Conference time

The political conference season is at the half way stage. The good comrades, all trundle up to Manchester for Sunday. This year, yours truly won’t be doing the circuit. Having tended more conferences than is good for the sanity of any man. I’ve been let off for good behaviour or is it for bad behaviour.

Having attended conferences of all political hue its still baffles as to why so many ordinary party members turn up at these events. Some even making it their annual  holiday. Hardly, normal behaviour, it’s a bit sad really. 

And what for. Certainly not to debate issues. Those days are far gone. Everything is a set piece event that party planners think will go down well on the the tele. Policy making, it is not. Well, apart from the Liberal Democrats who still cling on to the quaint idea of using their members to make policy. 

And what do they do? They also serve who only sit and wait. And sit they do, through the most tedious of speakers. At one time you’d hear the odd orator, not any more. It’s all so bland. 

The increase in standing ovations for mediocre politicians is probably more to do with preventing deep vein thrombosis than with the merits of the speakers.

It does take a special type of person to turn up to germ ridden, hot and sweaty conference halls. They may not be inspired to take a political message back to their constituencies but they sure as hell spread colds and flu around the country on their return.

With lemmings its a once in a lifetime event, for the party delegate they do it year after year after year. Why? 

They’re the rump of the old ideology that brought them into that particular party in the first place. While the rest of their party has become an ideology free zone, they continue to hold with the old faith. And each year they meet with others that hold the flame alive. 

Despite disappointment after disappointment they still hope that things will be different and their leaders will start to listen to them. Unlikely.

But like the old religious revival meetings they can sing the Red Flag, Jerusalem or Land of Hope and Glory. And the warm glow will bring them back again next year.

The Clegg speech

Conferences offer all party leaders the opportunity to speak direct to the public. Nick Clegg decided to say “pass” to the opportunity. He may have started his week with "sorry" to the great unwashed, but yesterday his message was very much focussed on shoring up his own position within his party.

There was even a bit of whistling in the dark, declaring his party could bounce back and become Britain’s “third party of government.” Oh yes.  But that depends in  part on the British economy recovering from the clinical coma it finds itself in.

In stating the bleeding obvious he excelled. Of course, he’s right that the voters, not politicians, will decide who will lead the next government. But it was always thus. Your point is what, Mr Clegg?

It was a classic case of putting up paper tigers to win over his party audience. His pledge to veto a further cut in the top rate of income tax. Well, it was at 50p and is now 45p. There is little to suggest that Osborne wants to cut it further. But the delegates got the warm glow from Clegg’s declaration.

There was little comfort to the rest of the country that the austerity imposed by the government would change any time soon. He was tied to plan A and he was not for turning.  

So both parties will hang together. As hang they surely will, if voters still feel the pinch at the time of the 2015 election. After all it’s alleged the reason they went into coalition in the first place. 

All he was offering yesterday “was further belt tightening.” Not the best of platforms to win back all those supporters that have deserted the party.

He even dared some of the rump that is left, to up sticks and go. "If people want just protest politics, if they want a sort of 'I don't like the world let me get off' party, they've got one. It's called the Labour Party." 

The party built its electoral base on being involved in local protests is he seriously suggesting that they can build a base without tapping into idealism and protest.

What was absolutely clear from yesterday’s bravado performance is that he ain’t going to make way anytime soon. His speech made it clear that he wasn’t going to fall on his sword. 

But if the party’s poll ratings don’t improve by next year’s conference. Well, then all bets are off. Many of his colleagues will start to panic and may look  for anyone they think will save their bacon. It is a party that has not been afraid to wield the knife in the past.

Where do we stand?

What a fickle lot voters are. Pollster after pollster will record how much voters hate political parties bickering with each other. The cry is  “they should work together in the national interest.” 

Yet, if you look at the poll ratings of the Liberal Democrats they’re been seriously punished for going into a coalition with the Cameron’s conservatives.

Despite Labour having a 10% lead in the polls at the moment, leads tend to narrow in election campaigns. So there is no certainty that any party will emerge with an overall majority.

Another hung parliament is a quite plausible outcome. 

It’s not just mischief-making that Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have been up to in texting Vince Cable. They may need him to deliver  his colleagues come the election. Provided, of course, they have enough MPs left to make a deal.

What may be an exception in Westminster does tend to be the norm in Wales. Majorities are as rare as a win for the Wales football team.

Both the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru have been junior partners in a coalition government. Neither gained electoral support for their period in office.

Why? Well, both parties place themselves as left of centre parties.  Both provide the voter with a respectable alternative to Labour at times when Labour are unpopular. What happens when Labour are on a high? The voters move back again to their original political home.

When a leftist party ties itself to a right wing party you don’t have to be Mystic Meg to predict it will all end in tears. 

So what are the lessons for our smaller parties. Be very careful where you place yourself on the political spectrum. 

With the Liberal Democrats having paraded their left wing credentials at the last election and then moved to the right whilst in government. They can hardly move back to where they were and retain any political credibility.  

Nick Clegg made that quite clear in his speech to conference. "The choice between the party we were and the party we are becoming is a false one. The past is gone and is not coming back" .

But ironically it’s in the past the party has to go to find an unique place in the political spectrum. They’ve got to ditch the democrats and become a Liberal party again.Yes, the radical party of Lloyd George. Challenging the conservatism of both left and right. A party of civil liberties and of real home rule. 

Unless it rediscovers its pass, it ain’t got a future.

To train or not to train? That is the question

The Assembly members are back from their holidays today. So it’s business as usual. 

The First Minister’s question time was a bit like Ground Hog day. All that listened felt that they’d heard it all before.

Bluster by the Leader of the Opposition, the First Minister blaming everything on the Conservative Liberal Democrat government, Leanne Wood completely under whelming and Kirsty Williams being her shrill self. Oh dear, next Tuesday will see it all happening again.

The media agenda today has very little to do with the goings on in the chamber. That’s a bit of a mercy.

No, the media agenda was concern over a raft of training  courses given to Assembly Members. Courses on how to be effective committee members. To be precise, how to best scrutinise ministers in committees. 

At a grand a session, a bargain if it raises their game. With an increased legislative programme they need to be on top of things. 

Mistakes will cost us dearly if matters go to the courts and lawyers get in on the act. Lawyers always have their collective   eyes on the main chance. Why should the tax payer add to their bank balance because Assembly Members haven’t done their job properly. 

Whilst training is under discussion it might be of value to throw in the four party leaders into the pool. On the job training is needed to prevent the embarrassment that is now First Ministers question time.

Some have questioned this expenditure as a waste of public money. But all organisations and employers ought to be constantly  reviewing the training needs of the work force. Politicians should not be treated as an exception.  

Wales needs to raise its game if it’s to compete in the modern world. 

God knows our politicians need to raise theirs. If training helps, bring it on I say.

Governor King got it wrong

King at last states the bleeding obvious. If the economy is not growing the government should stop making things worse by continuing to cut. 

It is a conversion of a kind, from the man that up until recently was four square behind the government’s debt reduction plan. King acted as Hardy, to Osborne’s Laurel. And it was a fine mess that the two of them got the country into. 

But in his first live interview for years, Sir Mervyn King acknowledged the weak pulse in the country’s economic body consequently more cutting would kill off any hope of recovery.

He now sees it as “acceptable” to miss the self imposed target that Osborne had set for clearing the deficit. Well, hooray.  

It doesn’t require a PhD to work out that if the economy is on the skids you don’t improve things by taking more money from people’s pockets to prevent them from spending on goods and services. 

King's utterances will be good news to the Liberal Democrats on the eve of their conference in Brighton. The prospect of tax rises and more welfare cuts in chasing an economic policy based on debt-cutting would have caused more unhappiness in the rank and file attending the south coast resort this weekend..

Now at least they can talk about how to stimulate the economy and reject the tired old mantra of cuts and more cuts. Even they realise that time is getting preciously short to turn things round. 

It’s the economy, stupid. And it’s health determines whether they’ve any chance at all of saving their political skins next election time.

Now they can at least hope that the conference darling, Vince Cable, will announce some economic goodies that might bring some hope to a party that has sunk behind UKIP in some recent polls.

It will be interesting to see whether the Liberal Democrats in government will have any influence on Osborne’s Autumn statement which strangely is delivered in winter - December.  

Osborne and the Treasury will have a lot to explain. They have been wide off the mark in predicting spending and tax receipts.  But no surprise there, then. They’ve been consistently wrong throughout this economic crisis.

From the start they’ve been widely optimistic. Like the dutiful hack that I am I recall sitting in the Commons hearing Osborne predicting that the economy would grow by around 5% by the end of 2012. Oh, how he wishes. 

Instead the Osborne cuts, with King as his cheer leader, produced the opposite. Growth evaporated and a double dip recession is what, as we say in the valleys, occurred.

Sir Mervyn has at least acknowledged the Bank of England got it wrong. 

Is it to much to ask with one politician saying “sorry” this week that Osborne will also say “mea culpa”. Humility and Osborne don’t readily come to mind. The odds of him holding  is hands up and say “I got it wrong.”  are roughly the same as you’d get on a snowball’s chance in hell. But we live in hope.

Swearing oaths

A story that is over an year old has just reemerged as from  nowhere. What and why?

First, the what. 

It’s about Leanne Wood the Plaid Cymru leader. No, not her conference speech last Friday, but about an oath she took on the day the Queen opened the current session of the Assembly last June. It was an oath expressing allegiance to Welsh republicanism. Taken in, the appropriately named, Mischiefs wine bar.

It was in a meeting held under the auspices of Balchder Cymru a radical nationalist group.

Now a film of the event was placed on youtube at the time. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ffBpnIWHRA&feature=relmfu). 

But at the time the story was drowned by the preoccupation in the media with Ieuan Wyn Jones, the then leader of Plaid Cymru, deciding to take his holidays and missing HM's visit.  

At the time  Leanne Wood's oath swearing seemed to be a passing footnote in history. It was dismissed as the usual suspects showing their leftist credentials

But, of course, the world turned upside down. Against the odds this radical, oath taking republican became Plaid Cymru’s leader. And as consequence her past became of interest to her political opponents. So a bit of oath swearing between consenting adults becomes in the hands of a practitioner of the black arts political dynamite.

But the puzzling thing is why did her political opponents decide to use it now. Which opponents we don't know, but the finger of suspicion points to Labour. They've  form in using their opponents past to cause havoc. And indeed it's Labour that have been using the social media to spread the story.

It’s not a surprise that they’ve trawled the web to find this damaging story, but the surprise is that they’ve chosen to use it now. 

Now we're all used to political parties trying to spoil each others conferences. Indeed some more cynical of the press corp thought that last Friday’s event organised by the  Welsh Government to celebrate our Olympians was an attempt to steal the limelight from Ms Wood’s conference speech. 

But to push this story after Plaid’s conference is inept. Surely it would have been more effective to keep it in the cellar and brought out at a time when it would have done some real damage to Plaid. Election time, comes to mind.

At a time when Labour's riding high in the polls and there is little sign that Plaid Cymru under Ms Wood’s leadership is making any headway, why now? Unless, of course, that  there's some private polling that shows that Leanne Wood is more of a danger than seems apparent to the rest of the world.

Of course, there could be another more sinister explanation. It may not be Labour at all. The culprit could be  someone from Plaid Cymru itself. There have been mutterings of  disenchantment with her leadership. As Harold Macmillan once said your opponents are opposite, your enemies sit on the benches behind you. It might yet again be proved to be a very apt in this context.

There is a lesson here to all ambitious politician, be very careful who you share a platform with. Today’s comrades in arms, could be tomorrow’s liability. 

Plaid at Brecon

Party conferences are getting tame. Where are the young turks that challenge the party bosses and push parties in directions that cause maximum discomfort to the party establishment? 

Plaid Cymru’s conference was such an affair. With monotonous regularity motions were carried unanimously. What ever happened to debate? 

It seemed to be in the best tradition of the old eastern blog when delegates raised their collective hands at the leaders bequest. In this case Helen Mary Jones.

It was all so, very, very, cosy. The “hwyl” has been taken out of politics. Certainly plenty of sincerity, but shouldn’t there be a bit of passion. 

Despite the party adopting a motion “unanimously” to bring the voting age down to 16, conferences like this ain’t going to get them rolling in the aisles with excitement about politics.

It is still a party that want’s independence, sometime, eventually, in the fullness of time.  But mention of the “I” word was certainly not centre stage. But should the day come and a referendum is held all those sixteen year old’s will be allowed not only a say but a vote as well.

More powers for the Assembly was certainly a demand of Elfyn Llwyd's. He want’s the criminal justice system devolved to Cardiff Bay.

According to Llwyd we’re unique as a nation, but not unique in a nice way. "It is remarkable to consider that Wales is the only country in the world that has a legislature, but no legal jurisdiction of its own." 

So there you have it, the campaign to bring back Hywel Dda started in Brecon. 

Interestingly it was left to Dafydd Elis-Thomas to declare that the Union was dead. It has “run its course, on its way out of history”  To be replaced by what, I hear you ask, A European union of regions says he. Hmmm.

And what about the new leader, Leanne Wood. How did she go down? Well, its true to say she had a warm reception. 

She had a standing ovation before she spoke and she even had one when she’d finished. And the middle bit. Well, again it concentrated on economic matters. A little bit more flesh on her spring conference speech. Re-establish the WDA, of course it wouldn’t be called that.

Create our own financial system, not a resurrected Banc y Ddafad Ddu but “our own Bank of Dai.” Her new economic policy though is still very much work in progress. The work bit has started, now we await the progress.

The verdict on her first conference. Conference liked it and it likes her, which is no bad thing for a new inexperienced leader. They still have the faith that she’ll take them to the promised land of political power and even for some independence.  

Whether she’s making an impact in the wider Wales. We shall see. 

She ain’t no political heavyweight, yet.