Thursday 27th January 2011
YES VOTE FOR WALES!
There’s to be a referendum on 3rd March which, if successful, will mean that in future, laws which apply only in Wales will be made only in Wales.
It’s an idea whose time has come, I believe.
It’s the right thing to do, for two main reasons.
But it won’t happen at all unless people are prepared to go out and vote for it.
A YES vote is important, I argue, because it is:
- right in principle; and
- right in practice
It is right in principle because it helps to complete that great constitutional journey on which we’ve all been embarked in Wales, since the referendum of 1997 and the foundation of the National Assembly.
That referendum created a body which is, more than anything else, a social policy forum – one in which the great domestic agenda of health, education, housing, transport and so on is made the responsibility of the people who are directly affected by them.
I put it that way because devolution, it seems to me, is a process which combines two vital ingredients.
On the one hand it puts power where it belongs.
But, on the second hand, it carries with it the responsibility for exercising that power wisely and effectively.
There’s something quite deep in the Welsh psyche which means that we are sometimes more comfortable in being the poor dabs who are hard done by – and who can blame others when things go wrong – than we are in having the confidence to take our futures into our own hands, and to take that responsibility onto our own shoulders.
Now, we’ve come a long way, it seems to me, since the debates of 1997, with the dire predictions of the No Campaign that, without our betters in London to take care of us, even the most basic services in Wales would soon fall apart.
Young people, in particular (and my first year students weren’t even in school when that 1997 referendum took place), look askance at the idea that Wales was once governed by a Secretary of State from outside Wales and from a Party which had been roundly rejected in Welsh constituencies.
A YES vote in the March referendum is right in principle, then, because helps complete the devolution jigsaw.
It reinforces that basic principle that decisions which only apply in Wales should only be made in Wales – and that we then step up to the plate and do things in the way we will have chosen and decided.
And, if it’s right in principle, then it’s right in practice too.
The present system has served a purpose. It has allowed the Assembly to make the transition from its previous set of responsibilities to those of being a legislature. It has allowed the civil service in Wales to gain some of the skills and abilities which will now be needed in much larger measure.
But, it has proved to be cumbersome, confusing and time-consuming.
Even for those who are most closely involved, the system is very difficult to understand, and even more difficult to keep on track.
Even more significantly, it pulls the time and the energy of the Assembly into having what have been referred to as the wrong conversations, with the wrong people.
The wrong people, because the discussions are very largely with Westminster politicians, including very many who have no direct interest in Wales.
The wrong conversation, because MPs turn out to be interested, not in the question which lies with them – which is whether legislative power should be transferred to Wales – but the question which lie properly with the Assembly – which is all about what use should be made of the power, once transferred.
WhenIf I tell you that it took Westminster the best part of two years to agree that the best place for legislation about the Welsh language to be made is in Wales itself, you can see just how cumbersome it had all turned out to be.
And that was when we had a Labour administration at both ends of the M4.
Even then, the determined ideological opposition of the Conservatives meant that there were interminable delays in the Housing LCO, despite it having been in Labour’s election manifesto of 2007.
The signs of things to come are already very apparent. The early skirmish over Organ Donation means that it is all too easy to imagine what might happen if the next Assembly is dependent upon the Member of Parliament for Chesham and Amersham to secure LCOs in health, or education or powers of intervention in transport or the Welsh economy.
Why should all of this be of interest to a trade union and its members?
Well, my answer is that it is because successive Assembly Governments have demonstrated a commitment to a set of left-of-centre politics and policies which chime with the preferences of Welsh voters in general, and with the membership of trade unions in particular.
This policy agenda includes a set of unifying principles, including:
- a belief in the positive power of good government, and in government as the vehicle through which the collective efforts of Welsh citizens can be harnessed for the collective good: government as the place where people come together, and no-body gets left behind;
- universal rather than means tested services, as the glue which binds complicated modern societies together etc.
- the model of the relationship between the elector and the state, as one based on citizenship, not consumerism and where
- the model of the relationship between the individual user of a service, and its providers, is based on high trust, not low trust relationships]
- and, over-arching it all, a belief in equality of outcome, rather than simply equality of opportunity.
And why PCS?
Because there is already a track-record of successive Assembly Governments working with, rather than against organisations which represent staff – and of regarding trade unions as assets in the shaping the future of Wales, rather than barriers to it.
And, over the next four years, the symbolic significance of doing things differently is going to be much more important than over the first decade of devolution.
Because, with a Conservative-led administration in London,
- hell-bent on destroying the social fabric built up over more than 60 years,
- of returning with new vehemence to that Thatcherite mantra of ‘private good: public bad’
- of treating people who work in and for government as a problem to be solved, rather than an integral part of the solution itself
then the fact that we will be doing things differently in Wales takes on a significance far wider than what goes on within our own borders.
If you want to see the different world which we now occupy, then just look at the reaction to the Assembly Government’s decision not to go down the route of throwing higher education to the marketising wolves.
Central Office sent out a phalanx of their finest to attack the Welsh policy on every radio and television programme they could populate.
Why? Not because they could care less about what goes on in Wales per se, but because they feared that it gave the lie to that biggest lie of all – that there was no alternative to the way in which they had chosen to act in England.
And the reason why PCS as a union needs to be, I would argue, in the forefront of arguing for a YES vote in March, is because that will put the legislative tools which we need to do things differently here in Wales firmly in the Assembly’s hands. And the significance of doing things differently will be important not simply for your members here in Wales, but as a symbol, far more widely, of a different way of doing things.
I’m not suggesting to you, at all, that there haven’t been areas of discussion between the Assembly Government and its staff in the past.
Nor am I pretending that there won’t be some frank exchanges in the future.
But I am saying that those discussions, in Wales, will take place within a framework in which Government recognises the value of public service, the vital importance of public services, and the essential part which your members play in making all that happen.
In principle, and in practice, the referendum of 3rd March brings that close, and makes it easier in the difficult years ahead.
I hope, and believe, that PCS, with the wider Union movement will be there again, when the people of Wales most need you.