Good news from Belgium

Brussels at Christmas - but not sprouts

BACK IN my salad days when ageing was not yet a thing to dread, I heard one of the most pungent sayings of my life. It was 1980 and the Christmas hit was There’s no one quite like Grandma, by the now alarmingly resurrected St Winifred’s School Choir.

After a few pints in the Hope and Anchor, Neath Abbey, I needed, as exquisitely polite people say, to wash my hands. A man in the adjacent urinal farted very fully and exclaimed, “Ah, good news from Belgium!”

To this day I don’t know the derivation of the phrase but I have a couple of theories. The bloke was old but too young to have served in the First World War. Yet his father or an uncle might have. Had the constant assurances of victory left this unique mark on his family? Perhaps the saying had wider circulation, although I can find no reference to it in Brewer’s Phrase and Fable. Or was it of more recent invention as Mrs Thatcher was then just starting to fill her handbag with bricks to give the Brussels bureaucrats a good bashing. Whatever. But I have no doubt that it was an eloquent response to the windy rhetoric that so often captivates politicians.

Nonsense is abundant in politics, not that you need me to tell you that. Politicians inhabit a frenetic world full of demands for action, comment or patronage. An opinion can be instantly demanded on any conceivable subject and it is little wonder that words tumble out in frequently chaotic profusion. I once heard an AM call for “concrete policies on the environment”; and I also remember a colleague, keen on greater discipline in schools, assuring me that “a good caning never hurt anyone”. But such gibberish is not spin. Spin is altogether darker, the original sin that lurks in every political soul.

The Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war is focussing on what might have been considered a clever bit of spin back in 2003. Saddam Hussein, we were quite correctly told, was a nasty tyrant. But that was not all, was it? No, Saddam also probably possessed weapons of mass destruction. That put him in a very different category. And let us not forget that Saddam played along and wanted his neighbours to believe he had such weapons. Soon George Bush concluded that not only should weapons of mass destruction be removed, but also the regime itself. Tony Blair signed up to this much extended objective and the spin cycle ran day and night.

In the aftermath of what appeared to be swift victory the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction did not weigh that heavily. But, but … as the peace was lost in a grim insurgence that all changed. Many think this episode the most blatant example of spin in decades and it threatens to indelibly stain Blair’s premiership – something that the Belgrano affair never quite did for Mrs Thatcher, but Suez did for Eden. But there I go! Am I now spinning? Are Blair’s impressive constitutional and social achievements really to be so utterly overwhelmed? Will historians compare Blair to Eden, who is usually considered the worst Prime Minister of the 20th century? Probably not.

Spin is the first-born son of that most potent vice half-truth. It aims to get our minds to fill in the evidence gaps and agree with a particular policy before fuller consideration raises awkward doubts. No wonder spin is seen as the politician’s most sneaky trick. Let us remember that when governments put the best face on things this is not really spin – it’s just good PR. Spin is the art of slapping so much makeup on a dodgy policy that we think the Hunch Back of Notre-Dame is really a Brad Pitt lookalike. Eventually, we realise that the leading man is not quite up to playing the hero. We feel not only let down, but deliberately deceived. Spin seeks to deny, create, modify or extend evidence. That is why it is so dangerous. That is why it is so tempting.

Thankfully, the plentiful examples of spin in Welsh politics occur at the venial end of the scale. Still potent, mind you. How often, when a critical report is published on some Welsh Assembly Government policy or other, do we hear the Minister respond by saying that the report is accepted but it is already out of date. What? Within a few weeks of receiving such a report all the issues have been addressed! But that is what we are asked to believe. Very often we oblige. I consider this form of spin the political googly, it is bowled from the back of the hand and before we know it we are beaten. It is more effective than the leg-break variation of spin which encourages us to concentrate on some related but less relevant issue. Here our critical faculties are diverted by the crafty politician. When asked, for example, about the relatively poor GCSE performance of Welsh pupils compared to those in England, Ministers are wont to rattle on about the number of new schools built.

Two forces are at work here. One is high expectations. Sometimes it is almost as if we expect government to cure Death itself. And governments play along and assure us that they can tackle even life’s most intractable problems. Secondly, we are loath to accept that not everything goes to plan. Would we admire Ministers who honestly acknowledge that some policy is in need of review and amendment? Any such Minister would more often than not be eaten alive by the unforgiving forces of public opinion. It is far easier for Ministers to change direction while pretending that nothing fundamental has altered at all. A case in point is WAG’s health reforms. The 22 Local Health Boards were abolished before their sixth birthday. Yet Edwina Hart insisted that this amounted to no more than a ‘simplification’ of the system and one – here is the real spin – that would allow the government to abolish the internal market in health care. Quite magnificent, but also a little malign.

So what future is there for spin? Well, like original sin, it will take some shifting. But before we despair, let us not forget that spin rarely deceives in the longer term – democracy has a habit of getting its own back in the action replay of political posterity. True, by the time we realise the deception it is usually too late to hold the government to account. Yet we become a little wiser.

Before I wish you all a Merry Christmas, I must just bring your attention to a press release that this minute has landed on my desk:-

“WAG today denied irresponsible reports that Father Christmas does not exist. These reports deliberately misinterpreted the well established evidence base on Santa Claus. WAG scientists have again assured Ministers that no convincing evidence has been found to question Father Christmas’ existence. Children all over Wales receive Christmas presents every year. This is an absolute fact and the Welsh public will not quickly forgive the Santa deniers.

“Recently, a number of e-mails were leaked which indicated that WAG scientists no longer believe that Santa lives in Lapland. We believe in utter transparency and no WAG Minister approved of this information being withheld from the public. WAG never in fact claimed that Father Christmas definitely lived in Lapland and there is now growing evidence to suggest that Santa in fact lives in a small grotto in Belgium …”

So, at last, some good news from Belgium.

Merry Christmas.