Speech
before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on September 4, 2001:
The Rt. Hon.
Rhodri Morgan, AM
First Minister of the National Assembly of Wales
Of course, Wales did play quite a significant part in the founding of this nation as well. The Welsh were very important founder peoples of the 17th and 18th centuries here. Indeed, the first drift away from political correctness vis-à-vis the Welsh occurred in the state of Pennsylvania, some people say, with the kind of first anti-Welsh joke, or probably the first joke against any ethnic group in the entire U.S.A., going back, I’m told, to about 1740 in the state of Pennsylvania, long before you had a central government here. The joke was “What is five miles long and five foot high?” and the answer, before you try to puzzle it out, is “The Annual St. David’s Day March through the streets of Philadelphia of the Pennsylvania Welsh.”
I’m here today to be the representative of Wales in its modern form and I hope that we can get away from some of this kind of misty Celtic twilight stereotype that I remember in the days of my youth, going to the pictures to watch -- motion pictures as you call
them -- to go and see the film The Vikings starring Kirk Douglas, whose daughter-in-law is Welsh, Katherine Zeta-Jones, and is living in this area. But he was the Viking chieftain in the film and Janet Leigh, I can’t remember exactly what part she played, and I think Tony Curtis had a significant part, where on this misty-Celtic seashore, their Viking longboat steams up the beach until it crashes to a halt. Kirk Douglas, knife between his teeth, races up the beach and, with the Vikings charging up behind him, sort of hollering away in a very blood-thirsty manner and from behind a bush emerges, I think, Tony Curtis dressed in a kind of toga and waving a bit of a white handkerchief and saying “I’m Rhodri, King of the Welsh, where do we surrender?” I want to check this out in the film library, because that’s the memory I have of it anyway, but this is the image that we have to get away from.
It is true that the imagery of Wales as an ancient country is terribly important to us, and we would never want to betray that heritage nor the more recent heritage of the Wales of the Industrial Revolution, the first industrial country in the world in many ways and the huge strength that we have in the steel, tin plate and the coal industries. But it’s not what this is about today. That is the Wales of the past, and your past is important because it is the foundation stone of your country and has formed its character in many ways. But now it is the modern Wales. So let’s explain what has happened during this incredibly exciting period of constitutional change in Britain since Labour was elected in 1997.
There’s probably been more constitutional advancement in Britain since 1997 than in any other period, barring, maybe, 1832 around the time of the Great Reform Bill, or 1910-1911 and the struggle over the people’s budget and the bringing in of the old age pension and employment exchanges and social security that occurred in that very, very turbulent period in 1910-1911.
Think about what’s happened since 1997. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland getting devolved parliaments or assemblies. They say about waiting for devolution in Britain is a little bit like waiting for the London buses: you wait ages without seeing one devolved parliament and next thing you know there’s three of them coming along all at the same time. You’ve had the changes to the House of Lords. Did people in the USA ever think that there would be a government which in the end would develop the kind of political courage to take on this ancient institution, an elected institution, which in a way is very pleasant and nice, but also the kind of stain on the democratic credibility of the unwritten British constitution. Well, now huge changes have taken place in the House of Lords: their restoration of the power of self-government to London and the institution of a directly elected mayor of London. I tried to use this pronunciation of mayor over here, not only because it’s the pronunciation that you use in America, it’s also the pronunciation that we use in most of Wales as well. So, I’m happy to be able to say it here. Many people thought that wouldn’t happen and it has caused the government huge pain in the process obviously, because of the struggle over who was the right person to be the Labour candidate: should it be Livingston? Could you bar him and all that? That’s been done. We have now restored self-government to one of the world’s great cities: London.
The incorporation into British domestic law of, if you like, an external treaty law, namely the European Convention on Human Rights, has been very cleverly done. Everybody thought that was technically impossible, but we have done it, and now we have incorporated that convention into our domestic law so that British people who really feel that their rights were being contravened and they weren’t able to access those rights because of the expense of going to Strasbourg in order to be a supplicant before the European court can now do it in their own local courthouse as well. So, this all happened in the space of four years, and I think the government deserves a lot of credit for that.
Now, when it comes to devolution, of course, most constitutional change and most of these other changes would fit into this heading as well. Constitutional change for a government means giving power away. Now for Labour coming in 1997 after 18 years in opposition, it’s quite difficult to say “O.K., now we have the fruits of power. Now we can do the things that we wanted to do during those long years when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, then the sort of end-game of John Major as Prime Minister for another six, six-and a half years. So we can do all these things. Isn’t it wonderful to be in power?” But then to set to work, to give away an awful lot of that power in order to modernize the British constitution, requires an extraordinary act of self-denial, self-obligation by the government. But it’s being done because it was thought that, look our constitution in Britain is not in a fit state to enter the 21st century. And now by and large it is.
The same applies to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, if I can return to the bus carriage analogy, that bus in now parked back in the bus carriage, at least temporarily, and we hope that the peace process will permit the Assembly to resume its work in, I don’t know when, probably perhaps November if all goes well. But Scotland and Wales are marching ahead. In our case, and in the case of Scotland, too, it is not now the same First Minister as we started with, Donald Dewar’s death, Alun Michael being moved out through the vote of no confidence. It means that we have different bus drivers as well in Wales and in Scotland compared to May 1999. So it has not been an entirely smooth process, but constitutional change never is.
Now, we have sixty members in the Assembly, forty elected on the same Westminster straight first past the post franchise exactly as if it was a kind of segmented off general election in Wales. We have forty seats in the Westminster parliament and those same forty seats are also used as the basis for the elections to the forty First Past the Post members who form two-thirds of the Welsh Assembly. And then there are twenty in addition. That is, one-third of the total, elected on a German style written by British and American constitutional lawyers to form part of the new German constitution for 1949. This is a compensation mechanism, whereby if you do too well on the First Past the Post then you don’t do very well on the list system; [it is a] proportional representation balancing mechanism. So, one-third of the seats in the Welsh Assembly are by proportional representation, and actually a higher proportion in the Scottish Parliament -- I think it’s 42 percent -- in the case of the Scottish Parliament.
The impact of that is that it is impossible for any one party of government to win an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament. If forty-two percent of the seats are on a list on a compensation basis, there is no way that any party can win an outright majority in Scotland. That has the disadvantage for Labour that Labour can’t win a majority, but it has an even greater advantage to the fundamentals of the United Kingdom. I mean that the Scottish National Party, which wants to break away from Britain, can never win an outright majority either. Therefore, the United Kingdom will always remain the United Kingdom and Scotland will never break away. There will always be nationalists within the Scottish political system, and it’s right that they have the ability to promote their cause, but they can never effectively form a government because the three parties that believe in continuing the union with the rest of the United Kingdom can always block you given that you can’t win an outright majority. There’s no way the SNP can do that.
In Wales with only one-third of the seats on the proportional representation list, it is possible for one party to win an outright majority, just by one or two, and I suppose most people would have expected that party to be Labour because Labour historically is the party of greatest strength in Wales. But that was part of the bargain that we made with the people of Wales as a Labour government, that, yes, we know that Labour is strong in Wales. Labour had won 34 out of 40 seats, after all, in the 1997 election, and we did it again in the 2001 election. Thirty-four out of 40 seats -- that’s a big majority, but obviously it’s wildly disproportionate to the actual votes cast because of the way the First Past the Post system works. So in order to say to the people of Wales who live in the non-Labour area, the country areas, look, this is not about bringing machine politics from Welsh local government into a new Wales assembly. We are going to put some additional hurdles in the way of Labour, our own party, from winning an outside majority. We are going to have a proportionate representation compensation system so that if Labour does well and the First Past the Post don’t do well on the list, therefore the other parties will get a fair shake. Labour doesn’t do well on the First Past the Post system, they will probably do quite well on the list.
Now, as it happened we did very badly in the election of May 1999, and we didn’t do particularly well in the First Past the Post nor the list system, so we finished up without a majority. So we have 28 seats out of 60, compared to 34 out of 40 for Wales in the Westminster Parliament. So, this means that we’re short of a majority. It was always intended that we wouldn’t win every election, but we didn’t think we’d actually lose the first one, but that’s the way it happens, and you can never control democracy.
I had a very interesting visit just now to the City Hall here, and just watching for ten minutes a Los Angeles City debate in the City Council. The one thing you can always say, I know the language helps, but the one thing that you can always say is that democratic debate always takes the same shape, in whatever country and whatever level or whatever continent you’re in, you can always recognize the basic pattern of argument and promotion of an interest in whatever country you go to. I was really pleased to register that very quickly in the City Council hall not very far from here this morning.
So, we’re now in a state whereby we have the powers to use our budget. Our annual budget is approximately 14 billion dollars for a population of 3,000,000. Now, I don’t know, the population of California is about ten times that, but I don’t actually think that California’s state budget is 140 billion dollars. I think it’s about 100 billion dollars, so there’s actually more money per head in the system through the block grant method that we have to promote Welsh interests using that block grant.
So what we have to do is to spend that money in the best interests of the citizens of Wales. What have we done so far? What we are trying to do in the early stages is to walk it where we can run and try to answer that age-old question of the Monty Python film, when the Palestinians are in rebellion against rule from abroad or from the Roman Empire. “What have Romans ever done for us?” Now, we ought to be able to picture a kind of hypothetical question that the people of Wales ask: “What has that Welsh Assembly ever done for us?” and we are trying to say “O.K. By the end of our first four year term we want some people in all parts of Wales regardless of their age group, regardless of their social class, and economic status, to be able to say ‘Oh, yes, there is something the Welsh Assembly has done for me, my kids, my parents, my local road system, sewers, or whatever it might be.’”
So, we have brought in free school milk for kindergarten children, and perhaps it was the most sort of poignant moment in the life of the Welsh Assembly when our Cabinet minister for agriculture and rural affairs, Carwyn Jones, was able to say to the Assembly with a totally straight face: “What Margaret Thatcher took away, the Welsh Assembly has restored today.” It was just a sort of wonderful magic moment which sort of showed up, that now that we have this measure of self-government you can make these decisions. It’s good for the farmers, it’s good for the kids. We produce a lot of milk and kids need it, poor kids need it particularly, so we’re able to do it. They’re not doing it in the rest of Britain, but we’re able to do it in Wales because it suits us.
Likewise, in terms of major sort of strategic school building programs, we’re putting a lot of money into that and then, if you’re an older person, we would say probably that the issuing of free bus passes for use on local municipal buses that will carry the entitlement to free bus travel on those local bus passes from April of next year. So, we hope people will be able to see the advantages of having self-government. Likewise, we now have free prescriptions, not just for the one to eighteen age group, that’s all over Britain, but now we’ve extended that for eighteen to twenty-four, because of evidence that that’s a group that tends to drop out of the health care system. So, now we have free health care prescriptions for 18-24 in Wales. Yes, there is a tiny bit of prescription tourism across the Welsh border. This was not the scheme for free prescriptions for 18-24, it was not devised, by the way, by the Welsh Tourist Board. It was devised on health care grounds but there is no effective mechanism for preventing short distance prescription tourism.
But we’re trying to cover all the bases and all the age groups, because the strange thing about Wales is that we’re a very patriotic people. We love the national flag, the red jersey that our sports teams wear when they go on the rugby field, our national anthem, Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, Land of my Fathers. We have an intense affection for that. Our musical tradition and our male voice choirs, we have a great affection for them. Our patron saint, Saint David. But when it comes to politics, people don’t always have that same degree of affection because politics is about institutions. You can be a rebel all your life but if you want to do anything you’ve got to do it via an institution. But the Welsh distrust institutions, because institutions have always been things far away which do things to you and you can’t do anything about it. So you hate institutions. Now you’ve got an institution that belongs to you, which is a bit of a new experience for us in Wales. Whereas Scotland had a parliament until 1707, this is new for us. We had a parliament for one week in 1406. This is not a regular thing to occur in the kind of Welsh psyche.
So you then have to learn this art of taking responsibility for your own affairs. You can’t blame the English for everything any more. Now, we’ve got our own Welsh Assembly. You can’t even blame the Assembly, but you can’t blame the English. So trying to get back into our psyche that now we have this measure of self-government, it’s up to us, up to us to promote ourselves abroad -- that’s what I’m doing here in California -- and up to us as well to engage our higher education system with people who want to form companies, whether those companies start off from California or whether they start off from England or whether they start up from within Wales as well, so that we’ve got an ability to generate our own high technology businesses. Because we have been a very specialized economy, probably the most specialized economy in Europe.
When I started as a civil servant, I think I’m unique among political leaders in that I was a civil servant with an office two floors above the same corridor as I now have my office as First Minister of Wales. When I started as a civil servant in 1966 in the same building, Wales had 100,000 coal miners, 75,000 steel workers, and not very much else -- a bit of agriculture, slate quarrying, but not much else. We have to reinvent ourselves. We threw open a welcome mat and became a major center for the assembly of Japanese TV sets, microwave ovens, video recorders, American companies like General Electric and Ford, and electronic components, but now much of that work, while its become commoditized, is moving to Eastern Europe because labor rates are so much cheaper in the ex-Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and Hungary. Their wage rates are like the relationship between you and Mexico here. They’re one-sixth or one-seventh of what they are in the UK. So, we can’t say we’re the cheapest location in Europe. We’ve now got to reinvent ourselves again as a knowledge economy country and we believe that we are set to do that. The makings are there. Some places are there on the chessboard but not enough yet.
And then, finally, you could say, bringing power closer to the people: how do you actually do that? We have thrown away a lot of the traditional aspects of Welsh politics, including even a Welsh labour politics which is very macho, it’s very much built into the trade union movement and local government. About machine politics: how you get to the top in local government and how you get to the top in the coal miners union and steel workers union was a very macho way of doing business. Now, in the new Wales, we are the only Cabinet anywhere in the Western world that we have been able to discover which actually has a majority of women ministers. We have a Cabinet of eight, five of them are women, and three are men. If you were doing the Vikings again now, and you’re doing it about the new Wales, you’d probably call it Rhodri and the Amazons, but I’m not recommending that as a film, O.K.? It is very important that somehow or another this huge shift has occurred whereby women now play a very very major role. They are not the sandwich cutters and tea makers any longer. They are actually the people that are running the country with a majority of the Cabinet.
Now, I think that’s a kind of indication of the way we are reaching out to the people. Likewise, the steps we have taken in terms of freedom of information. We publish our Cabinet minutes six weeks after the relevant Cabinet. Those minutes are published. They’re on the Internet; they’re in the newspapers. That’s the way in which we are trying to indicate to the world at large, to Britain, to industry, to business, to the volunteer sector: this is how we want to engage you in this process. We don’t want you to suspect about us or that you should get cynical about this new institution. It belongs to you, the people of Wales.
And that’s my message to you as well. I think we’ve got a good story to tell and we’re going to tell it all around the world.
Thank you.