Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Straw

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

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?

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...

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)

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.