SOME PEOPLE believe that the Assembly is about Legislative Competence Orders and such law-making business, but to those who remember the old-style and sadly-departed ministerial committees, the running of a country depends much more on administering policies and in deciding HOW things happen.The Assembly is far too concerned with getting the legislation right that it is forgetting about the administration.
Welsh Assembly
Why it’s wrong to reduce the number of councils
DESPITE ALL the problems both they and the country is facing, a pledge was made in the coalition briefing that local councils will NOT be forced to merge.
Welsh Assembly
Barnett Squeezes the pips till they Squeak
HOW MANY billions of pounds Wales has lost through the operation of the Barnett funding mechanism (known as the SQUEEZE) which keeps the country – and more important, for now, the Assembly – going is uncountable, said Gerald Holtham, chairman of the Independent Commisson on Funding and Finance in Wales.
Welsh Assembly
Gordon Brown is judge and jury and banker
It seems the new Barnett formula which will eventually appear will be almost exactly the same as the old one. Almost the only difference will be that an appeal formula will be built in so that the “regions” can object to the way the carve up that has been decided by the Treasury in London.
Welsh Assembly
Wales’s Westminster freeloaders
If ever there was a need to get rid of an ‘extra, expensive and useless tier of government’ (the old chestnut once much loved by critics of the National Assembly) it is now. And the tier that should be in our sights is that which consists of Wales’s 40 Members of Parliament and some 48 Members of the House of Lords.
Economy
The Tourism Silk Purse
This week the Assembly announced another £22m on a “targeted clean-up campaign” for the Valleys.
With another 38 million spent on disaster areas in the North, that’s a total of £60m of silk purse creation out of a sheep’s ear. Yet the Assembly cannot guarantee that the expenditure will create a single job! The geniuses down in Cardiff docks merely hope that this tarting up will make these areas more attractive to tourists. This is optimism of a kind that makes a child putting a lost milk tooth under its pillow look like a ruthless investor.
Voting methods
Tories adoption of PR could end jerrymandering
It’s one of the great scandals of Welsh politics, but the Liberal Democrats, everlasting proponents of electoral fairness and proportional representation for once never mention it.
