provision and in law. Summarising such a position as flat-out anti-religious is nothing short of insulting, both to the BHA and to humanists nationwide.

Unhappy Divergence From The Work Of Handel

2008-11-10T23:20:00.000Z

See, there I was ready to break the habit of a lifetime and trumpet a party press release only to find that, in a moment of supreme irony, it failed to turn up on time...

Actually, that's a little unfair; recourse to Google finds the errant document on Cllr Steve Beasant's website and in the news section of the Institute of Transport Management. But this does not represent the sort of fanfare we need for a policy announcement we should be wrapping round a brick and hurling at Geoff Hoon's head.

Admittedly, I wish it was still Ruth Kelly's head we'd be hurling it at. I was always going to find her to be morally repugnant at the best of times, but remarkably I found her pronouncements on expansion of the rail network even more offensive than her moral CV. Question after question from local members desperate for new railway lines to relieve congestion and improve transport links in their area were batted away with, “we believe that lengthening trains and platforms is the best way to increase capacity on the network”, a statement so intensely moronic it isn't funny.

You'll imagine how much my heart was lifted to see us publishing a list of line and station reopenings, line redoublings and electrification projects . The list includes my old favourite the Varsity Line and is so comprehensive it includes schemes even I hadn't thought of. With a headline talking of rolling back Beeching, it's a fantastic announcement, a bold investment in infrastructure that the public want and the other parties are too stupid to propose.

And yet, upon the party website there's nary a mention and not even a story wedged down the back of BBC News Online. I don't for much, but when I get it, it'd be nice if we could make a song and dance about it.

Tales Of The Overexpected

2008-11-06T23:47:00.001Z

I suppose one of the other reasons for my dearth of council-related posts is that it's been pretty rare so far for me to come away from a council meeting angry. No doubt that's one of the advantages of being a member of the ruling coalition, but either way it is the way of things thus far. I was particularly surprised, therefore, to find myself angry on my return home from two consecutive council meetings today. But then, in both of those meetings senior councillors attacked a service that the Liberal Democrats saved in the face of craven political incompetence, in some cases by their own parties.

The tale of 101 starts with Labour's 2005 Manifesto;

“Not all problems need a 999 response, so a single phone number staffed by police, local councils and other local services will be available across the country to deal with anti-social behaviour and other non-emergency problems”

And lo it came to pass that a year later there was a trial...

And a year later, they found that the trial was such a phenomenal success that they abandoned it...

You'd think the whole thing was being run by the Home Office under a Labour secretary of state...

As is often our wont, the Liberal Democrats jumped to the defence of an important local service and did a sterling job of retaining the existing trials (of the five trial areas, it's not exactly a coincidence that the three to retain were Cardiff, Sheffield and Hampshire...) In the Assembly, Mike German jumped into the fray, eliciting this Scunner Broon award nominee from Rhodri Morgan;

“It would set an undesirable precedent if, every time the UK Government could not afford to continue a scheme through its departmental budget, the automatic assumption was that it would be funded by the Assembly instead. You can imagine that it would start to withdraw from a range of schemes in the hope that the Assembly, the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive would start picking those up instead”

Nevertheless 101 did survive in Cardiff, a result I can but hope was assisted by the Facebook campaign run by yours truly. And yet, plenty of councillors are unhappy, although today was the first time I'd heard such criticism in such vituperative form or in a public meeting.

The primary problem, however, is a simple case of unrealistic expectations. 101 is only a phone number; it does a fantastic job of ensuring that non-emergency issues are reported to the right authority more easily and more rapidly. Its mere existence does not cause those issues to suddenly become emergencies, however; it just means that they are dealt with in good time as opposed to not being dealt with at all.

Those councillors who have a problem with 101 should remember that that in itself is a massive step forward; perhaps the most remarkable result of the 101 trial was that referrals to the noise nuisance team went up by 500%. One of my commonest refrains as a councillor is that, while the system may be a bit slow and creaky, it is infinitely better to be inside the process than outside of it. There may be legitimate concerns about feedback from 101 on case progress, but we as councillors should be able to go beyond individual cases to look at the performance data and realise what an outstanding job 101 is doing.

One Nation Conservatism; Not So Much A Philosophy, More A Statement Of Foreign Policy

2008-10-23T23:21:00.001+01:00

Last week's reference to my Labour colleagues on Cardiff Council gave me cause to consider my reticence to this point towards blogging on council matters. At one level, this blog was never going to become a repository for ward news because that sort of thing was never its purpose when it started two years and one major city ago and it still isn't. Sooner or later I'm sure there will be a Llandaff and Danescourt Focus Team blog, but that's for another day.

As for city-wide issues, I've always recognised that I'm a member of the ruling group and that I have responsibilities to my colleagues. Our executive team is one of the very best in the country and I would not want anything that might appear on these pages to make it harder for them to do their job. Keeping my own counsel is difficult at times; there's one ongoing story I'd really like to blog about because it has given us the winner of the 2008 Scunner Broon Award for Stupidest Political Quote Of The Year, but I'll save that for the appropriate juncture.

Nevertheless, one thing you do learn very quickly in this business is that the council is a reasonably decent microcosm of the world of electoral politics everywhere and the examples worthy of note abound. One such came last Tuesday at Environmental Scrutiny Committee, where we received a presentation from the leader of the Sustainable Development team as part of the Executive response to a scrutiny report on that subject.

What was remarkable was the questioning that followed from the two Conservative members of the committee. The first enquired about the scientific basis of the team's work, leading to a brief discussion between him and our chair about whether it was most or the vast majority of scientists who think climate change is real and anthropogenic. The second went even further, asking in all seriousness whether the council's 60% carbon emission reduction target had taken into account the actions of China, India and the USA...

And yet, the thing to note is that it's not remarkable at all. Beneath the flaky veneer of the Cameron revolution, these are the members the Conservative Party actually has; old white men for whom the one nation is Britain. Dave's thesis, of course, it that they aren't important in the grand scheme of things and that it is the Goves and Greenings and Warsis of this world that matter. But while in Cardiff we're lucky that they're only the official opposition, it is traditional conservatives like these who are running councils and Conservative Associations up and down England and will have a big say in the actions of any future Cameron government.

The Impossibility Of Normality

2008-10-22T22:12:00.002+01:00

I've been trying and failing to catch up on a backlog of blog topics over the last few days, but the work of a councillor must come first and rightly so. What's less helpful is when little nuggets are thrown your way and your feel the need to disgorge them to the blogosphere asap, thus interrupting the carefully laid plans.

Nevertheless, I must divert your attention to the latest Zogby poll (courtesy of Matt Drudge), not for the numbers (because my poll policy is pretty much the same as Lib Dem Voice's) but for the sheer depth of the demographic analysis...

"Three big days for Obama. Anything can happen, but time is running short for McCain. These numbers, if they hold, are blowout numbers. They fit the 1980 model with Reagan's victory over Carter -- but they are happening 12 days before Reagan blasted ahead. If Obama wins like this we can be talking not only victory but realignment: he leads by 27 points among Independents, 27 points among those who have already voted, 16 among newly registered voters, 31 among Hispanics, 93%-2% among African Americans, 16 among women, 27 among those 18-29, 5 among 30-49 year olds, 8 among 50-64s, 4 among those over 65, 25 among Moderates, and 12 among Catholics (which is better than Bill Clinton's 10-point victory among Catholics in 1996). He leads with men by 2 points, and is down among whites by only 6 points, down 2 in armed forces households, 3 among investors, and is tied among NASCAR fans."

As a NASCAR fan myself (highlights on Five, Tuesday night/Wednesday morning at 2am) I'm all in favour of the last category, but you have to ask yourself; if the candidates and their campaign teams are getting that depth of information and worrying about demographic groups with that level of finesse, how have they stayed sane this long?

Live From Long Island

2008-10-16T03:45:00.000+01:00

There's something disturbingly onanistic about enjoying blogging an event while not actually enjoying the event. Still, as it appears to be the only way I can haul myself through a presidential debate, here I am again in the company of the Channel Formerly Known As News 24.

Or rather I would be, except my digibox for some reason can't pick up one of the BBC multiplexes so I can only get analogue BBC2 and in one of those engineering works during major sporting event moments, BBC2 is giving us a replay of Ding Junhui vs Graham Holt and not BBC News as it normally would be now. What I have, therefore, is Sky News, which hopefully isn't going to piss me off by cutting to the ads in due course.

The table format feels rather like a boxing match in a football stadium, with the action dwarfed by the surroundings. There's a fundamental dichotomy in the format; the candidates are closer than they've been before, but the table is in the way to prevent them taking swings at each other. Again, right from the start there's a difference in style, with McCain talking to the format and Obama talking to the camera.

Unsurprisingly McCain ducks the first exchange when Obama pins his plan to help homeowners as another bailout to the banks, instead leading with the story of Barack and the plumber from Ohio. That exchange reminds me once again of that great Bartletism; “That's the problem with the American Dream, everybody's preparing for the day they're going to be rich.”

Still, it's a good exchange to have, because it really is about the fundamental questions, about trickle-down versus trickle-up. It's a debate I'd kind of like us to have too; redistribution is fine if it allows, as Obama suggests, Joe the Plumber to be able to start his own business sooner. That sort of economic change matches the political change we as Lib Dems are looking for.

In the first of what may be many recommendations tonight, if you haven't seen Simon Schama's new series yet, catch it on iPlayer. The idea that the American Dream is finally facing the reality that there is a limit to the resources the USA can provide is critical to the answers we're seeing to question two, with Obama tightening the belts and McCain looking for new ways to scrape the barrel.

Interesting that McCain again brings up the projector in the planetarium; if my first refutation of that wasn't enough, consider that other West Wing classic, the four-hundred dollar ash tray. On the matter of balanced budgets generally, McCain brings up the spending freeze in New York; I'd refer you to my favourite political columnist, Tuesday Morning Quarterback, for an intriguing look at why balanced budgets may not be the Washington problem you think.

The copycatting here is quite breathtaking; McCain sledgehammers in with an “I am not Spock” moment, then Obama responds listing the rows he's had with the oft-forgotten core vote of the Democratic Party (the teachers unions and environmentalists).

Rarely has the answer to a question been so long when a simple no would suffice. Asking them to say what the ads have said to their faces is absolutely right, but the answers are unsurprisingly evasive on both sides. McCain calls Obama out again on the town hall meetings, which works less well after he failed to kick butt in the one we had. He also keeps going to the amount of money spent, which is fine if people care about the nuances of electoral law but how likely is that? All raising the money suggests is that Obama has raised more money than anyone ever, which at some point has to reinforce the faith so many people have in him.

The result is a pox on both houses, though my feeling is that Obama's answers are more statesmanlike and more about the culture and the politics, rather than the details of the attack ads. It might work for McCain, but Obama got to make a full defence and the discussion was about McCain attacking Obama and not the other way around. Again, not being a voter it's difficult to know.

The questions continue to be excellent; “why is your running mate better than his?” is wonderfully playground. Obama's answer is entirely about Biden, with not a hint of kicking Palin while she's down. Most interesting is how McCain opens with “America has gotten to know Sarah Palin”; hang on, the central plank of your campaign is that we don't know Obama after two years of a campaign and now you're saying they know Palin after two months? While we're on her, if you haven't seen this John Cleese video, you really should...

It's Bartletisms again though, as McCain mentions and then Obama reiterates that Palin has united the Republican Party; I can't tell you how much I wanted a “what you've done is bring the right together with the far right.” Then again, I did have the visceral thrill of McCain describing the partition of Iraq as cockamamie and Iraq as a whole as united; as a supporter of Kurdistan I got a major kick out of that piece of stupidity.

My one worry with Obama is that he's very good with numbers, which I love but you have to wonder whether the voters do. McCain's attack, “it's eloquent but you have to look carefully at the words” is the right one and it's a shame he gets it through on one of my great bugbears, free trade agreements without labour rights requirements; and as I'm reading Mark Thomas' book on Coca-Cola and the murder of trade union workers in Colombia, I'm delighted that he raised them in showing why free trade with Colombia isn't the no-brainer McCain says it is.

The image of this debate is becoming clear, however; Obama smiling that big toothy grin as McCain speaks. He's not wrong to be smiling, but it's one of those attitude things that appear to be so important in the response to these debates stateside.

Healthcare is the American policy issue I think we would understand the least, given our commitment as a nation to socialised medicine. It's also the issue that was best dealt with by Matt Santos in the West Wing debate and as Obama covers that same ground I'm willing him to deliver the beatdown; instead we get the sanitised version. Following that up is another massive question, the Roe v Wade test for Supreme Court nominees. McCain won't impose one, which is fine but it ignores the relative level of scrutiny involved; if you impose a litmus test as a Senator, that happens on the floor of the Senate, when you do so as President it stays within the Oval Office (and again, the West Wing provides some interesting primers on what the White House can do in that process). I get the feeling that I actually disagree with Obama on abortion too, it being another Obama-Santos parallel, but I'd much rather have my disagreement with him making that choice than my disagreement with McCain.

Meanwhile, as Liberal Youth prepares to discuss tuition fees at its conference, it's nice to hear Obama making the most fundamental point about fees as they are now assessed; we can't ask aspiring scientists, engineers and doctors to take on a mortgage worth of debt before they've even thought of buying a house. But again, as the education debate continues it's Santos-Vinick again as the failure of Headstart in later grades rears its head. By this point, even I'm surprised by how much West Wing there is in this debate.

And so we come to the end of the end. My guess is that McCain hasn't won this one and again, if he has won it hasn't been the big win he needed. As someone just posted on Facebook, McCain sounds like a man who's beat; we can but hope that that really is the case.

The Oral Application Of My Cash Reserves

2008-10-15T17:14:00.000+01:00

Like most members of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, I've been thinking about this leadership contest for quite some time. It's safe to say that nothing in the two Federal leadership races I've experienced could have prepared me for how different this race feels.

Those two races were of course fairly abstract for me. In 2006 I was just Chair of Manchester Universities Liberal Democrats so I was thinking about it in terms of how it would energise my new members. A year later I at least had a candidate to be passionate about, but even so, as a target council candidate in Cardiff and someone on the edge of the blogosphere the consequences of my decision were not much more than statistical in the grand scheme of things.

A Welsh leadership contest is a different beast entirely, however. Now I'm one of 159 councillors and writing from a small but select blogosphere. What's more, I've worked with and for both candidates in the Assembly, so the experience I have to base my decision on is much deeper than it has been before. And let's be clear, the one thing that experience has at least assured me of is that both Jenny Randerson and Kirsty Williams would be outstanding leaders of our party.

But where are we asking that person to lead us from and, indeed, to? Right now, every party in Wales has its vulnerabilities. Labour have the mess of Her Majesty's Government hanging round their necks and a distinct lack of new energy driving them onwards (I mean, seriously, if Edwina Hart is a credible contender for the leadership of your party, you're absolutely nowhere...) Plaid are struggling to deliver anything from their seats at the big boys table for either their nationalist or communist wings, while also struggling to reconcile those wings into a coherent national package. And while Dave manages to keep the Tories on his side of the daffodil curtain away from their nastiness, on this side the waning influence of Nick Bourne (the man who was a Cameroony before Cameron himself) looks to be leaving the door open for a tougher brand of Conservatism that is both uncomfortable with the idea of Wales and ignorant of the damage it did the last time.

So the first requirement to my mind is a leader who will take the attack to the arrogance and complacency of the other parties. As a party we massively undervalue the ability of our members in the chamber, in the place they're actually employed to work; my belief in Nick Clegg's ability to do well in that arena was a big factor in my support for him and the benefits of that are starting to become apparent.

More importantly, however, I did say that every party in Wales has its vulnerabilities and it is the Liberal Democrats own vulnerabilities that must be addressed by any new leader. I would identify two particular areas of concern;

While individual AM's are known for their own campaigns and called upon by the media to speak on them (Peter Black on fuel poverty, Jenny Randerson on health, Mike German on Severn Bridge tolls, and so forth) there is no great sense that we cover everything and can speak to everything. They may not do it as regularly as we would like, but the media certainly call on Nick Clegg on just about any matter, and I suspect the same was true of Nicol Stephen in Scotland. Through no real fault of his own, however, Mike German has not been called upon in that sense, certainly since Ieuan Wyn became the second centre of power in the Government. Those appearances are crucial to winning the air war and reaching out to areas with no tradition of voting Lib Dem.
The Liberal Democrat Group is now pretty stagnant in terms of its membership, which hasn't changed in any way since March of 2001. I'm seeing an example of the results of that right now in Cardiff, where Labour have only two newly-elected councillors in a group of thirteen and only one councillor who might be described as young; the lack of energy driving that group forward is palpable. Things in our Assembly Group aren't by any means that bad (such places tending as they do to draw in the energetic) and the ongoing policy reviews will help on the ideas front, but the need for voltage is still there.

What we need from our new leader, then, is a positive, combative attitude and a blast of fresh energy in both policy and personality.

Which is why I'm supporting Kirsty Williams.

Kirsty has already shown that desire to take the other parties on, to break the pseudo-socialist consensus and return Wales to its liberal roots. She has the character to take us forward in the chamber and the ideas to take us forward in the hearts and minds of people across the length and breadth of this country. We need nothing short of a sea change from our leader, and Kirsty is the person to deliver it.

Sensible Solutions From 'Oop North

2008-10-10T15:27:00.000+01:00

John Hemming's weekly round-up of the by-elections confirms a fantastic night for us, with gains in Bristol and Wantage and holds in Haringey and Southwark. And yet, none of these are the most fascinating result of the night. For that, we must head north to the land of the wag, for in Knutsford there were by-elections for both the existing Cheshire County Council seat and for a seat on the shadow Cheshire East unitary authority. And lo it came to pass that;

Cheshire CC, Knutsford
Con 1647 (58.7; +11.4)
LD Caroline Aldhouse 818 (29.1; -2.0)
Lab 342 (12.2; -9.4)
Majority 829
Turnout 28%
Con hold
Percentage change is since May 2005

Cheshire East UA, Knutsford
Con 1679 (59.7; +2.1)
LD Caroline Aldhouse 817 (29.0; +5.0)
Lab 318 (11.3; -7.2)
Majority 862
Turnout 28%
Con hold
Percentage change is since May 2008

The unusual factor here is that these are two simultaneous by-elections to essentially the same position; Cheshire East is a shadow authority until next May when it takes over from the County Council, so one job is real until then and the other job becomes real at the same point. As the wards themselves are coterminous (the shadow authority merely uses the existing county council wards, but with three councillors per ward instead of one) you have two identical votes with the same people going into the same polling stations on the same day.

And yet, the results are not identical; indeed, not only did seven more people vote in the unitary than in the county, there was a twenty-two vote swing from Labour to Conservative in the unitary over the county ballot.

There is, however, a possible reason; while the Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates in both elections were the same, the Conservative candidates were not. The new County Councillor is a sitting borough councillor for part of the town, meaning she now has two jobs both of which are due to be abolished. Meanwhile, the new member of the unitary is the current Chairman of Cheshire County Council, on which he represents the neighbouring Bucklow ward.

The question, then, is why the new unitary authority member is changing seats. After all, Bucklow has three Conservative members of the unitary, all elected in May this year. Was he deselected in his own ward in May only to be thrown a lifebelt next door? If not, why does he want to stand for a different ward in October when clearly he didn't want to do so in May? Neither scenario suggests that the burghers of Knutsford have done well out of this little exercise in democracy.

In Defence Of Lembit; Or, Why Targets Don't Work (Part 94)

2008-10-09T23:11:00.001+01:00

I thought that those who think that the boy Öpik can't appear in front of a camera without a harmonica, a Z-list celebrity partner and a picture of an asteroid should be pointed towards his appearance on Wales Tonight giving a sombre, measured reaction to a sombre story. Then again, I should warn you both that ITV's answer to iPlayer is criminally inept and that the video you are about to see may be proceeded by scenes of a Daily Hate Mail advertising nature that some viewers may find distressing...

The story itself, however, gives an important insight into what happens when you give a target culture to a group of people almost specifically recruited to be innumerate. In this case, a family in Newtown, Powys have been waiting since August for a response to their claim to the Social Fund for help paying for a family funeral. ITV Wales approached the Department for Work and Pensions for a comment and they duly responded;

"...we aim to clear all such applications within sixteen working days. So far this year in Wales we have cleared 1,800 applications with an average clearance time of fourteen days, so we are exceeding that target."

Oh dear me no. For those who need it spelled out, when the target is 100% clearance at sixteen days, an average clearance time of fourteen days means that the 100% clearance time is insultingly pathetic and could easily be twice the sixteen day target. To say that you are meeting a complete clearance target when the average clearance is better you must by definition be either illiterate or innumerate; to say I'm not surprised to see a government response be either would be a colossal understatement...

Live From The Grand Old Town Hally

2008-10-08T03:38:00.001+01:00

To be honest, I've struggled with the first two rounds of debate season. I tried to watch both on iPlayer but found myself rapidly not caring about either. Maybe that's a function of my having made my mind up long before even the primaries, but it didn't feel right to be disinterested in it. And so I promised myself to watch at least one of the debates live, which is why I'm in front of News 24 tonight.

The Town Hall format is interesting, even to a Briton brought up in the era of Question Time where public interrogation of politicians is a weekly event. What is immediately striking is the difficulty, even at the linguistic level, for either candidate to connect with the audience. Obama opens up answering on actions to bail out citizens as well as banks, but he has to talk about “you” because talking about “us” would be ludicrous; he's not feeling the pinch because he's on a senator's salary and so is McCain. But once you say you, what you're saying is very different.

It's also immediately clear why all the hype was about McCain's ability in this format. In that first answer he does a very good job of talking both to the questioner and to the whole audience; Obama fixates on the questioner. When Tom Brokaw follows up, however, it's the other way around, McCain talking to the chair while Obama talks to the crowd.

Whether it's the format or the ads, there's definitely a more direct aspect to the exchanges. Then again, I've always taken the view that there's a difference between pointing out facts about your opponent and saying they blow goats and the exchanges here are clearly about each other's record. The result is a plague on both your houses and lo, Obama's pivot is away from the row about the facts and towards the practicalities for the questioner.

The saddest thing about the financial debate is how much both sides have reached towards energy independence. By definition, being energy independent is probably more expensive than where we are now, because if it wasn't you'd already be there. There's a clear national security benefit to reducing foreign oil expenditure, but there's unlikely to be a financial one, certainly in the next eight years. Nice to hear Obama make the Apollo Project comparison; can't imagine where he got that from...

As a recovering physicist I quite like the use of the planetarium projector as an example of a bad earmark, if only because it demonstrates that McCain's advisers don't have a basic factual understanding of things. The point being made isn't that giving money to planetariums is bad, it's that $3m is too much for a projector, which is fine until you actual think about what a planetarium looks like and how much bespoke structural metalwork you need for that sort of thing. If you're going to attack a value as being ridiculous for what it is, you ought to check exactly what it is and whether it really is ridiculous.

And then Obama answers my opening point with the best pivot of the lot; I don't need a tax cut, neither does he, so we shouldn't get one. McCain's response is interesting, because he tries to paint his position as being a freeze rather than a cut on taxes for the wealthy. What they're talking about is Dubya's headline policy and whether it should be maintained or reversed; how it plays will depend very much on whether the voters spot that.

Dear God, an American called for nuclear reprocessing! I just wish it wasn't McCain! It's particularly interesting territory for McCain; much as he leads into it with his experience on nuclear ships, the reason America stopped reprocessing is because they decided it was a proliferation threat (it isn't but they had a paranoid moment). Obama's phrase, that he supports nuclear as a part of the solution, is interesting; it's better than nothing, but you can read so much into it. Tom Brokaw's been reading my blog though, taking Apollo and turning it into Manhattan just the way I told him to...

Finally we reach healthcare, a subject that has been surprising in its absence from this campaign. After all, if you as McCain are trying to paint Obama as a bleeding heart liberal egghead communist, you'd think “he wants to socialise healthcare” would be page one of your playbook. Now we're getting into the meat and drink of the narratives; Obama brings the first biblical allusion, McCain goes on the offensive with Obama talking about government first. If there's one issue that should kill the Republican Party dead at the root, it's this one; sooner or later, the inability of small government and the private sector to deliver universal healthcare will kill America itself if it doesn't get the Republicans first.

Jed Bartlet is throwing stuff at the screen right now, because McCain just invoked “in the history of the world” and you don't do that. Okay, he wasn't comparing himself to the Visigoths adjusted for inflation, but for a non-American the whole “we're the biggest force for good there's ever been” bit is pretty galling. In Obama's response I heard echoes of “I will not make an issue of the youth and inexperience of my opponent”, but that was probably just me and not the dial groups. To make things worse, Brokaw's follow up begs for the premise of the question to be rejected; in the twenty-first century, every humanitarian crisis has national security implications for everyone, no matter how far away. Either way, this is the area where I as a Briton am least qualified to judge the answers; I get Obama's point about allies, but I don't believe the majority of Americans are there yet.

Possible award for strangest comment of the night; “Russia is not behaving the way we'd expect a country that has become so rich through petrodollars would”. Yeah, 'cos the way Russia's developing is so different to the way Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran have. Then again, Obama responds by suggesting that Poland needs America's help to rebuild its economy and leave the old Soviet sphere of influence, and my eyes roll once more.

Inevitably there's a question from a veteran (though not one so gnarly and grizzled as we tend to think of when we conjure with that word). It's then that it strikes me that much of McCain's comfort with the format is rooted in the bond he can develop with veterans; statistically in America you're going to benefit from that a lot, but he's not had that advantage tonight until late on.

He may have been learning from me, but Tom Brokaw's been learning from David Dimbleby and he's picked a terrific last question. The answers, of course, go back to the narratives, though it's a forgiveable reach for them to do so. I still think that Obama's narrative is more authentic than McCain's, but I am biased in that respect.

It's for others to decide what the result was; maybe it's because I know the Santos-Vinick debate so well that I feel much the same after this debate as I did then. The one thing it certainly wasn't is the big McCain win he needed to overturn the current poll leads and if that is borne out and Obama survives the debate McCain was meant to beat him on, we could be very close to a result.

Yon Scunner Santos

2008-10-07T23:23:00.003+01:00

For ten years we all complained that Tony Blair thought he was President of the United Kingdom. But today's second-hand story from the new Secretary of State for Jockshire that Scunner Broon himself is "very keen" to join the campaign in Glenrothes is something else entirely; evidence, perhaps, that the Supreme Leader thinks he's running for President.

Despite the headlines, what Jim "I'm Secretary of State for a part of the UK that has a devolved assembly so my name has to be" Murphy actually said was;

"I think it would be a real benefit to Labour's campaign if the prime minister can attend, so we'll be talking about that... But I think most people in Glenrothes in truth would rather he was certain he was doing everything he could in the economic crisis. If he is able to do that and come to Glenrothes, I think he would be a great boost to our campaign, so I think it makes sense."

Or in other words, the Prime Minister would like to talk up how much he wants to be involved and how positive it would be for the campaign, but in reality his appearance would go down like an iron airship so he's going to set Cameron up for the fall when he has another go at him for not going to a by-election and he can pivot to looking strong and responsible on the economy.

It's all very well trying to set a trap for your opponents, but erecting a ten foot neon sign above it and standing next to it waving your arms isn't usually the best way to make it work.

Doing The WRU's Bidding

2008-10-03T18:00:00.002+01:00

My love of sport and my politics collide relatively frequently, so much so that I'm occasionally tempted to start up a sports blog a la He Who Must Not Be Named. This week, however, they seem to be particularly intertwined. Which is fine, except that I'm now an Englishman representing a part of Wales, so some of those collisions can very easily get me into a lot of trouble, particularly where rugby is involved.

At club level, I feel I have a reasonable excuse, namely that I'm from Gloucester which means I bleed Cherry and White, especially when they face Cardiff Blues in the Heineken Cup later this year. I wish I could summon up the strength to support the Blues themselves, but as regionalisation is such an abomination I don't feel especially guilty about not cheering them on.

Internationally, the rift is perhaps even deeper because the country of my birth and the country of my home are represented by the RFU and WRU, who continue to fight a broad-fronted battle to see which of them can be the most incompetent bunch of useless morons (and trust me, that's the polite version...) I tend to support Italy and Argentina, because the future of the game depends far more on their success than the tribal battles of the M4 corridor.

Which leads us to the news that Wales has made two different bids to host the 2015 World Cup, in partnership with either England or Ireland and Scotland. Now let's be clear, I hope both those bids are irrelevant; after the corrupt way they were denied the 2011 World Cup, it is absolutely vital that Japan hosts in 2015 because, again, the game there needs the boost far more than the game in any of the home nations does.

Nevertheless, the bids are important, if only because they demonstrate that the WRU hasn't learnt the lessons of 1999. That World Cup was undoubtedly the worst in the tournament's history, not least because it only produced four games of any quality and none of those were in the host country (France beat Fiji 28-19 in the pool stage in Toulouse, Argentina beat Ireland 28-24 in the play-off in Lens, South Africa beat England 44-21 in the quarter-final in Paris and France beat New Zealand 43-31 in the semi-final at Twickenham).

By 2015, however, the factors that lead Wales to distribute the 1999 tournament to the four winds (lest we forget, in that tournament, Uruguay and Spain played in Galashiels!) will largely have disappeared. Instead of the mess of rickety old stadiums Wales had then, it will be packing;

Millennium Stadium, Cardiff – 74,500 (1999)
New Cardiff City Stadium, Cardiff – 26,500 (2009)
Liberty Stadium, Swansea – 20,532 (2005)
New Newport Stadium, Newport – 15,000 (c2010)
Parc y Scarlets, Llanelli – 14,340 (2008)

That's half a World Cup on its own just in South Wales, and the immediate question has to be, why on Earth are you including Scotland in your bid? Ireland on its own offers;

Lansdowne Road, Dublin – 50,000 (2010)
Thomond Park, Limerick – 26,500 (2008)
Ravenhill, Belfast – 19,100
Musgrave Park, Cork – c17,000 (c2010)

Add in the Racecourse Ground in Wrexham for another 15,500 and that's a World Cup right there.

But the clever thing would be to have a bid that transcended national borders and dealt purely in rugby borders. In reality, Welsh rugby's heartland is South Wales and only South Wales, which is where the five new purpose-built stadia are. What's more, that heartland borders its English compatriot, which by 2015 will be able to offer;

Sixways, Worcester – c20,000 (c2014)
Kingsholm, Gloucester – 18,000 (c2011)
Memorial Stadium, Bristol – 18,000 (c2010)

It may only be eight stadia and it lacks the second semi-final site that Lansdowne Road provides, but it's not so far away as to be ridiculous and it would be a fantastically rugby-focused tournament.

Whatever ends up happening, we can but hope that the WRU actually think about the quality of the tournament they're producing, instead of prostrating themselves before the business interests and scattering another World Cup to the winds. I'm not holding my breath though...

Failure To Dylan

2008-09-24T06:51:00.004+01:00

Joe Otten's useful heads-up on Caroline Lucas and the dogma of the Church of EnvironMentalism reminds me of something I meant to blog about a while back but left alone largely to avoid overloading the world with energy stuff.

We are often reminded how windy Britain is and how much potential there is meant to be for wind generation. Heck, one Lib Dem blogger (who I will refrain from naming in order to save a fellow elected member from having their name and moron too closely associated in Google) even went so far as to say;

“It's a myth that renewables cannot provide baseload. There has never been a day on record when the wind has not blown somewhere in the UK. The point about baseload is that what you need is enough people in enough places producing electricity. The more you decentralise electricity generation the more secure the baseload becomes. “

Interestingly, two weeks before that was said, a useful little study of the actual potential of wind generation in Britain was published. Okay, most of you probably weren't reading The Telegraph when it was covered, but I would hope my constant plugs have started to focus everyone's minds on The Register, a far more sound source of technology news.

As our anonymous blogger rightly identifies, the great problem for wind has always been the difficult question of variability; that sooner or later, the wind will stop blowing. We as Lib Dems have never really worried about this because the answer, we're told, is our favourite word; decentralisation. Indeed, some have proposed that large scale wind investment should be accompanied by the establishment of a Europe-wide electricity grid, so that the areas with the best wind at any moment can sort everyone else out.

The study uses the existing Met Office wind speed database, as measured at weather stations across the country, to evaluate the nationwide wind potential over the decade from 1996 to 2005. In general terms, it finds the system susceptible to “large, rapid and frequent changes of power output.” Hardly the best of starts, but nothing like as bad as things get when we consider the extremes of Britain's energy needs.

Excluding specific events like deaths on Coronation Street and England reaching the semi-final of anything, the annual peak of electricity demand generally occurs on the coldest evening of the winter between five and six pm, as domestic demand rises after the school run faster than commercial demand tails off at close of business.

You might expect that the coldest events are associated with Arctic or Siberian winds blowing cold air into the country. What the report finds, however, is that the coldest period in any British winter occurs when a high pressure system takes up residency over the country for a period of days; the absence of cloud to insulate the nation being far more potent when it lasts for five days or more.

More importantly, however, high pressure systems not only bring no cloud, but no wind either. Perhaps the most shocking finding of the report is this; between five and six pm on February 2^nd, 2006 (the peak of the electricity demand that year) the total electricity output of the UK's wind turbines was less than zero, as demand from auxiliary systems in the turbines exceeded their output. And that isn't a number from the model; it's the actual result as measured by the National Grid! What's more, such examples really aren't unusual; a five day high pressure, low wind cold snap is an annual occurrence in the UK, while a ten day low wind cold snap is probably a once in twenty year event.

As for the Europe-wide grid, the report compared their modelled wind load factor for the UK against the large existing wind farm system in Germany and Denmark;

I'm sure you don't need my help reading that graph.

The message remains as clear as it has always been; the question of our future energy supply is absolutely not intuitive and it cannot be answered by reference to bland and uninformed generalisations. There is no issue for which that old chestnut the “informed debate” is more vital.