And So, With Tears In Either Eye

In fairness to him, Rhodri Morgan pretty much kept to his end of the bargain in announcing that he would stand down as First Minister after the Assembly budget was agreed on December 8th (but since the promise was that he’d announce his intentions on or around September 29th, his end of the bargain wasn’t that hard to keep up). The inevitable political and journalistic encomium followed and you can’t begrudge it him; whatever his political failings, his personal popularity is unmatched in recent memory.

With the flag dropped, Larry, Moe and Curly were soon off and running to succeed him (not that they hadn’t been before, unofficially).
First to show was Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney AM Huw Lewis, of whom it’s difficult to report much new as he’s basically been running for the leadership since July 2007, when he was moved aside (read: sacked) to make way for a Plaid minister as part of the coalition agreement (read: because he opposed it).

The campaign launch reflected the manifesto he’s been hawking around the country ever since, namely that Llafur should break with history and have their traditional post-defeat lurch into communism before they’ve actually lost. It’s a bold strategy, and he certainly found the right face to help him launch it; Jessica Morden, the virtually anonymous MP for Newport East whose upcoming electoral arse-kicking at the hands of our very own Ed Townsend looks likely to mirror Huw’s own over the next eight weeks.

The trouble with Huw from a blogger’s standpoint is that, despite being the outsider, as the candidate who’s been out there the longest he’s the easiest one to write about. On the funny side, there’s his insistence on implicit comparisons to that heroic liberal American President, Josiah Bartlet, as his campaign slogan, “Let Labour Be Labour”, demonstrates. Less humorously, there’s the question of whether in his courting of the Jon Cruddases of this world he doth protest too much.

The key exhibit for the champagne socialist prosecution, particularly in this time of expenses scandals, is the question of where exactly he lives. The Mythbusters section of his website claims that he lives in Merthyr and that his house in Cardiff Bay is not for profit, but that’s not the point; Huw’s wife is the AM for Torfaen, so which residence is most likely to be his main one for them and their children? One of their respective constituency homes in the Valleys, or the second home they share in middle-class Penarth? On that issue, comment comes there none.

Next up was in many ways the wild card, Edwina Hart, the AM for Gower. Long considered a contender, the Health Minister had generally stayed out of the preliminaries only to leap straight into the race and establish an early lead, at least among her Assembly colleagues.

Nevertheless, that lack of preliminary business makes Edwina’s campaign the most intriguing, not least because of the fundamental dichotomy she represents. Her appeal is clearly based on her record as a decisive and/or divisive Health Minister, but while it’s easy to imagine her being an excellent leader of the Welsh Labour Party, you get the feeling she’d be an absolutely dreadful First Minister (not that that logic stopped Gordon Brown, of course).

Last in, however, was the theoretical heir apparent, Carwyn Jones, the AM for Bridgend. A cabinet veteran, Carwyn has spent the last two years in the highly important role of Minister For Not Doing Anything Anyone Might Notice And Thus Be Annoyed By. His campaign launch also captured the fundamental essence of his offer, namely that while he’s meant to be the next Rhodri Morgan, he looks and sounds rather like the next Tony Blair (or in the dullness stakes, the next Iain Gray). Nevertheless, as the only fluent Welsh speaker of the contenders, Carwyn embodies the issue likely to be at the heart of the campaign, namely how a party that after the next General Election will have been wiped out west of the Loughor and the Clwyd can speak for all of Wales. If any of them realise that the first step in that would be to speak for any of Wales, things might get interesting …

Charles The Verb

For a moment, however, it looked as if Rhodri’s departure, pre-announced as it was, might be overshadowed by a somewhat more surprising leap from the ship of state.

Adam Price’s speech to Plaid conference was widely seen as his coming out party, the moment his accomplishments caught up with his ego in which he has always been The Next Leader Of Plaid Cymru™. Admittedly it wasn’t clear whether that was because it was so good or because, by comparison, Ieuan Wyn Jones’s speech was so utterly atrocious (and if you haven’t time for Freedom Central’s excellent coverage of that, let me suggest that the level of IWJ’s speech may be described as follows; low, lower than low, hades low, spinning iron core of the planet low, low …).

It turned out, however, that he’d passed up the chance to make his performance even bigger, as the draft speech included the announcement he made a week later, namely that he was stepping down as MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr. That much was unsurprising, since to be leader of Plaid he needs to be in the Assembly and even if Rhodri Glyn Thomas had been willing to step aside, he wouldn’t have been able to sustain the dual mandate for three to four years.

The surprise was that he’d found a better excuse than “I want to be leader of Plaid” which, while true, might not have endeared him to wherever he ends up parachuting himself. Instead, he announced that he would spend a year studying in America on a Fulbright scholarship, thus inventing the political verb, “to do a Kennedy” (as any fule kno, Charles was a Fulbright scholar at Indiana in 1983 when he came back to stand for Parliament).

Whether the excuse helps at all remains unclear; Plaid’s top targets seem fairly settled for candidates, including the pundits’ favourite to receive him, Neath. He could be hoping that there’ll be a wave of unexpected Plaid wins that clears the way for him in a raft of seats, but you’d have to be pretty delusional to expect that … Ah …

* Gareth Aubrey is a councillor in Cardiff and blogs at Long Despairing Young Something. Barcud Oren appears (theoretically) regularly at Liberal Democrat Voice and is cross-posted at Freedom Central.

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Putting aside whether or not it is appropriate, I wonder if Rhodri Morgan and his cabinet do ever indulge in a bit of the old soft selling to their counterparts in London.

What about on the Welsh devolution settlement? Clearly Rhodri Morgan is not stupid. He knows as well as anyone else that the current system for devolving powers to Wales is a painfully-convoluted, time-wasting, expensive and bureaucratic nightmare whose only saving grace is that (as a result of its basic ineffectiveness) it managed to get the support of Labour MPs.

Of course Morgan is a party man, so he’s not going to publicly criticise the Labour stitch-up that has, no doubt, caused him a great deal of hassle in the last two years. But behind closed doors?

I don’t think it’s too much of a leap of imagination to believe that if he can go to Westminster demanding extra money for Wales, then he can also from time-to-time mention how awful the process of acquiring new powers is while he is there. If this does happen, perhaps Rhodri doesn’t consider it lobbying, perhaps he sees it as advising or co-operating on the next stage of devolution.

A comment to my blog post yesterday said ‘I would have been interested to see Mr Morgan under a Tory Parliament, I have a feeling he would lobby then’.

I think that may be right.

So if the Conservatives take control in Westminster, let’s see how Rhodri Morgan’s attitude to Westminster changes. Perhaps he will begin to have all kinds of opinions that have until now laid dormant.

In the meantime, however, I will keep an ear out for ‘inappropriate lobbying’ on the part of the Welsh government – Labour and Plaid – and I will keep you informed if I hear anything suspect.

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It’s a shame that Rhodri’s former colleague, the other Rhodri didn’t think so. First Minister Rhodri Morgan argues that it is inappropriate for the Welsh government to lobby the UK government on non-devolved matters, even if they have a trickle-down effect on Wales. 

There’s a simple answer to this little predicament: independence. If Wales was an independent nation, Plaid wouldn’t have to worry about going begging to Westminster  for more money and could scrap its own Trident replacement programme just like that.

I’m coming round to this independence malarkey. Any buyers for Rhodri Glyn Thomas as Defence Minister?

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Details of the redacted expenses published by the House of Commons reveal that a company called Corwynt was paid a total of £10,129.51 to supervise work on a new computer system in the Ammanford office of Mr. Price, who is the MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr. Corwynt is an IT consultancy registered at the home of Mr. Dixon in Llanpumsaint and both he and his wife are listed as directors of it at companies house.

Mr. Dixon explains that Adam Price and Rhodri Glyn Thomas, who represents the same constituency in the Welsh Assembly, had decided to create a unified team of caseworkers and as such they needed a new IT system to accomodate this. He was asked to oversee the work.

This sounds all very plausible and there is no evidence to contradict it but the explanation does raise a number of questions and in particular what it was that Adam Price got for his £10,000?

It is the case of course that AMs have computer equipment provided to them for their work and that they are part of a networked system which can not be tied up to any other system because of a firewall. MPs are in a similar position. So whatever work Mr. Dixon was contracted to carry out could not have involved linking up those two systems.

It is perfectly legitimate for AMs and MPs to use their allowances to buy other IT equipment to carry out tasks that their Parliamentary systems cannot deal with. This might involve the maintenance of websites, uploading videos and the design of surgery and other information leaflets as well as software to deal with casework. It would be a simple task to network a couple of PCs and a few printers to enable staff to work together as a team on these tasks. The cost of doing so would come to a few thousand pounds including the cost of hardware and software.

The questions that need to be answered therefore are:

1. Did the £10,000 include the cost of hardware and software?
2. What was the exact nature of the work carried out by Mr. Dixon?
3. If hardware and software were not included in the cost then why did a simple networking task cost so much and what was the additional cost of the equipment?
4. Was a competitive tender sought for the work so as to ensure the taxpayer got value for money?

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Excuse Me While I Hate Myself

Our first clip comes courtesy of Rhys Williams, the Labour PPC for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr. A strongly Welsh-speaking area, Carmarthen East and Dinefwr is fairly iconic for Plaid; it’s the successor to Gwynfor Evans’ old seat and is now represented by The Next Leader Of Plaid Cymru™ and The Minister For Smoking In The Eli Jenkins. Equally, having been held by Labour so recently, it’s also often identified as vital for Llafur in re-establishing its Welshness.

Nevertheless, Mr Williams went in all guns blazing in a magazine article, chastising the Welsh-speaking community for using the language as a weapon of exclusion. Not that he has any problem with individual Welsh speakers; that would after all be quite difficult as he is one himself…

In a competitive seat, it would indeed have been electoral suicide, but Plaid were already going to open a big can of electoral whupass on Mr Williams anyway, so for him the greatest consequence will likely be a reminder of his idiocy on BBC Wales’ election night coverage. In any case, no-hoper Llafur candidates saying stupid things quickly took a back seat as the professionals got into the game…

L’Etat, C’est Morgan

A little context to kick us off. Wales has been struggling with falling school rolls and surplus school places for many years, but Cardiff faces a unique challenge in this respect. The city’s unprecedented growth in demand for Welsh-medium education, combined with years of neglect of the issue by previous administrations, has left the city with some 8,000 surplus places on the English-medium side but with Welsh-medium schools chronically oversubscribed. The council has been advancing proposals for a comprehensive reorganisation of provision across the city, but every case is understandably an emotive one.

One of the main battlegrounds is Canton, one of the wards that borders my own in the west of the city. Canton is served by two English-medium primaries, Radnor Road covering the north of the ward and Lansdowne covering the south and west. Radnor Road shares its site with Treganna, a Welsh-medium primary that is almost literally bursting at the seams.

After various iterations, the council is currently proposing to move Lansdowne to a new, smaller facility on the site of the local secondary school. Treganna would then move to the current Lansdowne site, while Radnor Road would expand into the current Treganna site. On the English-medium side, the result would be a smaller Lansdowne covering the south of the ward while Radnor Road covers the north and west.Those proposals continue to be the subject of consultation, with campaign groups fighting hard on all sides. But during a recent meeting of the Lansdowne campaign, Councillor Ramesh Patel raised the stakes ever so slightly by introducing a new description of the current plans.

Ethnic cleansing.

Cue row in the press, police investigation and a classic non-apology apology from Cllr Patel. Still, you might be reflecting that councillors say stupid things all the time and wondering why this is a matter for Y Barcud Oren and not my own bit of electronic real estate. The answer comes courtesy of Cllr Patel’s employer.

One R. Morgan Esq., mucker of this parish.

Asked about Cllr Patel’s comments at First Minister’s Questions the following week, Rhodri endorsed the non-apology apology, saying the proposals would “lead to an undesirable degree of ethnic polarisation”. Which is all very fine and splendid, except that once agreed by the council, the final proposals will go forward for final approval to…

One R. Morgan Esq., mucker of this parish.

Or at least, to his Welsh Assembly Government. Formal complaints were immediately lodged that, by commenting, Rhodri had prejudiced WAG’s quasi-judicial role in the process, but that didn’t stop Rhodri fanning the flames further. His next press release trumpeted the First Minister for requesting the Equality Commission get involved, and the correction saying that he was actually acting in his capacity as an Assembly Member lost most of its bite by getting his constituency wrong…

Meanwhile, those complaints were quickly brushed back not once, but twice. On the first occasion we were told that the complaints did not identify where the Ministerial Code had been broken. On the second, it was claimed that referring to specific paragraphs of the Code in the second complaint but not the first was inappropriate (because heaven forbid that, when asked for a clarification, we should do anything so gauche as provide one). Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised that the person investigating the complaint against Rhodri would respond so childishly.
Care to hazard a guess who he is? Yup…

One R. Morgan Esq., mucker of this parish.

And now, from a stupid comment by a councillor, we have ourselves a constitutional ball game. Things can only get stranger…

Y Barcud Oren appears fortnightly at Liberal Democrat Voice and cross-posted at Freedom Central

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The Committee proceeded through a number of amendments, some of which were passed partly as the result of the support of North Wales’ Plaid Cymru member, Janet Ryder. This was despite the fact that the Government were opposed to the amendments and she is a member of one of the two ruling parties.

Janet Ryder was passed a note and left the meeting. She did not return. The Committee then broke for tea. On reconvening the Plaid Cymru whip, Chris Franks came into the meeting and removed Janet Ryder’s papers. At this morning’s meeting of the Legislation Committee Janet’s place was taken by Rhodri Glyn Thomas.

Does this mean that Plaid Cymru have started the New Year by asserting greater discipline amongst their members? Does Janet Ryder still speak on education for her party?

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