Seasonal gifts for my political opponents

When I was a young reporter in the 1970s I received a political lesson from Jack, now Lord Brooks of Tremorfa, at the time the Labour leader of South Glamorgan County Council. Taking my arm during a reception in Cardiff City Hall he pointed to one end of the room and said, ‘Now down there John are my political opponents, they’re the Tories.” Turning, he pointed to the other end of the room and added, “Down there are my political enemies, the Labour Party.”

In the spirit of the festive season I shall adopt Jack’s generally non-sectarian approach to politics and offer some suggestions to my political opponents in Wales for the coming year. First on my list is the Welsh Government. It used to have a target of increasing Wales’s economic activity, measured by GVA (gross value added), to 90 per cent of the UK average. It quietly dropped that target as the figure has stayed stubbornly in the low 70s for the 16 years it has been running Wales.

Gerry Holtham - Polo-mint Welsh Government has 'a holein the middle'.

Carwyn Jones should take note of his former advisor the economist Gerald Holtham who back in January wrote a paper for the Wales TUC saying we needed more firmly directed policies. Instead, he said, we continue to have  “Polo-
mint” government - one with a hole in the middle. “There is no substantial First Minister’s department, no strong Cabinet office and no
real Treasury in the Welsh government. There
is no body that is supposed to help frame an overall strategy or to co-ordinate the strategies of different ministries, which all too often operate with detached independence. If the First Minister wants to create an industrial strategy driving
the infrastructure plan and to ensure that the policies of all departments are in harmony with
it, he will have his work cut out. The institutions to help him are not there. You won’t get joined up government if a chunk of the government’s central nervous system is missing.”

Next on my list is the Secretary of State for Wales, Preseli’s Conservative MP Stephen Crabb. In October he published the draft Wales Bill which seeks to increase the powers and legislative authority of the National Assembly. However, it has been criticized on all sides as achieving precisely the opposite. Stephen Crabb should take note of the report on the Bill just published by the Assembly’s cross-party Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee, chaired by the Deputy Presiding Officer, Conservative AM David Melding. This has presented Crabb with a sensible list of proposals that would, as Melding says, “deliver the Secretary of State’s aims of a stronger, clearer and fairer devolution settlement for Wales that will stand the test of time.”

As the referendum on whether the UK is to remain in the EU looms ever closer, my next thought is for UKIP. Of all my political opponents they’re the least congenial. All I would say to them is take the next anti-EU speech by Nigel Farrage and simply replace the words ‘Britain’ or ‘United Kingdom’ with ‘Wales’.  Then take a close look at it and decide whether you agree with the sentiments expressed.

As for the Liberal Democrats and Greens what can I say? They’re such nice people. Next year they should undertake what they do best and redouble their efforts to seek cross-party collaboration. Have a happy Christmas one and all.

How Labour spends to save seats

Follow the money is a good way of getting to grips with politics. But to understand the Welsh Government’s policy decisions I suggest you follow the politics. Two big announcements last week underline my point.

The first was a decision by the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board to keep consultant-led maternity provision in three north Wales hospitals – Ysbyty Glan Clwyd, Ysbyty Gwynedd and Wrexham Maelor. A report commissioned by the Board recommended that none of the maternity units should close. This follows months of uncertainty and massive campaigns across northern Wales reminiscent of our own campaign to sustain consultant-led maternity services at Withybush.

The Rhyl demonstration when 2,000 people protested

So why were the campaigns in north Wales successful while ours was not? Consultant-led maternity provision was moved from Withybush to Carmarthen in August 2014. As I say, follow the politics. The most vulnerable hospital in north Wales was undoubtedly Ysbyty Glan Clwyd situated in Bodelwyddan, a small community about four miles south of Rhyl. It also happens that the hospital is bang in the middle of the Vale of Clwyd constituency which, until this year’s general election, was a safe Labour seat.

But in the election Labour lost the seat to the Conservatives by just 237 votes, and undoubtedly the major issue in the campaign was the fate of consultant-led maternity services at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd. In February during the run-up to the election more than 2000 people in Rhyl demonstrated against the downgrading of the hospital. As in Pembrokeshire they were protesting against the prospect that mothers in labour would have to be ambulanced long distances for treatment, in their case to Bangor or Wrexham. Compared with the situation in Pembrokeshire those are relatively straightforward journeys, along the A55 north Wales dual carriageway.

Marching against the threatened downgrade

But, quite rightly, they were still unacceptable and the campaigners persuaded voters to register their opposition in the ballot box. Now another election is looming, for the National Assembly in May.  If a decision had been made to close consultant-led maternity services then, undoubtedly Labour was set to lose its Vale of Clwyd Assembly seat. In Pembrokeshire, of course, Labour has no seats to lose.

The other bid announcement last week was the distribution of the Welsh Government’s local authority funding grants.  What a surprise, therefore that it was Labour-run urban and city authorities across Wales that benefited most. Meanwhile, it was rural authorities that are run by other parties and independents that lost out. All authorities received a cut in their budgets but these ranged just 0.1 per cent for Cardiff to 4.1 per cent for Powys.

The average cut across Wales was 1.8 per cent. Pembrokeshire’s budget was cut by £157 million, or 2.8 per cent. Though largely a rural authority, neighbouring Carmarthenshire’s budget was cut by only 1 per cent. Why? Could it be that Carmarthenshire contains Llanelli, and that Labour-held seat is vulnerable to Plaid Cymru in next May’s election? Denbighshire which contains most of the Vale of Clwyd constituency and which again is largely a rural seat, had its budget cut by just 1.2 per cent. As I say, follow the politics.

Labour parties battle it out

Though he retired from front-line politics a while ago former First Minister Rhodri Morgan is still capable of some pithy analysis of current events. Last week, for instance, commenting on Labour’s divisions over the bombing of Syria he pronounced that we were seeing the emergence of two parties rather than one. The catalyst had been the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader and his estrangement from many Labour MPs at Westminster, and not least many in his Shadow Cabinet.

 

Rohodri Morgan - Labour is now two parties, or is it three?

All this was creating a very different kind of party. As Rhodri told BBC Wales last week: “We have got a new kind of Labour Party now. The majority of the membership in the country, almost doubled, are very loyal to Corbyn and very few of them in favour of going to war in Syria. But you’ve got sincerely held beliefs among those 66 MPs who voted on the government side that they’re doing the right thing. Generally the 232 Labour MPs are not really Corbynistas except for a small number, maybe 20 or 30.”

Rhodri Morgan went on to consider a suggestion that had been made by Birkenhead Labour MP Frank Field that there should be two Labour leaders, one of them leader of the party as a membership body, and the other leader of the party in the House of Commons. “Now it’s not very workable that, but you can see what he means because in effect we do have two Labour Parties,’ Rhodri said.

A problem in working all this out is that it is even more complicated than Rhodri Morgan suggests. To see that you only have to ask which of the two Labour parties he describes he would support. The answer is neither.  He does not support Jeremy Corbyn but neither does he support the bombing of Syria.

To understand Rhodri’s position it’s necessary to go back to the Labour leadership campaign during the summer. In early August Jeremy Corbyn visited Wales and was quizzed at some length on Welsh Labour’s approach to policy which he said he supported a good deal. He referred to the notion of ‘clear red water’, which is short hand for the way Rhodri Morgan had distinguished himself from Tony Blair’s more right wing policies. Corbyn said, ‘“I know Rhodri very well and I’ve enjoyed reading the book on Clear Red Water ... Maybe we can narrow the red water and we can walk across it.’

This drew the following response from Rhodri Morgan: “There’s a massive gap between between what you can call Corbynism and Blairism. I attempted to fill that gap with what I called Classic Labour. He’s not Classic Labour, he’s old hard left Labour. So its got nothing to do with clear red water at all. When I heard it I thought it was a bit of a cheek to be honest because I think Yvette Cooper represents that space between Corbynism and Blairism which is where I think Labour ought to be.” One conclusion we can draw from this is that Rhodri Morgan is wrong in suggesting that two Labour Parties are emerging. There are at least three.

Tory animal reveals its spots

It’s always pleasing when a creature that normally goes about in disguise hiding its true intentions, suddenly reveals itself for what it really is. That’s what happened with the Welsh Conservative Party last week.

You may not have noticed but hidden away in George Osborne’s autumn spending review was a surprise commitment to devolve to the Welsh Government control of some of the income tax levied in Wales, and without a referendum. This sharing of tax powers between ministers in Cardiff and London would mean the Welsh government controlling £3 billion of taxes a year by 2020. It was a surprise because hitherto the Tories have not been in the forefront of advocating more powers for Wales – the reverse, in fact. Moreover, they have always demanded there should be a referendum before the Welsh Government be allowed any control of income tax.

So what, I wondered, was going on? Then all became clear when up popped the Welsh Conservative leader Andrew R.T. Davies. Within a matter of hours of the Chancellor’s statement, he announced he wants to use new income tax powers to take 5p off the higher rate in Wales.

Andrew R.T. Davies - revealing his spots

The higher rate, it will be recalled, is 40p in the pound for those who earn more than £43,000 a year. The Welsh Conservative leader said he wanted to use the new powers over income tax to cut this rate by 5p to 35p.  This, he said, would cost about £75 million in a year. And as an example of those who would benefit he said people earning £50,000 would gain about £400 a year.

So that’s a straight shift of £75 million to the better off, at a time when the Tory government in London is also intending to cut £12 billion from the welfare budget over the next five years, directly hitting the worst off. How can Andrew R.T. Davies possibly justify this blatant transfer of money from the poorest to the richest in Welsh society?

His answer is that cutting the top rate of tax would attract entrepreneurs to Wales and "create quality jobs". And he added,  "Ultimately what we want to do is make sure the entrepreneurial rate is attractive enough to make entrepreneurs stay and come to Wales to create quality jobs that pay increased take-home pay. Five pence seems to be a sensible difference between what Wales would raise and what England would raise. That would offer enough scope to say to businessmen and women 'Wales is open for business'."

This is complete nonsense. A saving of £400 would be a marginal sum for those earning £50,000. It would not be nearly enough to persuade anyone earning that amount to move into Wales to take advantage of it. Of course, as earnings rise so does the amount you gain from a cut in the top rate of tax. For example, those earning £100,000 would gain £2,850. But entrepreneurs earning that kind of money typically make most of their income through shareholdings in their company.

So Andrew R.T. Davies’s argument that cutting the top rate of tax would encourage greater entrepreneurialism doesn’t stack up. Rather, it’s a shameless bid to benefit those who the Conservative Party really represents - the better off. And, as I say, it’s very satisfying because for once it’s the Tories themselves who are revealing their true agenda.