by Les Broad
quangos do not.
(2) There is a difference between earning and merely being paid.
(3) The people of Wales are more important than its politicians.
(4) Those employed by the Assembly are civil servants, and should be reminded from time to time what those words actually mean. Try looking them up in a dictionary.
(5) The Assembly was supported in the referendum by only one person in three, and the controlling faction has the support of only half that number.
I also have to ask myself if, given all the circumstances, the Assembly has a big enough mandate to justify its continued expensive existence, or should it be replaced by, for instance, a body made up as the UK Independence Party suggests. Expecting a collection of individuals whose first post-election acts were to ladle more taxpayers’ money into their pension pot and to devise ways of adding extra chunks to their salaries, already running at well over eight hundred pounds per week and practically unmatchable anywhere in North Wales, to declare themselves surplus to requirements is, I acknowledge, an idiotic notion but the question has to be asked. Were I to answer my own question I would be forced to conclude that no such mandate exists. Does the average person in the street really want to pay tax to his County Council, more tax and national insurance (tax by another name) on what he earns and VAT on what he spends, assuming he has anything left to spend, and ultimately Inheritance Tax on what he leaves behind when he dies to finance legislatures in Brussels, Westminster, Cardiff and his local county town, all telling him what he can and can’t do? Does the average businessman want to pay colossal sums in business rates, tax on his profits, tax on the payroll, VAT, tax and national insurance on whatever is taken out of the business in salary and tax on the income in his pension fund to fund four armies of busybodies to tell him how to run his business? If the answer to either question is ‘yes’ I think I’m living on the wrong planet. I know we have, at the moment, a Prime Minister who is hell-bent on solving part of this problem by devolving power to assemblies in Edinburgh and Cardiff while at the same time letting sundry Europeans take away the rest of Parliament’s power but it isn’t the right way to go. His mammoth ego-trip at the expense of the British people will anyway take years to correct once he’s gone and if we don’t do it we’ll end up having Latvians telling us how to live our lives – anyone who remembers the American TV show ‘Taxi’ should recoil in horror at that prospect.
So, if the Assembly has managed to prove, in its short existence, both its profligacy and pointlessness, what should come into being to replace it? It’s an interesting question.
There is a case to be made for a county-based entity since county infrastructures already exist. They may not be brilliantly run, but some functions of some counties are run well while other parts of other counties (or, indeed, the same counties) are little better than shambolic. It wouldn’t be beyond the wit of those in high places within the existing counties to work together, hand in hand with the Welsh Office, with the objectives of making all our counties reasonably efficiently run, creating a cohesive strategy for Wales and taking a unified voice to Westminster. It might even have the beneficial side-effect of eliminating a lot of the wasteful duplication of effort that afflicts the six North Wales counties, which seem to be competing with each other rather than working together. Competition or co-operation? I know which I’d take in this instance, given the choice. It doesn’t take long to drive from Wrexham to, say, Llangefni but in that short distance you’d pass through the catchment areas of six (yes, six) local authorities – Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire, Conwy, Gwynedd and Ynys Mon – all busy duplicating what the other five are doing. Madness, isn’t it?
Having said all this, what do the Assembly election results really tell us? Firstly, I suppose, those results suggest that there probably is a left-of-centre leaning in the political scene in Wales, Plaid Cymru being of that persuasion as well as Labour. Plaid took a bit of a beating, for which there was no obvious reason except the possibility that a lot of their supporters stayed at home (maybe in protest at being governed from Cardiff, that epicentre of the Welsh language). While we’re on the subject of Plaid Cymru, isn’t it about time they took their election posters off the many trees and telegraph poles they nailed them to? The Conservative voter is under-represented, even taking into account the bizarre voting system that lets a losing candidate, polling a mere couple of thousand votes, get his (or her) hands on a forty grand a year job. The Liberal Democrats seem to have a bit of support even though nobody has ever known what they stand for.
Secondly, the results say plainly that few people believe the Assembly can affect them.
Does this view reflect the truth? Does it say that the institution is doing good work but has a PR problem? Does it say that the ordinary voter has a problem with an individual of no great renown getting a seat in Cardiff and suddenly becoming a Minister of this or that, and pontificating like an expert?
Thirdly, the re-election of John Marek tells us that voters like a politician (inasmuch as anyone does actually like politicians) who does his bit to look after his constituents and that enough of them can see through dirty tricks campaigns to unseat a good man.
Fourthly, and I admit this is speculation on my part, those results highlight the bits that were missing from the ballot papers. By that I mean the options that weren’t there – the ‘positive abstention’ option (‘none of the above’), which would have given voters the chance to express dissatisfaction with the quality of the candidates, and the ‘close the whole place down’ option which would have given those who object to the Assembly’s existence a voice. If those choices had been included and the turnout had still been the wrong side of 40% the bulk of the electorate would have surrendered its right to complain. As things stand, though, those who simply couldn’t be bothered to find their Polling Station rank equally with those who didn’t vote for a specific reason. ‘I’m not voting because doing so gives the Assembly credibility’ is a view I’ve heard expressed by more than a few people.
Anyone who has read this far is probably thinking, whether he agrees with anything I’ve said or not, ‘so who did this bloke vote for?’ I’m not ashamed to say I voted against the creation of the Assembly in the referendum and I’m still against its existence. Generally speaking, I don’t like politicians, I can’t see the logic in wanting to create another lot of them and I don’t like the con-trick played on us when we were told (as if anyone would believe it) that the Assembly would be of no net cost to Wales. By my arithmetic, 60 members getting paid forty grand a year each equals ?2.4 million, plus the extra payments to Ministers, and if we didn’t have the Assembly that money wouldn’t have gone into the pockets of those people. The Assembly building no doubt costs a great deal of money to run and the civil servants’ salaries will add more millions to the bill. Only one party campaigned on the scrapping of the Assembly and they don’t have any representation at all. You work it out.
Ah, I can hear voices saying, what about getting all that Objective One money from Europe? Wasn’t that a triumph for the Assembly? ‘Probably not’ is my answer as I am of the opinion that it could have been achieved even if it had been Westminster driven (the Government managed it with Merseyside) and it’s not such a triumph anyway. In my earlier publication ‘What Is Wrong With Wales’ I argued (quite well, I thought) that if we weren’t in the European Union or whatever the EEC happens to be calling itself at the moment all that money would have stayed within the UK, we wouldn’t be supporting a ridiculously expensive European legislature and, imminently, a bunch of lame duck Eastern European economies and could have done what we liked with the money which ‘Europe’ has squandered. Instead we got some of our own money back with conditions it didn’t have before we gave it away and have a whole army of people to watch over what we do with it. I don’t call that a triumph.
I believe that if it is to be a credible institution, bearing in mind the referendum result and the 2003 election turnout figures, the Assembly should r
un itself as any business would.
Financial stability is a necessity, and no business will survive if its primary concerns are creaming off huge sums to line the pockets of its principals and to fund unnecessary capital expenditure on itself of no real benefit. It must also make its position in the massed ranks of government bodies dictating to the citizens of the country plain to those citizens. I ask therefore that these questions be answered:
1. What aspects of our lives are dictated by Brussels and what governmental or quasi-governmental bodies exist to provide data on which decisions are based, to implement policy decisions and to enforce legislation?
2. What aspects of our lives are dictated by the UK Government and what governmental or quasi-governmental bodies exist to provide data on which decisions are based, to implement policy decisions and to enforce legislation?
3. What aspects of our lives are dictated by the Welsh Assembly and what governmental or quasi-governmental bodies exist to provide data on which decisions are based, to implement policy decisions and to enforce legislation?
4. What aspects of our lives are dictated by Local