News reaches me that an English Conservative MP has laid an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill that would move Welsh devolution backwards and render the voting system unfair.
Under new Conservative plans, proposed by Daniel Kawcynski, MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, they would abolish the regional lists, which would also mean that the Welsh Conservatives would lose half of their Assembly Members, including their leader, Nick Bourne.
As Kirsty Williams says the Tories obviously don’t have a clue about what goes on in Wales and they clearly don’t understand the fairer system of voting we have of making Welsh people’s vote count in Wales, flawed as the d’hondt system is.
Under their own plans, the Conservatives would lose half of their Assembly Members and their leader in the National Assembly. Kirsty comments that “Given that Nick Bourne has never won a constituency assembly seat, I am very doubtful that the Welsh leader was consulted on this issue. This shows that the Welsh Conservatives take their orders straight from London without question.”
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Daniel Kawczynski is the chairman of the First Past the Post APPG at Westminster, so his views on electoral methods are hardly a surprise.
On the other hand, he is a backbencher with little influence within his party.
That’s a little different to your frontbench experts on constitutional reform making a boob and failing to link a cut in Members of Parliament from Wales with greater powers for the Welsh Assembly.
- and, if the Conservative proposals had been in place in the first Assembly elections, there would have been just one Con, David Davies in Monmouth. We would almost certainly have outnumbered them three to one.
Actually Ian there was no ‘boob’ because the link is very clear. Liberal Democrat policy on the constitution comes as a package.
The boob is that there was a ten page amendment laid to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill which makes no link between a 30% cut in Welsh MPs and greater powers for Wales or the need to change the parliamentary/assembly constituency links in the Government of Wales Act 2006.
You should remind your party at Westminster about the ‘package’.
I dont need to remind my party of anything. They are all aware of our constitutional agenda. This amendment was laying down a marker, no more than that. There was no boob, nor was there a need to set out the proposals in the sort of detail we would need if we were actually legislating for them. The party has always been very clear how we will; move forward on this.