Plaid – Asghar ‘should resign’ his seat
PLAID Cymru leader Ieuan Wyn Jones has said he is shocked and disappointed to hear that Mohammad Asghar, the Assembly Member for South Wales East has left Plaid Cymru to join the Conservative group in the Assembly. Mr Asghar was elected to represent the South Wales East region on behalf of Plaid Cymru in 2007.
Mr Jones said: “We very much regret Mohammad Asghar’s decision and it comes as a shock to members both of the Plaid Cymru group and the wider party. We were particularly surprised to hear of this news from the media.
“We were very proud of the fact that in campaigning hard for Mohammad Asghar’s election in 2007 that Plaid Cymru ensured the first ever Assembly Member from the black minority ethnic community. It is has come as a shock that he has now decided that he shares the same values as those held by the Conservative and Unionist party.”
Dai Lloyd, chair of the Plaid Cymru group, added: “We now call on Mohammad Asghar to take the honourable decision to resign his seat as a Plaid Cymru AM. The people of the South Wales region did not want a second Tory AM to represent the area – they elected a Plaid Cymru AM. Mr Asghar does not have the political mandate to sit in the Assembly as a Conservative member for the South East.”
This is a significant raising of the political temperature around the defection. Although Oscar has done nothing wrong under electoral law, it is clear that Plaid Cymru are not prepared to let his decision to defect stand unchallenged. In Westminster defections may be rare, but there are over 650 MPs and plenty of places to hide until things calm down. Here in the Assembly the smaller confines of a 60-member institution means it will be an uncomfortable afternoon for several members as they get their heads around what has just happened. Presumably a new seating arrangement is already being worked out.
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it makes a mockery of PR if he does keep his seat.
People of SE Wales voted for a party and not for Oscar. It is Plaid who puts together the list of candidates and therefore Plaid should be able to withdraw his name.
If he was constituency AM, then it would be different. As it stands, he should resign as people voted Plaid and not for him.
It does seem strange that list AMs can keep hold of their seats if they defect. Surely it should pass to the next person on the list as people are voting for party not personality?
The defection also makes a mockery of the supposed proportionality of the list PR system by allowing AMs to cross the floor in this way.
Spare a thought for his staff. Not only has he effectively forced them out of a job just before Christmas, but in refusing to do the honourable thing and stand down – for the reasons outlined in Dai Lloyd’s comments above – he’s also denied them the chance to secure work with the replacement Plaid AM, who should replace Asghar in line with the will of the people of South East Wales.
With such a Scrooge-like disregard for the people that have worked so hard for him, he should feel right at home with the Tories.
All good stuff and shows the problems you can get with closed lists and regional seats based on totally artificial former European constituencies.
Looking at the constituency results in South Wales East, Plaid polled badly in most constituencies except Caerphilly. Even in Caerphilly they only polled 3899. In Mr. Ashgar’s home town of Newport Plaid polled just 1152 in Newport East and 1309 in Newport West. Not far in front of the BNP who gained 1020 in Newport East and 1175 in Newport West.
The voters you really have to feel sorry for are those Labour voters who in good faith cast their second vote for the Labour candidates on the regional list and find that it is a completely wasted vote. The additional member system was part of the 1998 fudge because Ron Davies rightly believed that the Labour Party would not support a full PR system. The Labour Party also believed on the basis of UK results from the 1980s that there would always be a Labour majority because of the first past the post seats.
Despite the fact that many regional AMs have proved to be excellent Assembly members the system is fundamentally undemocratic. Regional AMs are accountable not to the electorate but to the small band of Party activists who decide where they will be placed on the closed list. Only a few years ago some Tories tried unsuccessfully to demote Alun Cairns from his position as top of the Tory list in South Wales West. This was despite the fact that by any measurement he had proved to be a first class Assembly member for the Tories.
The real discussion should not be about the merits or otherwise of Mr Ashgar’s decision to cross the floor. British politics is littered with examples of politicians who in Churchill’s immortal words ‘rat on their party’. It should instead be focused on how to ensure that in future Assembly elections every vote cast counts.
I was once asked to think about standing as a councillor, not because I was a good prospect but because I was disabled. I was told we do not have many disabled people. I said if you had asked me because you thought I could do the task I would have said yes, but picking me because I’m crippled? No thanks.
So from now on stop looking at minorities and find people worthy of the post, people who have been Plaid for a long time.
Correction to my previous post where I used voting figures for the European election in 2009 which I’ve been looking at to ascertain each of the parties core vote. But it doesn’t invalidate my argument.
In the South Wales East regional seat in 2007 Plaid obtained 25915 about 12000 behind the Tories. Labour’s regional vote was 67998. More than Plaid and the Tories put together and every vote was wasted because under the system Labour had already reached its quota through the FPTP results.
As I’ve said in my previous post the people who should be up in arms are Labour voters in South East Wales. It is clear that they wanted Labour regional members as well as FPTP AMs.
I can’t see what this has to do with the electoral system in place nor the numbers of votes cast by poor old Labour supporter. That’s rather like saying we should blame climate change on Karl Benz, and no amount of clever, clever number crunching will change that. And to argue that Labour only went along with it because of Ron Davies is an absolute fudge all of your own, Jeff.
When are voters going to be credited with some intelligence by certain Labourites? Last week, the electorate wasn’t smart enough to grasp the intricacies of the route to further powers. Now, this week, we are being invited to feel pity for those poor Labour supporters who were duped into electing Plaid AMs because of this nebulous and nefarious system we have.
Let’s get down to brass tacks here. Asghar is morally obliged to resign his seat because he stood and was elected on another party’s ticket, and because he has given his staff the political equivilent of a gun and a bottle whisky. Those are matters upon which all parties can agree. The manner in which he defected – via press conference – is something that Plaid have every right to be aggrieved about. We don’t have to pick apart the system we’ve had for the past decade to resolve this.
Jeff Jones’s comments spice up this website and do the job (and its a privelege to have an ex-council leader having his say), but the pro-Labour bias is going a bit far there. The point is those Labour regional voters have already, logically, got all the Labour AMs they need to feel sufficiently represented. That is the whole point of the Additional Member System.
Duncan,
I hope his staff are members of a trade union because they urgently need some professional legal advice, independent of the head of the Fees Office!
I take it Oscar’s staff are legally employed directly by him, not by the Plaid group. I also take it that they are committed Plaid partisan’s who would not in good conscience wish to carry on working for a Tory for any significant period.
If an irretrivable breakdown of confidence has been created not by any fault of the employee, but because of the unilateral actions of their employer without any consultation then I would have thought they have a position to negotiate from. Certainly if they are represented by a trade union and therefore have the resources to pursue it, then this would have the makings for a fascinating industrial tribunal case!
Everything could hinge on the wording of their contracts and job descriptions. I would have thought the Tories would find it unacceptable to have Plaid activists working in the heart of their Assembly group, reading the emails and representing the AM and by extension the Tory Party. It would certainly be an uncomfortable relationship on all sides, but might not be entirely impossible, at least in the short-term, depending on the degree of sensitivity of the role(s).
Finally, I take it that the reduction in the Plaid group is sufficiently marginal to have no impact on the Leaders staffing allowance?
What is also overlooked is that in 2007 four of the five regions had overhangs, due to a party winning more constituency seats than the list said it was entitled to. In South Wales East the overhang was Trish Law (but would otherwise have been Labour), and it was the Conservatives who missed out. So the people of the region did want another Conservative as part of a total of six Labour, three Conservative, two Plaid and one Lib Dem, but the quirks of the voting system didn’t deliver that in total.
Plaid staff members are almost certain to be members of the PCS Union. The potential for wrecking would be great if they worked for a Tory AM!
Ok, it’s time Jeff Jones got a blog, or that Waleshome made him a columnist. Either is a win-win situation, from the point of view of informed debate, punchy opinion, and the steady supply of unexpected (if uncomfortable) home truths.
Adam I was there and it was a fudge like much of the 1998 Act. You know that Ron Davies wanted some form of proportionality. You also know that even today most Labour members would oppose STV. In the run up to 1997 agreement to the additional member system was as far as the majority of Labour members were prepared to go. Even then it was based on the assumption no matter how absurd it might now look that Labour would always win a majority of the FPTP seats. If you are going to have additional members then logical should suggest that they should be elected to represent the whole of Wales not 5 areas which were created for elections to the European Parliament. Any democrat would also argue in favour of an open not a closed list system. I’m all in favour of full lawmaking powers but only if all the lawmakers are directly accountable for their actions to the electorate. The whole episode hasn’t done much for the reputation of democratic politics and it has exposed a fundamental flaw in the system of electing additional members. If Plaid bloggers are to believed Mr. Ashgar was in real danger of losing his position on the list for 2011. In effect he would have ceased to be an AM not because he had lost the support of the electorate but because he did not have the support of a small group of activists. With the Tory Party experimenting with open primaries the way in which 20 members of the Assembly are both selected and elected leaves a lot to be desired. Some of us have opposed the system from the beginning and the fact that it has been in operation for 10 years doesn’t make it right. I haven’t used my second vote since the first Assembly election. It is a pointless exercise in South Wales West.
Patrick – we’ve offered it to him before, believe me.
Jeff – door is always open.
“If Plaid bloggers are to be believed” (thanks for the shout out), I think you’ll find that any actions on behalf of that “small groups of activists” (by which I presume you include elected members) would have been based on any misgivings about his performance as an AM rather than whether he’d fallen out of favour. That is not going above the electorate, that is taking care to ensure they are properly served. However, this is pure speculation, as no one at Plaid or anywhere else has gone on the record about Asghar’s performance as an AM.
Although people voted for Plaid rather than Mohammad Ashgar, it’s his seat and, much as I’d love to be proved wrong (I did read through the GoWA 2006 to check) it looks like the only pressure that can be put on him is moral rather than legal.
I could call it a flaw in the GoWA 2006, but the Act has so many flaws that this one hardly seems to matter in comparison with the others.
The problem is that we have a hybrid system where some AMs are elected as people, and other AMs are elected by party. We have a long tradition of elected representatives changing their allegiances and I would want to do nothing to stop that happening in future. I’m saddened by Mohammad’s decision, but I can live with it.
In my opinion the only good way of resolving the problem is not to tinker with the list rules, but to bring in STV in multi-member constituencies. That way we preserve the basic principle of people electing who they choose rather than who the parties choose, but keep a good element of proportionality. Yes, that works against Plaid in this instance, but the principle is more important than any party, including mine.
Q. Should he resign
A. Yes
simple as that.
Mohammed Ashgar cannot hold onto the seat and his credibility at the same time
If this was a constituency seat then there is an element of personal mandate, however as the list selection takes place within party and his election due to the votes given to that party then he must surely resign and allow Cllr Colin Mann to take his rightful place in the Bay.
What completely undermines Ashgar is that not only is he effectly absconding with a seat that is rightfully Plaid but the he then states his complete opposition to the fundementals of the very people whi put him there.
Effectively Ashgar has stolen the democratic will of the people, screwed it up and thrown it back into the face of every democrat in Wales. He has also set back the case of PR by decades as his very presence in the Chamber will be considered that of a Cuckoo and not a parrot!
Perhaps he ‘should’ step aside, but I am not aware of any elected politician, at national level, since Dick Taverne actually doing so. Even then Taverne had the option of fighting a by-election (which he won, although losing to Margaret Beckett in the following General Election). Precedent as well as the letter of the law (GoWA) is firmly on Oscar’s side. Ultimately it is up to political parties to ensure that those individuals to whom they lend their franchise are worthy of the trust being placed in them.
Plaid do surely have some questions to ask themselves about their candidate selection proceedures. They appear to have been so keen to secure an ‘ethnic’ AM (presumably to conter allegations that Welshness equals whiteness) that they chose to ignore the real question marks surrounding Oscar’s committment to their basic aims and values. Most other parties have some kind of pre-vetting before a putative candidate is able to proceed to selection. Clearly Plaid do not. It is fair to ask just how many people were involved in the selection of Oscar and what influence Ty Gwynfor exercised in the process? Surely Oscar’s previous political promiscuity should have given whoever made the decision some pause for thought? Was he really the best candidate available? What does that say about their third placed candidate in the highly unlikely event that Oscar were to step aside before May 2011?
I’m no great fan of the Assembly electoral system, but given that it is what it is, parties have a responsibility to ensure that they pick people who they – and those who vote for them – can genuinely count upon. Failure to do so is grossly irresponsible and positively invites events like yesterday’s.