Today's advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice on the legitimacy of Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 is very welcome, because it confirms the right of territories to secede from a state, irrespective of the wishes of the remainder of that state. They ruled that:
international law contains no "prohibition on declarations of independence" and therefore Kosovo's declaration "did not violate general international law."
There were elections to the Assembly of Kosovo on 17 November 2007 and on 17 February 2008 it voted to unilaterally declare independence from Serbia.
Declaring independence is one thing, but being recognized as an independent country by the other countries of the world is something else again. Because each country is free to do what it likes, it becomes a matter of consensus ... if enough countries recognize your independence, you are independent. The rule of thumb seems to be that it takes recognition by about a hundred countries to get you into the United Nations.
In Kosovo's case, its independence had been recognized by 69 countries including most of the big players. Good, but not quite good enough. Therefore the UN requested an advisory ruling in an attempt to clarify the matter so as to help reach greater consensus. It goes without saying that there are hardliners who will never accept it: Serbia of course, Russia as Serbia's closest powerful advocate, and countries like Spain who will do anything to stop Catalunya and Euskadi breaking away. But this ruling should now pave the way for many undecided countries to recognize Kosovo's independence.
From the point of view of those of us who want to see an independent Catalunya—as well as independence for our own countries, of course—the timing could hardly be better. The Catalan elections are only a few months away, and this ruling confirms that the reasoning behind the strategy adopted by Solidaritat Catalana per la Independència, as mentioned in my previous post, is perfectly sound.
No, I'm not describing the Barcelona football team, but what's happening in Catalunya.
Updating what I wrote yesterday, I've learned from this post on CataloniaDirect that a cross party committee of the Catalan Parliament last week agreed not to progress with the People's Initiative to get the signatures of 3% of the electorate in order to have an official referendum on independence. The reason for this is that the power to hold such consultative referendums was in one of clauses of the Statute of Autonomy that was recently rejected by the Spanish Constitutional Tribunal. I mentioned in this post that the power to call such referendums was in the new SoA, but didn't know until now that it was in one of the clauses which had been struck out.
I must admit to thinking that those wanting a referendum would press ahead anyway, not just to get the threshold, but to get as many signatures as possible, in order to demonstrate the strength of public opinion. But, as I said yesterday, it would only be a gesture because even if the Catalan Parliament then voted to hold an official referendum, the Spanish Government would veto it. If that avenue is cut off, the only way forward will be for Spain to change its constitution (which it obviously won't) or for the Catalan Parliament to declare independence unilaterally, but they can only do that with any authority if a majority of Deputies have been elected on that specific mandate.
The next elections to the Catalan Parliament are due this Autumn and, as a democracy, Spain would find it very hard to stop candidates standing on any platform they like. True, they were able to ban two nationalist parties just before the 2009 election in Euskadi, but they did so on the grounds that they were linked to ETA. Whether that was actually true or not is open to debate, but the timing was such that they were unable to re-form under new banners and this, arguably, cost the nationalists some seven seats and put them in opposition for the first time in thirty years. But Spain can hardly play that card again in Catalunya, because nationalists there have not used violence.
So, without any realistic possibility of holding a referendum on independence within the current Catalan or Spanish Constitution, the only game in town is to make this election into one where the main issue is independence.
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The news today is that a new organization, Solidaritat Catalana per la Independència, has been formed with that aim, which is exactly what Reagrupament have been pressing for. The three leading lights are Alfons López Tena, Joan Laporta and Uriel Bertran, as pictured below.
That Joan Laporta is included is no great surprise. The other two are the most visible faces of the series of unofficial referendums held over the past few months. But what is critical is that they are members of CiU and the ERC respectively, and are resigning their positions in their parties to do this.
In effect they are telling their parties—and their supporters, of course—that independence is more important than anything else, and I think it will be obvious from the tone of the CataloniaDirect post that there is a certain amount of frustration that neither CiU nor the ERC have bought into that agenda. But I think I can understand the position of those parties, because it is the same dilemma that we in Plaid Cymru face: although independence for Wales is our raison d'être, we can't be an electable political party unless we also take a position on all the other issues in day-to-day politics in the process of getting there.
It simply isn't credible to say, as the post appears to be saying, that if they don't get a majority that can declare independence they can be "a very strong coalition able to destabilize the Catalan Parliament" instead. Catalunya, like Spain and the rest of western Europe, has got to deal with matters like the economy, jobs, public services and the fiscal deficit with or without independence. So I'm with the ERC on this one, they can't rule out being in government if there isn't a majority in the Parliament to declare independence ... they have to get on with the everyday things too, preferably as part of government.
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Yet for the ERC there should be no real contradictions. They need to make clear that a vote for their candidates (Deputies are elected by means of a closed list, just like UK elections to the European Parliament) will be a vote for a person with a mandate to declare independence.
It is UiC who are going to be caught in the pincers. If they were able to make the same commitment, there would be no danger of them losing votes to the new group, although they might lose the votes of those who don't want independence. As I see it, it's a game of percentages. If your supporters really are two to one in favour of independence you will hold more votes than you will lose by declaring for independence. If you don't you will not get any more votes, and can only lose votes to the new group.
The beauty of UiC coming out in favour of independence is that it allows them to fight the election as much on the everyday issues as on independence. They can say, "Vote for us and you get a centre-right government to replace the current PSC-led alliance ... and you'll get to choose if you want to confirm the declaration of independence." It's a win-win.
From the point of view of independence, such a move would provide three options for voters who want it. If you want independence and are on the left ... vote ERC. If you want independence and are on the centre-right ... vote UiC. If you want independence but are non-party political and concerned primarily with maintaining Catalunya's culture and language ... and of course football ... vote for Laporta and his "good number of relevant personalities and intellectuals linked to the independentist scene". This third group of potential voters is important. With turnout in the last referendum at 48.9% and turnout in the last Catalan election at 56.8% there are a lot of people who are yet to be engaged in the process of getting the independence that they say they want when asked in an opinion poll.
I've been meaning to write something on the situation in Catalunya for some time, but the longer I left it, the more "out of the news" it became, to the point where it became a bigger and bigger task to explain things over again. However, the massive demonstration on 10 July in support of Catalunya's right to decide its own future has brought the political situation in Catalunya right back into the spotlight.
The demonstration was sparked by the decision of the Spanish Constitutional Tribunal (TC) to declare that some of the articles in Catalunya's Statute of Autonomy are unconstitutional. The Statute was passed in 2006 to replace the earlier version of 1979, which was part of Spain's transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975. It was presented by the Catalan Parliament with support from all parties except the Partido Popular, then passed by the Spanish Parliament after amendment by them, then finally ratified in a referendum. Although the vote in favour was high (73.2% to 20.6%) the turnout was 48.9% ... which either reflected the degree to which it had been watered down or showed that Catalans were not very interested in their constitutional position, depending on one's political standpoint.
The Statute was then challenged by the Partido Popular in the Constitutional Tribunal on matters relating to Catalunya's autonomy, and by surrounding autonomous communities on other matters particularly to do with finance. Although the "headline issue" was whether Catalans were allowed to consider themselves a nation or not, the ruling had many other facets, including:
• the right of the Catalan Government to have a bilateral relation with the Spanish Government
• the obligation to know Catalan language in order to work in the public sector
• the Catalan Supreme Court of Justice as the highest court for certain kinds of laws
• minimum levels of infrastructure investment and limit on the degree of fiscal equalization
Some of these rulings are inconsistent in that, for example: the bilateral relations are essentially similar to those enjoyed by Euskadi and Navarre, and the proposed Justice Council of Catalonia is modelled on what other communities such as Andalusia already have. The fiscal provisions were intended to limit the amount that could be transferred from Catalunya to the remainder of Spain (it is the richest area in Spain second only to Euskadi) and to guarantee a minimum share of infrastructure investment, following the German model. These details are taken from this article, which is the most complete account of the ruling I have been able to find.
For information, it's probably worthwhile to look at the political parties in Catalunya, what they stand for, and their level of support. Ranked in terms of their vote in the 2006 election to the Catalan Parliament they are:
• CiU - Convergència i Unió ... centre-right, pro-autonomy (31.5%)
• PSC - Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya ... centre-left (26.8%)
• ERC - Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya ... left, pro-independence (14.0%)
• PP - Partido Popular ... right, anti-autonomy, pro-Spain (10.7%)
• ICV - Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds ... coalition of left and Greens (9.5%)
• Cs - Ciutadans ... left, anti-autonomy, pro-Spain (3.0%)
The current Catalan government is made up of a broad left alliance between the PSC, ERC and ICV. This coalition was formed after the 2004 election, and the ERC's participation in government was at the price of securing the new Statute of Autonomy with a PSC that had always been lukewarm about it before. Negotiations between Barcelona and Madrid were also helped by the fact that the socialist Zapatero had just become First Minister of Spain. But the ERC felt that the negotiations compromised too much and left the coalition, prompting an early election in 2006. The election didn't change much, and they re-entered the coalition having to accept that the new SoA wouldn't be any stronger. CiU would also have wanted it to be stronger, but in the end the new SoA had more than 80% support in the Catalan Parliament.
Now that several articles of the SoA have been struck down or amended, those same four parties formed the backbone of the demonstration on Saturday, along with a host of civic leaders and other prominent members of Catalan society. The principles that united them were that any constitutional question mark over the new SoA should have been sorted out when it was being considered by the Catalan and Spanish Parliaments, and certainly before being approved in a referendum; and that it was up to the people of Catalunya to decide their constitutional future, not the Spanish State.
In all probability the march was organized on the basis that it is for the people of Catalunya to decide their future, and not to have something they have already approved retrospectively amended. However I'd guess it was a surprise to some of the organizers that there were so many pro-independence banners in the crowd. It wasn't organized as a pro-independence march ... but that is definitely what it turned out to be. So it is worth considering why the public mood in Catalunya has shifted from respect for the enhanced autonomy the Catalans thought they had to independence. Up until now, the only pro-independence party has been the ERC. They are the party that Plaid Cymru and the SNP work with in the European Parliament as part of the EFA.
The current rise of support for independence probably springs from the series of non-official independence referendums that started with the one in Arenys de Munt in September. There was a second round in December. Both these resulted in over 90% support for independence from those who voted, making turnout the critical factor. In the second round the turnout was 27.3%, which would have been enough to secure a victory if the turnout had been about 52.4% ... and if anyone thinks I was being over-clever with my maths, it was gratifying to see Artur Mas, leader of CiU, echo what I had said. But subsequent rounds of voting have been more disappointing for those wanting independence, with the turnout falling to 20.2% in April and most recent round having a turnout of 13.7%.
There are two ways of viewing this. For unionists, it is a demonstration that support for independence is low, particularly in the more urban areas. However it should be noted that these referendums have been organized unofficially by volunteers without the use of any official resources, most notably in terms of information and publicity. One useful parallel would be to compare these turnouts with the turnout for an official referendum and, as luck would have it, there was one of these in Barcelona in May this year on the future of the Avinguda Diagonal, one of Barcelona's main thoroughfares. Despite all the publicity events, the use of official facilities and a budget of over €3m, the turnout in that referendum was only 12%.
But even so, there was a general sense of disappointment that the unofficial independence referendums had not resulted in a higher turnout. However a second possibility has opened up, because it is now possible to organize official referendums on citizens' initiatives if they can collect enough signatures. The Catalan government has allowed the initiative to go ahead, and the signatures of 3% of the electorate (about 220,000) are required within a six month period. There is little doubt in my mind that this number of signatures will be gathered simply because of the numbers who have already voted Yes in the referendums to date, but what happens after that is more problematic. A similar referendum in Euskadi in 2008 was banned by the Spanish State.
A third development is that two more pro-independence groups have recently been formed. The first, Reagrupament, set itself up with the specific aim of getting enough deputies to the Catalan Parliament elected with a pro-independence mandate—either under its own name or by getting other parties to adopt that specific policy platform—in order to declare independence unilaterally. The thinking behind this is that the Spanish won't let Catalans vote in a referendum, therefore declaring unilateral independence will allow them to set up a referendum without Spanish interference. Other countries, as well as the EU and UN, would be almost certain to recognize that independence if it was confirmed in a properly held referendum, and the Spanish would not dare to take control by military force.
For some time there was speculation that Joan Laporta (the recently retired President of Barcelona FC and unambiguously pro-independence) would join or even become co-leader of Reagrupament, but he has decided to set up his own party, Democràcia Catalana, as a vehicle by which he hopes to become President of Catalunya. Of course it is not out of the question for the two groups to form an alliance for the election.
Against that melting pot of possibilities, the thing that matters more than anything is public opinion. Last December I pointed to a poll that showed 51% in favour of independence but didn't get round to mentioning a later poll conducted for El Periódico. Yet it just so happens that they commissioned another poll in June, and the results of both are:
If an official referendum on
independence for Catalonia were held, would you vote for or against?
Parliament has accepted an initiative to hold an official referendum on independence. Do you think it appropriate to hold it at the moment?
Do you think he the necessary signatures (25,000*) will be collected to progress it? [MH: this must be a misprint for 250,000]
If the signatures are obtained, do you think that the Catalan Parliament would approve holding the referendum?
Do you think the Spanish government would allow this referendum to be held?
Apart from the headline figure showing a margin of 48.1% to 35.3% in favour of independence, what is most interesting to me is the breakdown by political party. Of course supporters of ERC are solidly in favour of independence, and those of the PP and Cs are solidly against; but the other parties are more interesting.
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The majority of CiU supporters, by a margin of almost 2:1, are in favour of independence (and the same was true in the breakdowns for last December). Now CiU has always been a Catalan nationalist party, but in favour of greater autonomy for Catalunya within Spain rather than independence. So the choices for the CiU leadership are stark, for no political party can stand against something that most of its supporters want. If CiU now shifted its policy to one of pro-independence, the chance of independence would grow dramatically because they are the biggest party in Catalunya, even though kept out of government by a coalition of the three left leaning parties. If it doesn't shift its policy, there is every chance that voters could shift from CiU to either Reagrupament or to Laporta's new party, which would position themselves on the centre right so as to catch those votes, knowing that left-leaning independence supporters would vote ERC.
It's a choice that CiU would much rather not have to make. So it is concentrating its effort, along with the PSC, on trying to get the Constitution of Spain changed so that there is no contradiction between it and the 2006 SoA. My opinion is that it's worth giving it a go for the sake of due process (and the ERC and ICV will join them in that) but that it won't happen. That's largely because public opinion in Spain has developed a markedly anti-Catalan streak, as was shown in this post.
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Of the parties of the left, opinion among ICV supporters is fairly evenly divided, but with a very high percentage of don't knows. However that probably doesn't matter too much one way or the other for a party with less than 10% support. The PSC, on the other hand, has 27% support. Its problem is working out its relationship with its sister party in Spain, the PSOE. The situation is rather like that between Wales and Scotland and the UK. The PSOE needs PSC support to form a government in Madrid in just the same way as Labour needs its Welsh and Scottish MPs to have any chance of forming a government in Westminster.
So the chances of the PSC leadership agreeing to independence for Catalunya are very small, even though more than a third of their supporters want it.
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The final factor is that the next Catalan elections will be held this coming Autumn. Things are very fluid, and it's hard to pick up on all the nuances of what is happening as parties and personalities jockey for position.
Well, that's the background as I see it. And even though things are complicated, you wouldn't want me not to make some predictions ... so here goes.
The referendum initiative will get 220,000 votes without any trouble. The PSC and CiU will try not to make an issue of it until after the elections because they will want people to vote primarily along the left/right lines for which they are the biggest parties respectively. Therefore the name of the game for those who want independence is to make independence a greater issue than the normal left/right divide of everyday politics. If ERC, Reagrupament and Laporta can make this the burning issue of the summer, UiC will be under great pressure to decide whether to take a pro-independence stance for fear of losing votes if they don't. The size of the demonstration last weekend suggests it will be, but UiC are doing very well in recent polls (over 40%) and may well think that they don't need to change anything.
I predict that UiC will commit themselves to holding a referendum. That's easy. But the big question is what position they will take when (for there's no question of it being an if) Spain refuses to let it go ahead, as they did with the Ibarretxe referendum in Euskadi in 2008. If they can't say what they will do when Spain blocks the referendum, it will lose them votes to Reagrupament and Laporta if independence can be made the main issue of the election.
Even though I would be disappointed to see them fall short, ERC, Reagrupament and Laporta will only get about 40% of the seats in the new Parliament. Because CiU will have committed themselves to a referendum it will be voted though in Parliament, but will be blocked by Spain. However neither CiU nor the PSC will be able to form a government that is not dependent on pro-independence parties of some political hue, and CiU deputies will not feel able to vote for a UDI because they were not elected on that mandate. So new elections will be necessary in Spring 2011. This time there will be nothing for the CiU to be ambiguous about, and they will have to adopt a pro-independence stance because all other avenues will be closed. The majority in the new Parliament will then be elected on a pro-independence mandate and will declare UDI, with a confirmatory referendum to be held within a few months under EU supervision.
I've just noticed that John Tyler, one of True Wales' small core of supporters, has linked to this post I wrote last week on Holtham. Well, if he wants to draw attention to himself, let's show him for what he is. He said this about the report:
It failed the whole population of the United Kingdom by restricting itself to four entities …
England
Northern Ireland
Scotland
Wales
… its failure was to consider England as a single entity rather than a series of regions with differing needs, regions that change with time, without such considerations the report is fundamentally flawed.
The focus of the Holtham report (the subject of the first report, repeated in the final report) was to examine how much money Wales would get if it were treated on the same basis as an English region; because the different regions of England receive differing amounts of money from Whitehall departments according to their individual needs, rather than just the size of their population. That's why spending per head in London is much higher than it is in any other part of England, as well as being higher than it is in Wales, of course.
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How could someone write on this subject, but manage to get what he writes not just wrong, but completely wrong?
Once again, one of True Wales' most prominent activists is deliberately spreading lies and misinformation in order to confuse people ... not just on his own blog, but in the unfailingly amusing comments on Betsan Powys' blog as well. There can be no other explanation.
True Wales are living down to their reputation. They obviously still believe that if you spread enough lies, some people will be gullible enough to believe them.
And indeed the political reaction is one of condemnation from opposition politicians and incomprehension from the BBC's reporters. But I think we are in danger of missing a more important point.
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If there's one thing that characterized Labour's thirteen years in power it was a huge increase in the amount of money spent on the health service. When they came to power, the health service was on its knees. It badly needed more investment, both in people and facilities.
But Labour's preferred mechanism for building new hospitals was PFI. Doing it this way had the advantage (until the accounting rules were changed) of keeping what would otherwise be public borrowing off the books. But funding new building projects in this way is much more expensive in the long term, not just because the consortia need to make a profit, but because of being tied to high-cost management and maintenance elements.
PFI was the norm in both the English and Welsh National Health Services until relatively recently. And the privatization ethos was even more evident when Wales bought into the idea of creating an internal market in our NHS to faithfully replicate what was being established in England. The existing Health Boards were broken into 22 smaller units precisely so that they could compete with each other over commissioning and providing services.
But both those policies were reversed in Wales. As a result of the One Wales Agreement, the internal market in the Welsh NHS was abandoned; and Welsh Labour—to their credit—had already come round to agreeing with Plaid on how expensive it was in the long term to build hospitals under PFI agreements. But there was a downside to this decision. In the absence of an alternative funding mechanism, the result was that fewer hospitals and clinics were built in Wales; but the ones that were built were financed in the normal way out of the capital investment element of the block grant. The Treasury would have been more than happy to allow Wales to build more hospitals, but only if funded under PFI ... as was still being done in England.
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Now why did we make these decisions? Simply because we knew that in the long term it would be much more cost effective not to use PFI. So if we imagine identical new hospitals in Wales and England, the one in Wales will cost our NHS very much less than the one in England ... maybe as little as half over a typical 25 or 30 year PFI contract. Similarly, the reason for abandoning the internal market in the NHS was to cut out waste and unnecessary duplication.
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Returning to the story, I don't know how much of the difference in funding between the Welsh and English NHS is down to factors such as this, but it should be quite clear that the intended result of doing what we have is for the Welsh NHS to cost us less than its English counterpart. The whole idea is to get the same outcome for less money (... or a better outcome for the same money). In other words, it is not just a question of over or under-funding compared with England or any other country, but a balance between funding and outcome.
Now perhaps our outcomes in Wales leave a lot to be desired—although it is worth remembering what Betsan Powys said here about the apparent differences in waiting times between Wales and England, and what I said about it in the context of the larger picture here—but we cannot naïvely assume that spending more money is the only way of improving these outcomes. It is not merely a question of how much we spend, but of how wisely we spend it.
I've found the reaction to the Holtham Commission's report interesting. There was a good selection of differing views on last week's Dragon's Eye:
It's probably fair to say that a good number of people think this report has come at just the wrong time ... or at least that the second part of it has. The recommendations contained in the first part of the report over replacing the Barnett Formula with a formula based on need remain unchanged, and the report has also incorporated the Commission's model for how a needs-based formula could be calculated. But the second part looked beyond the immediate problem at how Wales should be funded in future.
Betsan Powys might well have a point when she said that the range of political reactions to the second part has actually resulted in people from all sides of the political spectrum reaching a remarkable degree of consensus about the first part. Personally, I think the consensus was already forming, and that the only reason why the parties were not in open agreement was because of the election in May. But I suspect that the force behind that consensus is not primarily one of fairness or principle, but simply of wanting to get more money. If operating on the same principles happened to result in Wales getting less money, we can be sure that most politicians would find some new principles. But that is the one thing we cannot afford to do. If anything is clear from the interview with Gerry Holtham, it's that the power to tax is a fundamental part of government, and therefore the principle of having a Welsh Government that can just spend the money it is given without being accountable for how that money is raised is flawed. Even the most local level of government can set its own precept, which is then collected as part of Council Tax.
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But against that backdrop, politicians from across the political spectrum seem anxious to say how much they are opposed to the Assembly getting tax varying powers, even though they are all in favour of devolution and even of extending the devolution settlement we have. Glyn Davies and Rhodri Morgan are two who made their opposition to tax varying powers perfectly clear.
Rhodri Morgan justified his position by saying that if the 1997 referendum had included an option on tax varying powers it would certainly have been lost. But I have to question that. As I see it, the issue was that we were being offered a very limited form of devolution not because we did not have the appetite for anything more, but because a tranche of Labour MPs were determined not to let us have anything better. It was very hard to stir any great enthusiasm for something so watered down, and that is why the turnout was low.
But, irrespective of what may or may not have been the case then, it is very clear what the situation is now. In a YouGov poll last year, this question was asked:
To what extent, if at all, do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
"The National Assembly for Wales should have the same level of powers as the Scottish Parliament."
The margin of agreement was 63% to 28% ... over two to one. By clicking the link for the full data, we can see that supporters of every party agreed with the statement: the Tories by 54% to 42%, Labour by 68% to 24%, the LibDems by 59% to 34% ... and Plaid by a margin that makes me blush with pride.
So doesn't it seem rather odd that people like Rhodri Morgan and Glyn Davies should be so adamantly against what the people that vote for their parties want?
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In the programme Betsan Powys also said that the polls commissioned by the BBC showed that about a third of people in Wales wanted a Senedd with powers of taxation ... and that this high a figure was unexpected. I have to tell her that she should be very much more surprised, because that was only those who want Wales to have powers of taxation as a devolved nation within the UK. It excluded those who want Wales to set its own taxes as an independent country.
These are the options and percentages for the past two years:
February 2010 (with 2009 in brackets)
Wales should become independent, separate from the UK and the European Union ... 4% (was 5%)
Wales should become independent, separate from the UK but part of the European Union ... 7% (was 8%)
Wales should remain part of the UK with its own Assembly which has full law making powers and some taxation powers ... 40% (was 34%)
Wales should remain part of the UK, with its own Assembly which has full law making powers BUT NO taxation powers ... 13% (was 10%)
Wales should remain part of the UK with its own elected Assembly which has limited law making powers only (as it has now) ... 18% (was 21%)
Wales should remain part of the UK and the Assembly should be abolished ... 13% (was 19%)
So the latest margin in favour of taxation powers stands at 51% to 44%. In fact the answer to this question was very close to the 52% to 39% margin for those who said they would vote in favour of primary lawmaking powers in the same poll. So Betsan's "third" is considerably short of the mark. The appetite for the Assembly to have some tax setting powers is very much stronger than she and her colleagues thought.
In fact the question has been asked, although with slightly different options, for several years. The margins in favour of the Assembly having taxation powers were:
55% to 41% in 2006
47% to 44% in 2007
50% to 46% in 2008
I'm showing these figures to demonstrate that the appetite for powers of taxation is much stronger than some people would have us believe. I fully accept that people like Rhodri Morgan and Glyn Davies are against powers to set taxes and I respect their candour, but I have to say that I find the attitude of those who do want taxation powers slightly more difficult to understand.
Apart from in 2009, the BBC's annual poll has shown that more people are in favour of tax varying powers than are against. So those of us who want to see it shouldn't be frightened off saying so for fear that it will make next year's referendum on primary lawmaking powers harder to win. First it won't really make any difference one way or the other but, more importantly, I can imagine those who want to see it backing themselves into the position where they are kept on the defensive. I don't want people in Plaid Cymru to feel they have to answer the "slippery slope" question by saying, "Let's not talk about tax, this referendum is only about primary lawmaking powers."
It's true, but it's not a good enough answer. When asked, we should be bold enough to say that this referendum is just one step on the road to the Wales we want. When asked, we should say that we are working towards devolution of not only taxes and borrowing, but of police, justice and prisons, of large scale energy, and of the welfare and benefits system as well. As I noted here 59.5% of us want us to make decisions on the benefits system in the Senedd, compared to only 22.7% who want those decisions made in Westminster. We need to display the courage of our convictions, for we know where we want to go and people will follow us because we have a coherent vision. Look again at how Betsan characterized the "drama of the day" shock reaction of other parties to what the three economists said in the report ... but Plaid's reaction was to point out that they have now said something not dissimilar to what we've been saying for a very long time.
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So if Yes campaigners from other parties want to explain that they are only in favour of primary lawmaking powers, but may or may not take a position on further devolution at some point in the future, we should let them do that explaining for themselves. But what is the point of us in Plaid Cymru—and those in other parties who have said that they want to take devolution yet further—trying to hide what we believe?
This blog has been set up to complement the Syniadau Forums.
Much of what will appear on this blog will also appear in the Syniadau Forums, but the emphasis on this blog is slightly different. The forums are focused more on the structures and institutions that Wales will need to develop in order to become a successful independent nation, arranged on a subject by subject basis, but the blog will have more of an emphasis on day to day political news and developments.
People are welcome to reply or leave comments either here or on the Syniadau Forums. If anyone wants to initiate a new subject they are very welcome to do so there.
