Following Cheryl Gillan’s announcement yesterday that the referendum on the Assembly’s powers would take place in the first quarter of next year, Cymru Yfory’s David Llywelyn Davies and True Wales’ Rachel Banner appeared on Good Morning Wales today (about 2h 34m in) to discuss issues surrounding the date and more.

The arguments Rachel Banner put forward in favour of a No vote were depressingly familiar, and far-removed from what is actually on the table in the referendum. We heard how the ‘political elites in Cardiff Bay’ are merely grabbing more power for themselves, that this referendum is part of the process of Wales separating from the UK, that a Yes vote would cost more and that the Assembly should instead concentrate on ‘Health, Education and the Economy’. Let’s take these points in turn:

The political elites

If it is the political elites that reside in Cardiff Bay, why is it that according to recent polling carried out by YouGov and the Insitute of Welsh Politics almost two to one of respondents believe that the Assembly should have more influence over governing Wales than Westminster, let alone the fact that the current UK Cabinet does not have a single Member representing a Welsh constituency?

‘The slippery slope to separation’

This referendum is not about independence. A Yes vote would not mean Wales ‘cutting itself off from the rest of the UK’, it would give us simpler, more effective government within a UK framework, and allow us to act swiftly for the benefit of our people and our communities.

Increased costs

As we have pointed out before, evidence published by the All Wales Convention shows that resources that are currently tied up in the inefficient and wasteful LCO process would be better spent on making laws more quickly and more clearly, and in a more joined-up way.

Health, Education and the Economy

Health and Education are fields already devolved to Wales. And yet, under the current flawed system, we have been unable to legislate fully on issues like improving the rights of mental health patients in Wales and providing safer school transport without wasting years in having to ask permission from Whitehall first. As David said this morning, why on earth wouldn’t we want these powers in Wales, especially given that the responsibility is already with the Assembly? In fact, the Assembly can only begin to properly concentrate on doing all it can to improve Health and Education once this mess is sorted out.

Finally, it was clear once again that True Wales has no answer when challenged on what positive benefits would be retained in the event of a No vote. The example of the smoking ban was proof enough of this – for the families of hundreds of people who lost their lives in the two years it took the Assembly to get powers on banning smoking this referendum is not about banal constitutional debate, or mythical political elites.

In a guest blog for Cymru Yfory, Political Commentator Lee Waters looks at the challenges facing the Yes campaign in the forthcoming referendum on the Assembly’s powers.

Though they present themselves as political innocents the No campaigners are sophisticated political operators.  And though opinion polls consistently show that they are out of touch with Welsh public opinion, once the date is named for a referendum they’ll be given an equal platform by the broadcasters.

So how should progressives deal with their backward looking pessimism?

1          It’s about the future

As flawed as the law making system is the referendum is not going to be about mechanics.  There are bags of evidence that the LCO system is not working but it is of little interest to most voters. There is little profit in getting drawn into opaque arguments about the Government of Wales Act.  The Yes campaign needs to focus on the future.

The No campaigners will dust off the Leo Abse playbook and conjure up the bogeymen of the past – the elites, the language fanatics, the constitutional obsessives who care little about bread and butter issues in their quest for an independent Wales.  But the Yes campaign must not be distracted by the dog whistle tactics of the 1970s.  We must frame the debate to be about the future and not the past.

Over the last decade the Assembly has gradually grown in stature and confidence.  A Yes vote will help take Wales forward, giving Wales a stronger voice.  It will give those we elect the tools to protect our communities from Whitehall indifference.

2          Hope not despair

We face tough times in the coming years and the Yes campaign must set out an optimistic vision for the future and contrast it with the backward looking message of the No campaign.

The choice is between a more confident Wales where young people don’t need to leave their communities in search of jobs and challenges, or a dependency culture where we look to others for solutions to our problems.

What is the vision of the future offered by the No campaigners?

3          The consequences of voting No

The majority of voters want to see devolution succeed, but the No campaigners want to hobble our Assembly.

They present a No vote in the referendum as a risk-free venture.  Defeat the elites, says Oxford-educated Rachel Banner, and let Assembly Members carry on as they are.  But staying as we are is not an option.  If Wales votes no to the proposals for modest reform, the Assembly’s ability to stand up for Wales will begin to unravel.

We already know that London officials need little excuse to sideline Welsh affairs. If there is a no vote the slow and complicated system of law-making will get even worse. The holes in the devolution settlement will be systematically exploited as Whitehall mandarins feel they have a green light to frustrate the Assembly’s requests. 

So the status quo is not an option. Forward or back, that’s the option. And let’s not pretend otherwise.

If, as Len Gibbs of ‘True Wales’ suggests (29 May), the population as a whole has a poor understanding of devolution, then his letter to the Western Mail on the referendum question will not have done much to enlighten it.

There is no hidden agenda here. The referendum cannot, and will not, offer independence or autonomy. It cannot, and will not, provide law-making powers in any area of policy other than those already under the Assembly’s responsibility. Those areas of policy are already fixed and are not up for debate.

The choice before the people of Wales is this: either we stick with a system where the Assembly has to keep asking Westminster’s permission to pass legislation in policy areas already devolved to it OR we change to a system where the Assembly can simply legislate in those same specific fields without wasting tremendous amounts of time, money, patience and good will.

The reason for people’s alleged confusion about devolution is precisely the same reason that the referendum question is so difficult to frame – we need a simpler system, and a yes vote in a referendum will provide it.

‘We were over in Carmarthen leafletting [Saturday] and found opinion pretty evenly split between Yes and No people’. Thus Rachel Banner of True Wales responding in the St David’s Day Western Mail to the ICM poll showing that backing for proper law-making powers for the National Assembly is now 56%. You’d think they’d done some serious campaigning and polling on the day.

So what really happened?

Tomorrow’s Wales had asked one of our supporters to observe the True Wales ‘event’ in Carmarthen between 11.00 and 12.00. He found two leafleters outside Marks and Spencer, together with a man with a clipboard. The leafleters were finding it very difficult to get shoppers to accept a leaflet.

After a time our man approached one of them and asked what they were handing out. ‘You’d better speak to my friend’ was the response, referring to the clipboard man, who turned out to be Paul Matthews from Newport Gwent. The sheet on the clipboard was blank.

Ms Banner says that she’s ‘not very convinced by opinion polling generally’. As far as True Wales polling is concerned she can say that again.

John Dixon has also blogged on the weekend’s events, read his view here.

CAMPAIGNERS against more powers for the National Assembly have been stunned by Labour MP Don Touhig’s refusal to back them.

Several prominent members of Mr Touhig’s constituency party at Islwyn also belong to True Wales, the group likely to form the official No campaign in the referendum on primary lawmaking powers for the Assembly that will almost certainly be triggered tomorrow.

(more…)

Source: WalesOnline 8/2/10

True Wales claim that “even more taxpayers’ money will have to be spent on the salaries of lawyers and civil servants” following a move from Part 3 to Part 4 of the Government of Wales Act 2006.

The Convention’s report exposes this as being inaccurate.

It says that “the likely impact on the National Assembly for Wales of a move to Part 4 would be, broadly speaking, financially neutral in terms of current budget allocations. In Whitehall, there should be a small, but unquantifiable, release of capacity if consideration of LCOs were no longer needed.”

“Should the National Assembly for Wales move to Part 4, the saving for the Welsh Assembly Government of £1.98 million from not having to go through the processes of acquiring powers through LCOs and Framework Powers in UK Bills would likely be reallocated to the formulation of policy and drafting of Assembly Bills”.

In other words, it’s clear that moving to a proper parliament for Wales won’t cost more, and that resources that are currently tied up in the inefficient and wasteful LCO process would be better spent on making laws more quickly and more clearly, and in a more joined-up way.

At a briefing in Cardiff this afternoon, Sir Emyr Jones Parry briefed assembled members of civil society and interested members of the public on the conclusions of the All Wales Convention’s report, whose authors are “convinced that Part 4 offers substantial advantage over the present arrangements in Part 3 (of the Government of Wales Act 2006). It would offer greater efficiency, permit a strategic approach to the drafting of the legislation, provide greater clarity, be more consistent with the rule of law and democratic tradition, and reflect the emerging maturity of the National Assembly for Wales”.

Despite having in front of them a document that is perhaps one of the most wide-ranging public consultations ever to have taken place in Wales and an ‘impartial examination of all the evidence received’, those present from True Wales were unable to muster the same objectivity in their own contributions. One contributor alleged that the decision on a referendum on moving to Part 4 would made undemocratically and by an undefined minority; it was left to Sir Emyr to explain that the decision on a referendum would, in the first instance, be made by elected representatives in Cardiff and Westminster, and then the question would subsequently be voted on by the Welsh electorate (‘the people of Wales’, who True Wales claim to speak for). Anyone who did not vote, Sir Emyr added, would be abdicating their civic responsibilities and as such could not complain after the event. It is difficult to imagine how such a scenario can be perceived as being undemocratic.

The content of a leaflet distributed in some areas of Gwent by David Davies MP’s True Wales group gives a valuable insight into the likely tactics of opponents of devolution as a referendum comes closer. In a word: lies.

Untruth Number 1. The leaflet bears the headline ‘Exposed! £9,000,000 Independence Black Hole’, and then suggests that moving to ‘full law-making powers’ (which Wales would not have anyway, even after a referendum) as a step on the journey to indpendence. The referendum is not about independence, but about giving Wales the powers to make laws in the 20 policy fields where it already has some powers.

Untruth Number 2. The leaflet claims that the All Wales Convention is a publicly-funded Yes Campaign ‘tasked with travelling around Wales… to persuade you to give the politicians more powers.’ WAG and Sir Emyr Jones Parry, Chair of the Convention, have repeatedly stated that the job of the Convention is to listen to people around Wales and decide whether a move to primary law-making powers is neccessary. The Convention will emphatically not be campaigning for a Yes vote.

Untruth Number 3. True Wales claim that giving the Assembly more powers would lead to at least 20 more AMs. If only that were the case! The Assembly seriously needs more members in order to effectively carry out its functions, but there is no prospect of this happening anytime soon, whatever the result of the referendum.

What we would really like to hear from opponents of further powers is a persuasive argument for why the current arrengements are the best constitutional settlement for Wales. The fact that they show no sign of attempting to do, and are instead having to resort to scaremongering and misinformation, suggests that they can’t think one either.

Three weeks after David Davies MP announced his intention to campaign for a No vote in any referenduum on giving the Assembly primary law-making powers, a group of like-minded people have now formed around him calling themselves ‘Ture Wales’.

However, even a No campaign must also be campaigning ‘for’ something - in 1997, it was for keeping things as they were - and it is difficult to discern at this point what the new group, or indeed any future No campaign will be ’for’? According to the Western Mail, True Wales spokesperson David Rees says the group is for:

those who support Wales’ presence in the United Kingdom [who] have been for too long unfairly categorised as ‘anti- Welsh’. True Wales aims to represent the true feelings of the huge majority of people in Wales who wish to remain in the UK.

if there is a general belief out there that the proposed referendum will be about taking Wales out of the UK, then clearly the All-Wales Convention has a lot of work to do in educating people! But that is unlikely to be the case. The referendum will be about giving the National Assembly primary law-making powers that will allow it to make a real difference to the lives of the poeple of Wales without having to go through the cumbersome LCO process every time. And with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and a number of Conservatives being behing such a move, any Yes campaign too will be led by people who want Wales to remain forever part of the UK.

So since ‘keeping Wales in the UK’ cannot be their defining principle, it may be that True Wales’ aim is to keep things as they are - whcih would be the inevitable consequence of a No vote in a referendum. If so, they believe that the current system of giving the Assembly law-making powers bit by bit, with a huge amount of time and resources being wasted in getting the OK from Westminster., is the best constitutional settlement for Wales in the long term. It is very difficult to see how anyone could come to this conclusion, still thes how they would hope to convince a majority of Welsh voters of its merits.

Or, they may be for something else. Maybe for going back to the pre-1997 days of direct rule from London with no devolved Welsh institutions at all? Not for keeping Wales in the UK, but keeping it, to all intents and purposes, in England. If that is their true standpoint, its is one that is supported by only 15% of the Welsh population, and pro-devolutionists have nothing to fear from the new group.