Friends of the Earth Cymru have today attacked Plaid’s Deputy First Minister over his announcements on transport spending, accusing him of “greenwash”, and acting contrary to Plaid policies. Nice word, but I think FoE are rather missing the point. The Western Mail’s editorial comes closer to the real point in my view, with its suggestion that the Minister is re-announcing money which has already been announced at least once in the past.
The latter practice is one to which we have become accustomed under Labour since 1997; it has become standard practice for government ministers - and mostly, they seem to get away with it. In answer to the opening sentence of the Western Mail’s editorial (“Perhaps it was naïve to assume the One Wales administration in Cardiff Bay would be above the kind of statistical sleight-of-hand that have (sic) characterised spending announcements over recent years”), I can only say, “Yes, it was. Very”.
And that’s why FoE have somewhat missed the point (although I don’t disagree with the substance of the concerns that FoE have about the announcements from an environmental perspective) in the way that they have attacked the Deputy First Minister and his party over the announcement. It betrays the same sort of naivety; the same underlying belief that with Plaid ministers something would somehow be different. Why on earth would anyone expect that?
The government is still led by the same people who led it prior to last May; government policy has, in practice, changed little. The same civil servants are still providing the same advice; and ministers rarely go against the advice that their ‘experts’ give them. The ministers claim that it is they who make the decisions; and most of their announcements are peppered with the ‘I’ word. But few, if any, decisions are in any way at variance with the advice that the ministers are given; ‘decision-making’ can often be a rather illusory concept. It takes a very brave minister to take a decision at odds with ‘expert’ advice, and the words 'brave' and 'minister' are not words which I would often use in the same sentence.
So the government carries on doing what it was doing before, and producing the same old justifications; the opposition carries on disagreeing. One party has switched from opposition to government, that's all. Had the rainbow ever come to pass, all four parties would have ‘swapped sides'; but the government would still have continued to make largely the same decisions - and the opposition would have largely continued to argue against them.
(This isn’t just a Welsh phenomenon – look at the way the Tories in London are today displaying their outrage at post office closures - just like Labour did when the Tories were closing thousands of post offices, and using many of the same arguments).
Cynical? Yes, of course. But it's what people in general see when they look at politics, and is one of the reasons for believing that 'they're all the same'. Does it have to be this way? No, it doesn't. But change, real change, depends on having a government which has a real vision, and the determination to make things happen rather than simply a lust for power. For that, we are still waiting.
Management speak has it that ‘the perfect should never be the enemy of the good’, and that's true as far as it goes. But the ‘bad’ doesn’t become the ‘good’ just because a different bunch of people are in charge. One would have to be pretty green to swallow that one.
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2 comments:
For a moment, as i reading the post i thought you were going to blame these practices as Labour, but once i read on i nodded many times in agreement.
The 'They are all the same' critique has probably existed since Plato, but where is gains ever more credence is that the fact that parties are offering less and less choice to the voter. They are all trianguating, more fearful of being seen as distinctive than similar.
The one thing i would say is that our politics is a result of our society in general, consumerist, managed and the abundance of apparent choice cloaking less and less ability for people to choose.
Its a chicken and egg scenario, and a turkey's and christmas scenario all in one. Are politician's merely recognising that mass participation only occurs in the consumer context in today's society, and offering a very similar brand of politics to not rock the boat as it were, or that politicians don't not want to engage with their publics for fear of their middle ground political bubble being pricked?
My view, the turkey and xmas point, is that politicians only want to do whatever keeps them in office, if they acted on their personal beliefs then many would leave their party or publicly speak out against it, hence why they once in the bubble they do as little as possible to change things.
The problem is political culture, not politicians. The political culture is set up to reward those 'loyal' to the elite's way of thinking, loyalists to this will be rewarded with promotions, safe seats and favours. Those 'awkward' elected members who dare challenge this orthodoxy are painted as mad, outsiders and out of touch, irrespective of the way they represent their constituents.
Christ, i need to lay off the Chomsky i think! haha
GOOD POST MATEY
Marcus,
”For a moment, as i reading the post i thought you were going to blame these practices as Labour"
No, I don’t blame Labour for the fact that Plaid ministers seem to be falling into the same trap. But neither do I excuse Labour for the continuous and shameless spin of which they have been guilty since coming into office.
”Are politicians merely recognising that mass participation only occurs in the consumer context in today's society, and offering a very similar brand of politics to not rock the boat as it were, or that politicians don't not want to engage with their publics for fear of their middle ground political bubble being pricked?”
Possibly, but I suspect that we simply have very few politicians left with any real vision of how things might be different, because:
”politicians only want to do whatever keeps them in office”
Can’t disagree with that. The pursuit of power has become an end in itself. Both Labour and Plaid were founded on the basis of an assumption that there was more than one ‘world-view’, and that politics was a process which could bring about real change in the underlying structures and nature of society. That’s not to say that the two founding visions were the same; clearly they were not. But the founders of both believed in a very different sort of world than the one which existed at the time.
I can’t help thinking that the founders of both would be a) surprised at how influential both parties have become, and b) disappointed that they have lost sight of the original vision and are seemingly happy to operate solely within the confines of the systems that they set out to change. Labour’s conversion is the more complete; but Plaid seem to be working hard to follow.
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