Sleepwalking into defeat
Bubble — By Joseph Carter on February 8, 2011 7:00 am
"10 more years of LCOs: what have we done?"
CAST your minds forward, if you would, to Friday, March 4. The votes have been placed and by the morning council workers are busily counting ballot papers in their individual counties. But there’s a problem.
While the exit polls looked favourable and some of the initial counties looked promising, the turnout is low and the number of no votes is higher than expected. By the end of the morning, the chief returning officer announces that the referendum has been lost.
This apocalyptic end to the third Assembly is a vision that I have on a daily basis. I am worried that we are inadvertently sleep walking into defeat by our underestimation of the strength of the No campaign on the one hand, and our over-estimation of the support of the public.
The recent manoeuvres by the “no” campaign have been a stroke of genius. Until the week before last, when the Western Mail started to raise the prospect of True Wales not being granted official No campaign status, it hadn’t even occurred to many of us that this would have knock on affect on the Yes campaign. Yet, by Thursday, True Wales had pulled off a surprise coup; choosing not to seek official status and therefore denying the Yes campaign (and themselves) access to funds and perhaps more crucially the all-Wales election address.
This event demonstrated that many of us have underestimated the No campaign. A friend recently said that he didn’t understand how True Wales thought they could win the argument. He works in the voluntary sector, has a great understanding of the Welsh political scene and logic told him that True Wales could not succeed. At the time, I thought about what he said and told him that in my opinion the No campaign had nothing to lose. They could make arguments that had nothing to do with this particular referendum and stir up enough fear and distrust in the political classes that they scare people into voting No.
This sense of having nothing to lose is also significant when you look at the some of the leading figures within True Wales. They come from all political parties, but by choosing devolution all four parties have left these individuals behind. It is difficult to imagine Carwyn Jones championing Rachel Banner’s future in the Labour party after she has spent so long fighting against something that he has staked his political reputation upon, and it is equally hard to imagine Nick Bourne or Kirsty Williams rewarding Conservative and Lib Dem members of this group. Individuals who have nothing to lose have nothing to fear, and this makes them very dangerous.
What are we doing? If we want to avoid waking up on March 4 and discovering that the vote has been lost and devolution has taken a massive step back, then we need to take action now.
If you are involved in a political party, then I would urge you to ensure that your party is promoting a Yes vote from now until March 3. As much as the Welsh media will concentrate on the cross-party Yes campaign, I believe that the most effective way of spreading the merits of a Yes vote will come through the literature of political parties. Labour have already taken a lead in doing this and while I do not personally agree with the messages they are using, it is effective for their members and their target voters, and this is just the sort of thing that all political parties should be doing.
Some people argue that the message is too complicated, but you haven’t got to talk about Part 3 or Part 4 of the Government of Wales Act 2006 in order to win the argument. For Plaid Cymru, the line could simply be: “Plaid in government has delivered x, y and z, but if we have law making powers we can do (policy) a, b and c.” For the Welsh Conservatives and Welsh Liberal Democrats the line could be “Labour and Plaid in government have failed because of x, y and z, and a Welsh Conservative-led/Welsh Liberal Democrat government would deliver (policy) a, b and c if the Welsh Assembly had law making powers.”
These are very crude arguments, but the important point is that we really want to ensure that this referendum is won on the ground, we need to ensure that the political parties we are members of are doing all they can to spread the word about the referendum and putting forward arguments for why people must vote Yes. At the launch of the Yes campaign on January 4, all four party leaders through their support behind this campaign. It is important that this support is transformed into campaigning on the ground.
If we don’t win on March 3, we could spend the next 10 years waiting for another chance to secure the law making powers the people of Wales rightly deserve. This is a battle we can’t afford to lose.
Tags: Assembly, referendum, True Wales, Yes for Wales
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107 Comments
So CJ you ask for suggestions and dismiss them out of hand, typical.
Your statement that the assembly has been good at transferring powers to local gov is questionable.
Only last week Carl Sergeant tried to sneak in a ministerial power to allow the minister ( not the executive or the ASSEMBLY) to force up to three councils to have to merge. No explanation of what would be the neccessary trigger points so it can be seen to be consistently and justifiably implemented, no details on how they would merge – nothing just a blatant undemocratic power grab.
Can you honestly support such things, councils are democratically elected, he cannot have the right to effectively dismiss them, and i doubt it would stand up in court.
Yet you and others want to give politicians like that more power – WHY.
Am I missing something here but Llewellyn says Labour was decimated in 2003… Didn’t they actually win a majority? A bit of factual consistency makes a debate more worthwhile. It’s also incorrect to imply that Wales is poorer now than when devolution began. People in Wales, even the poorest, are actually considerably wealthier. Not that wealth is the best measure of success, but as Dave points out it matters to people.
And scrutiny in Westminster is so far superior to what we have in Wales, is it?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/13/new-tory-politics-claim-sham
“councils are democratically elected, he cannot have the right to effectively dismiss them, and i doubt it would stand up in court.
Yet you and others want to give politicians like that more power – WHY”
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There is a view, held by some quite sensible people, that one of our councils is a basketcase.
Illtyd;
“Llewellyn says Labour was decimated in 2003… Didn’t they actually win a majority?”
– my apologies, the big loss of 4 seats and a 7.8% drop in the vote was of course in 2007.
As for -”Not that wealth is the best measure of success” have to agree with that;
Chris -
“The majority of the Welsh people that voted, voted for the Assembly.” just!
Surely now the biggest fear for the yes campaign is that those who didn’t vote in 1997 come out and vote on March 3rd
Duncan;
Scrutiny! this seems to be about packing a committee, would never happen in Wales would it.
However, accepting that it will be impossible to exclude bias, would you agree there are several key necessary components to effective scrutiny;
1/Those conducting the review should be capable of understanding the issue and possible ramifications, and also give the matter due attention.
2/There must be effective independent review of the decisions and process with proper iterative feedback.
3/The rights and freedoms under the British Constitution are properly protected.
Hendre, yep one of our councils is an accepted basket case and WAG has appointed their own chief exec for that council.
Are you trying to use that basket case as an excuse / justification for Carl Sergeant’s power grab?
1) If one council is a basketcase why should one or more neighbouring councils be lumbered by being merged with it, that will produce no improvements unless the councillors from the bad one are barred and the area run by the remaining two, is that what you are suggesting.( so hasty was bid, the minister did explain how it would work).
2) if you are saying he needs the power because of this particular council, wasn’t his solution rather like the badger order, a plan to cull in two well defined small areas but an enabling order which said Wales so they would have had the power to cull anywhere, which is why they lost in court. This ministerial power grab is the same he does not need a carte blanche whole of Wales order to solve the problem. Perhaps he didn’t want to embarass IWJ by naming the council.
Dave;
Regarding your quote
“So CJ you ask for suggestions and dismiss them out of hand, typical.”
I dont agree Your comments have very little to do with the referendum question of getting rid of the silly lco system .]
Generally speaking I dont quite understand why you think that the Assembly is any different to any other government when it comes to not getting everything right all of the time.Being negative and picking out failings and nothing else is easy and lazy and helps no one. How about offering constructive points as well?