Greetings from a less-than-snowy Cardiff, where the lack of meteorological chaos has allowed the business of devolution to continue unabated. More’s the pity…
Power To The Pobl
The big news is, of course, that the Welsh Language LCO is upon us. To the uninitiated (and, indeed, most of the initiated) it might seem strange that Welsh language powers aren’t already devolved, but that would be to assume that the current devolution settlement was designed with … well, anything really.
Not that the LCO does anything like devolving Welsh language powers anyway. Instead, it spends three pages caveating its way around the place. Then again, in the world of the One Wales Government, where generation of heat is all important, such caveating was vital to ensure that everyone bloviated on their hot potatoes.
On the right, even the Daily Mail jumped to the aid of the comic villain of the piece, the ever-confusingly named David Davies MP. Davies, the Tory member for Monmouth who makes Sir Bufton Tufton look many things (intelligent, tolerant, sane…), opposes any expansion of obligatory Welsh language provision to private enterprise, one of the key battlegrounds in this field. In fairness to him, it is a constituency issue; he does represent the mythical Chepstow chippy (the obligatory cliché that exposes, as much as anything else, the linguistic limitations of all the journalists who’ve failed to spot the alliteration…)
But the bigger political question in all this is whether it goes far enough to get Plaid off the hook. With their core constituency already alienated by failures like the daily newspaper, Plaid need the Welsh language LCO to be a big hit. Early indications, such as the reaction from Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, are that it’s difficult to be totemic when you’re trying to please everyone.
The Curious Case Of The Spokesperson In The Night-Time
There can be few less eventful events than a reshuffle in the spokesperson team of a minority coalition partner; I mean, who especially cares what the spokesperson thinks when their party has pledged allegiance to the other party’s Minister?
With Plaid, however, it does matter. Since joining the government eighteen months ago, Plaid’s backbenchers have established a unique constitutional settlement with the government their party belongs to, a settlement that basically amounts to “this Plaid is fictitious and any resemblance to Plaids that are members of the government coalition is entirely coincidental.” That being the case, in an Assembly sufficiently small that almost everyone is a spokesperson, the dividing line between the real and the fictional is a little more important.
And so to the case of Janet Ryder, who last week resigned as Plaid education spokesperson. As Freedom Central recounts, the chain of events was pretty strange; having voted for a number of government-opposed amendments to the Learning and Skills Measure in a committee meeting, she disappeared at the tea break, shortly after which her committee papers were retrieved by the Plaid whip. A week later, not only was she not the spokesperson, she wasn’t even on the committee.
Eventually, news of the resignation emerged, with Ryder claiming unhappiness at the lack of progress in improving the measure. As for the strange events in the committee room, however, explanation came there none, perhaps because of the perverse lack of journalistic interest in the matter. Either way, for all the pundits talk of cracks in the One Wales agreement, it seems clear that the real cracks will open where we least expect them to.
Y Barcud Oren appears fortnightly at Liberal Democrat Voice and cross-posted at Freedom Central
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