Scrap the Welsh Assembly and Wales Office says Conservative Councillor

We are well used to people in the Conservative Party calling for the National Assembly for Wales to be abolished, it was even part of UKIP’s Welsh manifesto, but there is also a call to scrap the Wales Office from a well known Conservative Councillor.

Cllr Harry Phibbs on ConservativeHome in response to yesterday's Welsh Conservative Manifesto launch in Prestatyn said :-

‘Generally we can expect to do rather better in a General Election than in the Welsh Assembly. Conservatives are naturally hostile to the waste and bureaucracy of superfluous layers of Government. So some feel the way to show their contempt for the Welsh Assembly is not too taking part in elections to it. Back in 1997 when the referendum was held on setting up the Assembly, the Conservatives were the only Party campaigning for a No vote and came within a whisker of success - the No Vote was 49.7%.

Some money could be saved by abolishing the Wales Office (which has administration costs of 3.2 million and since the advent of the Assembly has diddly squat to do.)

But I would favour radical localism. The option of real devolution of abolishing the Welsh Assembly (as well as the Wales Office) and handing its powers down to the local councils. Not to mention its £14 billion budget which includes £361 million for "Central Services and Administration" plus £48 million for the Assembly Commission - "the corporate body for the Assembly" which all goes on ensuring the talking shop is suitably lavish. £13.6 million goes on Members Salaries and Allowances - it makes Westminster MPs sound cheap.

I wonder if the Welsh Conservatives knew about this article in advance and what Nick Bourne and Cheryl Gillan make of it?

The damage has been done

Interesting take from Robert McNeil at the Caledonian Mercury on last night’s Prime Ministers/Leaders debate and the damage to democracy that excluding the SNP has done.

However, having said it all, let me add that I’m not joining in the tantrums about it. There was no other way, if current constitutional arrangements were to be reflected fairly. It wouldn’t have been fair to inflict Scottish and Welsh issues about every question onto an English audience. That never made sense

On the other hand, it wasn’t fair to a Scottish audience to have the three main British party leaders presented as the only choice. In fact, it was democratically damaging. True, later debates here, in which the SNP will be allowed to speak (and be ganged up on at every question by the other three), might rectify things. But the damage has been done.

The same applies to Wales and Plaid Cymru, but i doubt you’d hear it from anyone in the Welsh Media, particularly in a part of the world that struggles to engage people with politics, last night was a opportunity lost

The question for Plaid Cymru and the SNP is will they gain anything from it.

Why wait for Europe Rhodri, WAG should just get on with it

I wrote a post a few weeks back about former First Minister Rhodri Morgan’s comments on the prospect of Wales losing out on a new Generation of high tech jobs if European Leaders didn’t get their act together by making Europe into an Innovation Hothouse like Silicon Valley.

I pointed out that Wales far from being a high tech and high wage economy that under a decade of his leadership Wales had already qualified for a second round of European Funds after his Government squandered the first lot as a result of short term thinking and that we could be eligible next time around because of his and his successors unwillingness to listen to other voices on economic matters.

But worst of all before the article was published and Rhodri Morgan made his claims he must have known that EU Finance Ministers hadn’t agreed to the 3% R&D budget target just a week before, making his comments the latest in a long line of spin hiding Labour’s Economic failures by putting them a European context, a new low even for Welsh Labour.

I have no idea if anyone at the Western Mail knew about the EU Finance Ministers meeting or whether they thought to put this to Mr Morgan when the article was written, but it may have been a very different article if he was asked what WAG should do in light of these events to help encourage Research & Development in Wales, rather than being given a free platform to spout more meaningless drivel that First Minister Carwyn Jones and Welsh Secretary Peter Hain continue to do.

‘Banking on us’

With the UK debt level being the elephant in the room for politicians on the Campaign trail at the moment, the issue of how part of the massive debt came about and can be reduced is being over looked and that that is how the Government gets back the billions of pounds they have ploughed into the banks like RBS and Lloyds to prevent the UK's banking system crashing.

Last week Public Finance magazine hosted representatives from across the banking industry and public sector including John McFall Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association; shadow City minister Mark Hoban; economics professor John Kay; Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation; Andrew Hilton, director of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation; and Pam Walkden, group treasurer at Standard Chartered bank. The discussion was run in association with Ernst & Young, and chaired by public sector guru Tony Travers, of the London School of Economics.

Here are some interesting quotes from the article

There was widespread agreement that, while the bail-out was justified, the situation as it stood is unresolved and unsatisfactory. The industry is more consolidated and thus less competitive than it has ever been – a situation Hilton described as an ‘oligopoly’, not a free market.

Mulheirn argued that the government’s intervention was failing to ¬revitalise the economy. Much of the sector’s most ¬energetic activity was in mortgage lending, he said, propping up the ‘ridiculous Ponzi scheme’ of the UK property ¬market while more economically vital lending to small and medium enterprises remained sluggish. The importance of this, he added, was that as state spending subsided over the next Parliament, strong growth in the private sector would be necessary to pick up the slack.

Professor Kay agreed that much of the public contribution to the banks had gone towards building up asset prices. He ¬argued that the bailout had failed to ensure that commercial or domestic -customers were well served. Meanwhile, no mechanism had so far been put in place to ensure the credit crunch was not repeated.

But Knight said that not all the blame for the ongoing malaise should be laid at the gates of the City. She emphasised a lack of leadership among the banking sector’s political masters. ‘All the political messages [to the banks] are uncertain... there’s nothing in place at the moment that talks about economic recovery.’ This vagueness was causing the City to hold off making firm decisions about where to place investments, slowing the transition back to business as usual.

‘There’s been too much feeding of the mob,’ she said, referring to the prevailing mood of banker-bashing. Now the focus had to be on leading the country'

Scrutiny and the future of the Welsh Press

It’s worth reading Rob Williams over at the Independent about the impact on the ever shrinking Welsh Broadcast media that the Digital Economy Bill will have and he highlights the lack of interest from Westminster for what's in the Bill, no surprises there then

Rob’s answer is that broadcasting should be devolved to the National Assembly for Wales and I agree, it’s something that has been raised before and rejected by Labour and Plaid Cymru on cost grounds as the money would come out of the block grants, and don’t blame the recession this happened before we knew of the budget cuts to come. The other reason is that Plaid Cymru can’t be seen to be taking money away from S4C after fighting for its creation. It would be a bold and welcome step for Assembly to agree to this and it would prove that they aren’t afraid of more scrutiny and can do things outside Party interest, but don’t hold your breath for comment from any of them.

The main reason people get so worked up about a stronger Welsh media is because a healthy democracy needs proper press scrutiny especially as Devolution grows and beds down.

If you don’t believe that our politicians currently get away with an awful lot just take Peter Hain’s job creation article in the Western Mail it lacks even the most basic elements of scrutiny, there were no comparisons of the number of new jobs created in the last five years under the Labour UK Government here in Wales or whether the figures Peter was quoting are realistic, no indication of what industries those jobs are in or what areas of Wales they would be, there is also no mention of what the opposition parties are offering on job creation to contrast the ideas or any comment from the other parties to Labour’s plans and this is just one example and Labour aren’t the only ones who get away without answering questions, never mind difficult ones.

If Devolution is to be successful we need a Welsh press that isn’t worrying about its future and can ask difficult questions and uncover uncomfortable truths because if they can't in the current anti politics mood it could be a major reason for the irrelevance of the Welsh press and National Assembly for Wales in the future.