KIRSTY WILLIAMS seems willing to risk martyrdom, writes Clive Betts from the Assembly press gallery.
The Lib Dem leader launched a cutting attack on the size of the health budget, its wastefulness and suggested the need for cuts.
Normally, health spending is absolutely sacrosanct for politicians. The only issue is how to find some more money; never how to cut the existing budget.
Much of the blame was placed by the Brecon and Radnor AM at the foot of health minister Edwina Hart – which sparked the query from a member of the press whether, if she couldn’t run her own department, how could be run the entire government as leader of the Labour group and hence first minister.
Ms Williams declined to comment on that point.
But her attack on Mrs Hart certainly raised questions about the minister’s competence.
It is not that Mrs Hart doesn’t make decisions. But that she rushes into them, without perhaps considering issues carefully enough.
Ms Williams claimed that that the health budget is spent very inefficiently; that about £50bn remains unallocated of this year’s budget. When asked in committee about that unallocated money, Mrs Hart had the gall to ask members whether they had any ideas of how it should be spent, according to the Lib Dem leader.
There’s also the big issue of cash savings from the massive reorganisation carried out last month, with number of NHS organisations reduced from around 37 to about 10.
Ms Williams said that no figure exists for expected savings. Perhaps that it because the rushed change was pushed through on the back of a no-redundancies agreement. How many senior officials are now sitting around doing nothing, but still getting paid, she asked.
Hence the Lib Dem demand for the NHS to face a need to meet during the coming financial year of efficiency savings which are 0.4 per cent higher than faced by other departments.
In return, the under-pressure further and higher-education sector would be given a better deal during the coming year. We certainly hear quite a few moans from FE and HE – not only from the Lib Dems passing on their pleadings, but direct from the sectors themselves. But both sectors are quite well organised for public relations.
I admit I am surprised at the Lib Dem willingness to attack the health budget. The only reason I can see them getting away with it is that the health minister is not the most popular of characters politically.
Which says something about who should become the new Labour leader …
LIB DEM financial spokesman Vince Cable is down in Newport later this week, and the press were invited yesterday to meet him in the town, writes Clive Betts from the Assembly press gallery.
On being asked whether the UK party’s biggest financial noise will also be travelling to St Athan, Kirsty Williams, the party’s Welsh leader pointedly refused to answer.
The reference was of course to Mr Cable’s proposal to axe the giant military training “academy” which the UK government is planning to set up at the RAF base to undertake the entire gamut of military training.
The interest this morning from the press was because Mr Cable put the idea forward without having had any discussions beforehand with the Welsh party.
While defence policy is indeed reserved to London, any scheme such as this has massive ramifications throughout so many spheres of government. After all, the Cardiff government is planning to build all sorts of new roads, plus possibly a new railway station at St Athan – there used to be one there, but it didn’t get reopened when passenger trains returned to the line quite recently.
What is interesting about the few words said at today’s press briefing was that we still don’t know what are the Lib Dem plans for St Athan.
The truth is probably that they don’t have any plans, and that Cable’s “policy” was a faux pas or just a whistle in the wind.
This was a chance to lay a bogy. But the Lib Dems didn’t take it.
The comparison with the Conservative briefing which had only just finished was massive. Mr Melding spoke at length about policy on devolution – the Tories don’t possess a clear one. But that didn’t stop him talking about it, as well as giving the reasoning on which Tory decisions will be based.
And not just to give his personal views. But to go as far as he could towards explaining the situation.
It’s a pity that Kirsty – faced with the same sort of problem – didn’t do the same.
PS Mr Cable’s in Newport in connection with an expansion of the Admiral insurance navy in that town.
THE COMMENTS by this blogger a couple of weeks ago that new Lib Dem leader Kirsty Williams was failing to make her mark in the publicity stakes seem to have had an effect, writes Clive Betts from the National Assembly press gallery.
First Minister Rhodri Morgan opened his signing-off press briefing before the summer recess – after a few words about the Ashes in Cardiff – with a stinging attack on the information Ms Williams had put out on the credit-card expenses incurred by officials of International Business Wales (IBW, the old WDA).
Told of this afterwards, Peter Black, more or less deputy Lib Dem leader, merely gave a big grin.
And when Ms Williams turned up to her own briefing, she immediately commented on how she had overcome that morning the charge that this same blog had raised against her.
Mr Morgan took care not to ridicule the publication of the figures, merely some of the conclusions reached. He knew full well that charges of “wasting” money have always to be taken carefully … particularly in the wake of the row over MPs’ spending.
Mr Morgan expressed extreme surprise that anyone working with IBW had ever travelled first class. I never have, or I don’t think so, he told us.
Told this, Mr Black responded that the sums for individual flights were so high that they must have been first class.
But, as his own party’s former leader, Mike German, had pointed out in response to criticism of his own expenses as an AM, flight-bookings are often undertaken by the Assembly fees office. This particular figure did indeed seem rather high, but that was what the fees office had booked …
The moral is simple – don’t let the civil service book your air flights; use an expert. But that means going out-of-house, and some on the Left in Labour and Plaid object …
With front-page lead in the Western Mail and lots of time on the BBC, Ms Williams certainly made her mark over the expenses.
But you didn’t have to listen to Mr Morgan to wonder whether this Lib Dem publicity triumph was really part of an old-style Tory don’t-spend-anything agenda.
No doubt, in true fact, it isn’t. It’s just a way of getting publicity about how to win good governance. But behind it lurks the likes of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and they’re big friends of the Tory Party.
The high spending on air flights, Mr Morgan put down to the programme of office closures. For instance, there is now no office in South Korea. So someone has to fly in to meet a targeted businessman, so as to give the impression that Wales is there on the spot.
Mr Morgan challenged the Lib Dems to uncover through freedom-of-information requests the equivalent information for the other development bodies in the UK. Only when those figures arrived was Mr Morgan willing to be judged.
No doubt a few post restaurants were visited, and a few bars. But do you entertain businessmen bearing new factories and hundreds of jobs with no more than a mug of Nescafe in the office canteen ? Is that what the Lib Dems want ?
As long as the credit cards don’t include dancing girls who lie horizontal overnight … But that’s more like old-style industrial attraction, and no doubt the accountants in Cardiff will be keeping a very beady eye open for such fiddles.
Anyway, said Mr Morgan, in the modern world an accountant much prefers to receive a single bill from a credit card company, than have to deal with hundreds of receipts, some of them curly and coffee-stained. Why?
HOW LONG before the expenses issue starts to blow up in the faces of AMs, writes Clive Betts from the National Assembly press gallery.
A new system of rules was, as expected, adopted sheep-like by AMs in Cardiff in response to the shenanigans in London.
The new, rather draconian, rules have been drawn up by an independent review under Sir Roger Lyons “in order to restore faith in the political process”.
However, it didn’t take journalists – for long not unknown for taking expenses rather than oft-inadequate pay settlement - long to pick holes in them.
Some of the points are minor. Such as, what happens if an AM marries a member of his staff. He would then seemingly be barred from employing that person.
An arcane point ? No, former Lib Dem leader Mike German married one of his staff members, and he remains as an AM.
The hope is that such issues will be dealt with through the “discretion” in the Assembly.
But can we rely on such “discretion” when a certain tabloid (the Western Mail) has shown that it is only too willing to go over the top on the expenses issue.
Remember the ridiculous saga over Tory leader Nick Bourne expenses, while that paper ignored so long the issue of two AMs occupying a single second home (they were, of course, married).
While Mr Bourne seems to have escaped largely unscathed, “Valleys and working class tribune” Huw Lewis may have scuppered his bid for his party’s leadership.
More right-wing screams from the Western Mail is the last thing we want to hear on this issue; no doubt that person truly loves to adopt the policies of the right-wing Tory friend the Taxpayers’ Alliance …
At least one AM seems rather worried about the effect of the new rules which are about to be introduced. LibDem Peter Black could suffer dangerously from the rule that Swansea is too close a location for a first home to justify a flat in Cardiff Bay.
Perhaps it is. Perhaps it isn’t. It is at least an hour’s car trip, which is two-hour’s less working time each day. And then there’s not quite a London-suburban train service on the line (the last train is 23.15).
It’s OK driving for an hour on an often-busy motorway when you’re awake; but what about when you’re tired after a busy evening meeting constituennts …
Mr Black told the press that he had argued before the independent commission for Swansea to be designated a second-home town. Unsuccessfully.
The independent review panel’s chairman Sir Roger Jones seemed to fall a bit too much into the tabloid agenda. He said, “It’s like sending kids into a sweet shop with shelves knee-high off the ground; they were told to help themselves, and they did.”
Really, Sir Roger, we are talking here about enabling democracy. No AM possesses a duck island, even if one MP does. But they need to tools to do their jobs properly and well.
No 50-year-old would want the job, “fighting off the press every morning…” But most are seldom approached by the press.
And if we are bringing in rules which mean most 50-year-olds wouldn’t want the job, who would go for it ?
Inexperienced youngsters ?
Party hacks who are happy to swim in the slime of only their own party’s political dogma ?
That is not the sort of body which the National Assembly was supposed to be. We should beware extremely carefully of being led to adopt such a situation as a result of screams from the tabloid press.
Or of the discoveries of London’s sole remaining broadsheet – although we should be eternally grateful about the discovery of the application of cash for a duck-island.
A note of sanity is brought into the issue with a letter in today’s Western Mail from my level-headed friend John Owen. He refers to meals allowances, and to how they are dealt with in a normal commercial environment (John was an engineer, often working away from home).
In such a world, the AMs’ £36.65 allowance would not be sniffed at by the accountant. Mr Owen says a receipt would be necessary. But what sort ? Is the Western Mail accepting that paper’s equivalent of £36 when it is hastily scribbled by the claimant on the ripped-out page of a notebook, with a rough date attached ?
The Cardiff temple of journalistic proprietyblew hot and furious about Tory AMs (led, of course, by the Temple’s favourite hate figure, the Assembly-friendly and slightly to the left of dead-centre Nick Bourne) travelling outside Wales to study the political situation in areas apparently remote from their concerns, such as Brussels.
The Temple put its considerable journalistic resources into discovering that the AMs used quite a good hotel. Unfortunately, the paper failed (or didn’t try) to find out the discount (around 40 per cent).
Later that evening I chanced on a Lib Dem who waxed eloquent about the hatred being built up by the right-wing press against such foreign trips. Eleanor Burnham had spent taxpayers’ money travelling to Spain.
To sun herself on the beach ?
No, to travel to the Basque country to learn about their local-language daily papers.
Laugh if you like from the back of the public bar, as you peruse page three of The Sun.
I’d much rather listen to Ms Burnham on political issues (although, I know she is inclined to have her own take on them), than to the uneducated sections of the public bar on anything (unless they’re drinking good real ale, and that’s the last they’ll be imbibing).
I WONDER whether the new Lib Dem leader Kirsty Williams can ever win over the issue of payments to Assembly Government contractors, writes Clive Betts from the National Assembly press gallery.
She complained to the press at the weekly Lib Dem briefing that while suppliers of goods – such as paper and pencils – to the Welsh government get their bills paid very rapidly, contractors who supply training services – particularly to the newly-unemployed – have to wait at least two months.
“This has left a very bad taste in the mouth,” she said. “The very companies working to tackle the impact of the recession are in danger of going to the wall because Labour and Plaid are mismanaging the departments responsible.”
The answer to the problem seems to be the problem of ensuring that training has been delivered. Close checks have to be made.
There have already been a couple of scandals within Wales of training services being billed for, while they have not been provided.
Sad to say, it seems training is a service open to fiddles.
Also sad to say, the Lib Dem’s new leader doesn’t seem to making sufficient impact at these weekly briefings, in comparison with what the other party leaders manage.
QUITE A little battle is opening up between new Lib Dem leader Kirsty Williams and certain parts of the Assembly Government, writes Clive Betts from the National Assembly press gallery.
The Lib Dems released a press statement at their weekly press briefing on the number of laptops and other electronic equipment which the Assembly government and its officials have lost or had stolen.
The worst department, apparently, is economy and transport, headed by deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones.
Ms Williams went close to blaming Mr Jones himself for the 13 laptops and two Blackberries (a superior form of mobile phone) which have vanished. Was this because of the sort of leadership his department was providing ?
One almost expected Ms Williams to say that, clearly, nationalist leadership could not be trusted; perhaps they were secretly exporting them to independent Dublin.
Ms Williams certainly used one very good point … in that it is proving extremely difficult to obtain information about missing property from the government. Or of most other sorts of information. The open government we were promised from our National Assembly is certainly far from what we are in fact being provided at the moment – except perhaps in openness to theft and loss.
But beyond that openness problem – which deserves greater dissection, at a later date - lies a personality clash which seems to be developing. The previous week, Ms Williams had claimed Mr Jones’s economic department had been making a bad job of dealing with one of her constituent’s business problems during the present economic downturn.
This had led to Mr Jones leaping to his feet during an Assembly session, waving a sheet of papers at the Lib Dem leader, and alleging that all the information she had claimed was not available was in fact easily to hand, if only she had asked him.
Yet, a week later, Ms Williams demanded to know why she had still not had sight of the information that Mr Jones waved around. Her constituent made the same complaint. He still had not received the information that Mr Jones said was available to him.
A strange issue.
It almost seems to link with the complaint made by an Assembly committee that Mr Jones was refusing to supply them with information on transport priorities which they thought they had a right to. Some (Labour) members of the committee even threatened to take Mr Jones to court.
The Cardiff Assembly was supposed to be an excellent example of openness of information. Or, it was when Ron Davies, Caerffili AM, father of devolution, and former Welsh Secretary, still roamed the corridors.
It’s been a sadder and weaker institution since he left.
For the Liberal Democrats, the European votes looked a disaster, and one must wonder whether the party has much future in Wales,writes Clive Betts from the National Assembly press gallery.
Before the poll, the party was confident about winning the fourth seat; in the event, the Lib Dems came 14,000 votes short, and it went to UKIP.
And worse than that, in the Westminster constituency returns [available from the Pembrokeshire County Council website] the party usually came fifth.
In only six seats was a decent vote scored – in Cardiff Central, where the party came first; the party was second in Ceredigion, Brecon and Radnor, Swansea West and Newport East; while it managed third place in Montgomery.
One of the first questions from the press was whether it was time to ditch Lembit Opik in Montgomery before he got ditched by the electors.
In both Powys seats, the sitting Lib Dems were resoundingly passed by the Tories.
Kirsty Williams, the party leader and sitting AM for Brecon, was taking the briefing. Her argument was simple – her party consistently under-polls at European elections in Powys.
She refrained from saying why that might be. But it is simply because the large hill farming electorates of those two areas are strongly anti-European – that might seem strange as it is farming subsidies from Europe which help keep those farmers in business. But that it is how it is.
The Lib Dems are probably the party which is best at comparing the different results that can be produced by elections for Brussels, Cardiff and London.
Montgomery is the obvious problem constituency. The party clearly believes Lembit Opik, the MP, is at risk over his antics (with both cheeky girls and with asteroids). “He is the right candidate,” Ms Williams proclaimed. Which is rather different from expecting him to win.
She then added, “The Welsh party will be doing everything they can to get him elected.” This presumably means drafting in workers from the plenty of constituencies in Wales and in border counties of England where a win cannot be expected.
When similar doubts were declared by the press about Ceredigion – where Plaid scored almost twice as many votes as the Lib Dems in the Euro-poll – Ms Williams put on her lively-lady act. Whatever figures the press could produce, Ms Williams had others. And those figures were far more convincing. At least, they convinced her.
Compared with the Euro-election five years ago, Lib Dem support in Ceredigion had risen substantially, we were told.
Afterwards, Peter Black, the regional AM for South West, weighed in. He forecast that Mark Williams, the MP who unexpectedly snatched the seat from Plaid at the last London election, would go back with a greatly-enhanced majority.
This line strongly contrasts with what Plaid says – in particular Elin Jones, the AM. But the Lib Dems refuse to give way. They talk of the strong support on the doorstep that was during the Euro-election willingly given to Mr Williams.
Really, there is only one constituency where the party polled well – Cardiff Central, where the sitting AM strongly challenged Ms Williams to succeed Mike German. But youth won out over age and experience.
Ms Williams fought her leadership election on the need to “change the way in which we organise the party”. Yet the only person who clearly had organised her party successfully was Mrs Randerson.
But the Lib Dems possess two very different base-roots in Wales. There is the rural base – and that is where Ms Williams admitted she had been temped to pay the candidacy fee for her cash-strapped would-be UKIP candidate in Brecon. That was because he would be sure to take votes from the feared Tory challenger.
The second base is the urban one represented by Mrs Randerson. That base is achieved through the archetypical Focus newsletters delivered each month to every elector, focussing on local problems, and, of course, the possible Lib Dem answer.
In Cardiff, Focus eventually won the city council. The same is on its way both in Swansea (with Mr Black the leader) and, more slowly, in Newport.
Ms Williams declared she was “very buoyed up” by the Welsh results. The party had out-performed the parties in both England and Scotland (as the Welsh votes increase was by only 0.2 per cent, rising to 10.7 per cent, compared with 21.2 per cent for the Tories, the Welsh leaders), she really didn’t have much to boast about.
Ms Williams said she was “disappointed” not to have won the party’s first seat.
In the way that things are going, perhaps she should be more concerned about the possibility of losing the party’s last seat – which will probably be in Cardiff Central. Although, on current showing, Ms Williams would have had to become old and experienced.
The Liberal Democrats’ conference failure to put-Welsh-first when giving the name of the party in the constitution might be a bad sign for the future.
The party is currently in danger of slipping between the cracks in the floors of the voting booths as the Tories stage what could turn out to be a stupendous revival, and the leadership enters into interregnum fatigue prior to December’s vote on a successor to Michael German.
It’s not so much the failure to change the constitution to place Democratiaid Rhyddfrydol Cymru in front of Welsh Liberal Democrats which points to a problem.
Rather, it is failure to pass the motion by the requisite majority. In other words, most of us like the idea. But there’s not enough enthusiasm to convince the rest.
Arguments in favour were good – the party must appear more Welsh (but too many members, it seems, don’t want to); we’d be higher up the ballot-paper list at next year’s Euro election (anything which might gain votes is worth engaging in, as long as it’s legal; but many members don’t seem to think there’s any hope for lead candidate Alan Butt Philip, anyway…).
After the failure of this constitutional motion, one must ask if there was any point in passing the long and rather-miscellaneous motion on Welsh-speaking communities. Was this motion in reality not much more than a form of light relief between two long batches of constitution amendment motions ?
And if the Lib Dems really want to be embarrassed, where was the promise to fund a Welsh-language daily ? Slipping down the same cracks through which their votes are disappearing ?
LilaEilis: RT @jillevansmep: Huge majority voted for Financial Transaction Tax in European Parliament. Mwyafrif y Senedd o blaid treth Twm Sion Cati. Gwych #plaidcymru 1 hour ago
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KIRSTY WILLIAMS seems willing to risk martyrdom, writes Clive Betts from the Assembly press gallery.
For the Liberal Democrats, the European votes looked a disaster, and one must wonder whether the party has much future in Wales, writes Clive Betts from the National Assembly press gallery.
