At the count, the first stage is to add up the first preferences for each candidate. If a candidate has a more than 50 per cent votes they are elected straight away. If no candidate has a majority of the vote, the lowest-placed candidate is eliminated and that person’s votes are looked at again to see which candidate each of their supporters marked as their second choice. These second preferences are added to the votes for the remaining candidates. If someone has a majority now, they are elected. If not, the bottom remaining candidate is out of the running, and the process repeats until someone does have a majority of the vote. 

In general, AV would have the effect of hindering the Conservatives in Wales more than in England because of the presence of Plaid Cymru as a left-wing party. Conversely, and in England especially, AV can equally help the Conservatives, since UKIP and BNP are the largest ‘minor’ parties and their transfers will go Tory. Had the 2005 election been run under AV, it is likely that Preseli Pembrokeshire and Clwyd West would have remained Labour.

The effect would probably be weaker in the forthcoming general election in Wales. There would be fewer people determined to keep the Conservatives out, and it’s plausible that Liberal Democrat preferences in Wales would skew more to the Conservatives. Also, the Conservatives are probably going to win more seats with clear margins (as they did in Monmouth in 2005). Given the size of swing to the Conservatives in Wales that people are talking about, AV might save some far-end Labour seats particularly where there is a Plaid vote (possibly the Vale of Clwyd and Delyn)  but perhaps also help the Liberal Democrats against Labour in Newport and Swansea. It might also save Montgomeryshire for the Liberal Democrats.

Under first-past-the-post MPs often only have the support of a minority of the people actually voting in their constituencies. In the 2005 General Election, 220 MPs had the vote of more than 50 per cent of those voting, but 426 did not. Sadly, none at all received the vote of a majority of their constituents. This means that most MPs cannot claim to speak for the majority of their constituents, and sometimes even those who do vote in a constituency end up with an MP most of them do not support or like.

The main improvement under AV is that this doesn’t happen because at least 50 per cent of voters have registered some degree of support for the MP elected. This is a real benefit and has the potential to improve social cohesion and community relations. So, for this reason AV is probably worth taking, but only as a halfway house on the road to radical reform.

Groups such as Vote for a Change, which have been at the forefront of the recent campaign argue that the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system is the only way to secure truly fair representation. At the time of writing, Power 2010’s website shows the introduction of a proportional system of voting as the most popular change to be pressed on candidates at the election. The Jenkins Commission recommended AV+, a variation which contains an “element of proportionality” not dissimilar to the one we know in Wales. AV on its own is not a proportional system and Electoral Reform Society projections have shown that it can work out to be less proportional than FPTP across the UK.

It could be argued, therefore, that although there is a definite dividend for the individual as voter, there is a democratic deficit when it comes to counting up the numbers of MPs and seeing which party forms the Government.

Even before the duckhouse summer, campaigns were up and running to secure a change in the electoral system. First-Past-the-Post is so demonstrably unfair that there will always be campaigns against it, just as there will always be those who claim it is simple and transparent and leads to strong government and is therefore unassailable.

The promise of change was there in the manifesto on which Labour came to power in 1997. Jenkins reported, but the issue was shelved. A desire to push the potentially outgoing government for change before the chance disappeared with the removal van leaving Downing Street began to make itself felt early in 2009. Then came the summer of sleaze, and the need to shake up the system became an imperative, highlighted by the strange outcome of the European elections which were nothing if not a kick at the status quo.

Britain has a democratically elected government, but its legitimacy is strained when turnout falls. Electors see no benefit in voting, do not see their vote reflected in Parliament and are unimpressed by the conduct of the occupants of the green upholstery of the gravy train. To persuade the elector to take up once more the stake in society that less than a hundred years ago some citizens were ready to die for, we have to render the system relevant once more.

·      Annabelle Harle is Head of Office with the Electoral Reform Society Wales.

As the Minister for Children Huw Lewis put it, at a conference organised by the Wales Women’s National Coalition in Llandudno Junction at the end of last week, “We will have a legal requirement for the whole of the public sector in Wales to put children in poverty at the head of the queue.

“There are going to be interesting times ahead  in how this will be interpreted. But I shall be looking to see evidence of changes of resource allocation in response to this legislation.”

Child poverty is climbing higher in the Welsh political agenda with the release of a Save the Children report earlier this month showing that Wales is the worst performing part of the UK. The report, Measuring Severe Child Poverty in the UK, revealed that 15 per cent (or 96,000) Welsh children are living in severe poverty in Wales, compared with just 9 per cent in Scotland, 10 per cent in Northern Ireland and 13 per cent in England.

Commenting on the report Huw Lewis said progress on tackling child poverty has stalled in every part of the UK apart from Scotland and acknowledged that we have to do more in Wales. “What we have been doing has not been as vigorous or as comprehensive as it might have been,” he said. “We need a more integrated and wrapped around approach in which particular families are targeted.

“We need to have a clearer focus on extricating families from poverty rather a more generalised ameliorating approach.”

He said the Welsh Government has just 18 months before the May 2011 election to demonstrate that it was getting a firmer grip on the issue. “You can take it that my appointment as Minister for Children is a signal from the First Minister that this is being taken very seriously. I have a roaming brief across government and we will be seeking a co-ordinated approach.”

Huw Lewis will be launching the Welsh Government’s new Child Poverty Strategy in early March. It is likely that this will concentrate on actions that schools and local authorities can take in working closely with problem families in an effort to drive up the school performance of disadvantaged children.

A number of recent reports have already drawn attention to examples of good practice, including Estyn’s Tackling child poverty and disadvantage in schools, published in January, and a Department of Social Justice report, Tackling Child Poverty: Guidance for Communities First Partnerships, published last October. The challenge is to roll out the relatively isolated examples of good practice highlighted in these reports more widely across Wales. A problem with many schools is that their major focus is on getting good examination results among better performing pupils, leaving the bottom 10 to 20 per cent to languish. However, as the Estyn report underlines, improving the education attainment of the lesser performing and generally more disadvantaged children has the impact of improving the whole of a school’s performance.

·      John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

However, on the day similarities were more obvious than differences, since unlike applications for commercial radio licences, the details of the proposals are not in the public domain. Commercial confidentiality was cited as the reason for this coyness. Yet the rush to get the whole selection process done before the end of March, and the disruption of a General Election, probably has more to do with it. Conservative spokesmen are opposed to IFNCs.

In their seven-minute presentations all three bidders committed to taking on the existing news staff of ITV Wales, to making their news material freely available for re-versioning by others, and to providing ambitious websites as well as to encouraging ‘citizen journalism’ – the last of which mixes the estimable value of participation with inestimable value of being free. The beauty parade was not without its coating of cliché – promotional videos with driving music, big headlines and promises of “fresh and innovative approaches”.  Who would offer ‘stale and boring’ approaches?

Not surprisingly, Tinopolis, the Llanelli-based production company, made much of the fact that it was the only Welsh company bidding, and that it would launch an online service, Wales 24, taking material from reporters and citizens right across Wales. Its presentation also flagged that one of its subsidiaries is the producer of the BBC’s Question Time. Winning this bid would add another significant income stream to its many high volume programme strands in Wales – for S4C - and elsewhere in the UK.

Clive Jones, Chair of Taliesin News, emphasised the busload of Welsh partners in Taliesin’s consortium, carefully masking the fact that the bid is being made by ITN – the other ‘partners’ are not joint owners. (ITN is clearly concerned that any fragmentation of news provision beyond the ITV companies themselves, throughout the nations and regions of the UK, could undermine its own capacity for comprehensive coverage of the UK, with some impact on its own business model.) Taliesin’s reporters would be ‘embedded’ in the newsrooms of the three partner newspaper companies – the South Wales Evening Post, the South Wales Argus, and Tindle Newspapers, owners of several weekly newspapers. It would also deploy a fund to train citizen journalists – a concept beginning to sound strangely like the newspaper ‘stringers’ of old.

UTV, Northern Ireland’s ITV company, and owner of two Swansea radio stations, in a noticeably harder-edged presentation, did not hold back from stressing that its news programme for Ulster is the best performing in the whole of the ITV system, with an audience share of 34 per cent, more than twice the share of the current ITV Wales programme. UTV’s managing director, Michael Wilson, said, rather pointedly, that their programme for Wales would be ‘solid news’ from beginning to end, and we would not being seeing “celebrity interviews after 12 minutes”.

On the money front Clive Jones, for Taliesin, hoped that eventually the service could be self-sustaining. But Ron Jones, Executive Chairman of Tinopolis, disagreed and thought that some element of public funding would be needed in Wales for the foreseeable future. He said there had to be protection against market failure.  Michael Wilson, for UTV, wanted the IFNC in Wales to be able to retain any advertising revenue arising from the Welsh news slot, something ITV is strenuously resisting. “It’s time ITV gave something back,” he said. UTV was also the only one to mention that it would be keen to extend into other programmes if ITV could be persuaded to release more slots in the schedule.

The absence of detail behind the PR presentations, however understandable given the tight timescale, is a major flaw in the process since we have no detailed statements about:

i)     the approach of all three parties to the desirable nature of news coverage in Wales;

ii)   he precise level of resource to be deployed;

iii) the extent of specialist coverage; or

iv)  the ways in which this deployment of public money would strengthen the news infrastructure beyond the winners own programme and related online site.

On the last point the answer may be more obviously implicit in the breadth of the Taliesin consortium, although one of the merits of the IFNC proposal is that, as intended, it creates an open rather than closed system. All kinds of permutations could develop over time regardless of what bidders say at this moment.

Another long term implication is already apparent, which may become more significant than anything else: namely that this may be a first skirmish in a battle for the ITV franchise in Wales, when the current ITV licences come to an end in 2014. For the first time the Digital Economy Bill gives Ofcom the ability to create single licences for Scotland and England. One already exists for Northern Ireland. Although Wales is not specifically mentioned in the bill, a licence for the whole of England might imply a licence for Wales by default. In that situation it is not difficult to foresee a tussle between Tinopolis and UTV for the Welsh licence.

All in all Wales has a clear interest in ensuring that the IFNC concept is not derailed.

·      Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.

Motives behind blogging ranged from the journalistic to the cathartic and even the confessional, but panellists agreed that blogs appear to play an increasingly important role as a forum of public debate with knock-on consequences for the media and politics in Wales. Discussion centred on the importance of blogging as a communication tool – especially in the context of political discourse – and we were soon reminded of its power in having already claimed its first Welsh political scalp.

Panellists commented that blogs often have a loyal and committed following – and a captive audience – but breaking out of small niches to find a wider audience remains a particular challenge.

It was agreed that the traditional media and journalism have entered a period of declining dominance in terms of news, politics and the provision of facts to public debate – and that this will continue unless new business models are developed. The hegemony of conventional journalism as the gatekeeper of news is threatened not just by new technology and commercial and community competitors but, potentially, also by the audience it serves.

This led our panellists to discuss the emergence of citizen journalism and its role in reporting local events. They acknowledged the difficulty of ascertaining the accuracy or even veracity of such reporting, especially when bloggers are pursuing causes. But they also acknowledged that this was also a problem in professional media where there is increasing and worrying trend simply to use or recycle press releases as copy.

Nonetheless, the panel welcomed the concept of citizen journalism as it directly challenges the media’s monopoly on what constitutes news and how it is reported.  It was argued that this monopoly has finally been undermined by the opportunity for anyone with a laptop and the nous for a story to raise issues that the media often ignore – and even in some instances, set the news agenda in what has become a very short news cycle.

It was heartening to hear that our panellists (which included a politician and lawyer) do not feel too circumspect when blogging. Nonetheless, in the ensuing discussion the potential pitfalls inherent in this almost exclusively voluntary and part-time activity were clear for all to see.

The session concluded with a look to the future. The panel foresaw:

·      A continuing media deficit in Wales - evidenced by the fact that nearly 90 per cent of daily newspaper readers in Wales are reading papers with no Welsh content.

·      The spectre of state intervention.

·      The potential for micro publications (possibly using the successful template of the Papurau Bro) and

·      The advent of US style Clogs - Community Blogs.

·      The development of hybrid media with a more systenmatic interaction between the professional journbalists and citizen journalists.

It is commonly asserted that the internet ‘changes everything’. But the general consensus was that nothing fundamentally changes the rules of the game, it just changes the way the game is played. And in a country like Wales, with its obvious deficit in terms of media plurality and news provision, this at the very least raises some interesting (and some might say worrying) questions.

·      Heulyn Davies is a Committee member of the IWA’s Cardiff and Valleys Branch.

The second constitution, the Laws in Wales Act 1536 abolished what remained of the distinctive Welsh legal system and tied Wales into England’s parliamentary system. It was rushed through the English Parliament with the result that after it had had been passed, it was found to contain a number of defects. Consequently, it was necessary to return to the Welsh constitutional question just seven years later. This was our third constitution - the Laws in Wales Act 1543 - which tidied up the system that was established by the 1536 Act and which provided the framework for governing Wales until 1999.

Which brings us to the fourth and fifth Welsh constitutions – the Government of Wales Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 2006. As the Presiding Officer said, “The 2006 Act is far superior to any of Wales’s previous constitutions. It is not perfect by any means, but is has a unique quality, in that it has the potential to enable Wales’s constitutional system to evolve according to the will of the people of Wales.”

We will see next Tuesday whether Opposition members in the Assembly will allow that will to be expressed sooner rather than later when they vote on the Government’s motion to trigger a referendum on increased powers.

Meanwhile, only yesterday the Assembly’s Subordinate Legislation Committee decided to re-brand itself as the Constitutional Affairs Committee. The change was explained by the Committee’s Chair, North Wales Plaid AM Janet Ryder in the following terms

“The National Assembly for Wales has undergone many changes since the 2006 Government of Wales Act and its remit has increased greatly as a result of changes put in place after the Act. The committee’s role now goes far beyond technical scrutiny of Subordinate Legislation – it also scrutinises the merits of these laws, any public policy issues that may arise from them and a variety of other matters. It is the only Assembly Committee in a position to look broadly at the developing legal competence of the National Assembly and how those powers are acquired – in short at the Welsh Constitution.”

There it is in a nutshell, our constitution evolving before our very eyes. How far and how fast we evolve will be up to us, whenever that referendum comes. In the words of the poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), a supporter of the Republic in the Spanish civil war:

“Our footprints are the only road;

nothing else;

we make the road as we travel.”

· John Osmond is Director of the IWA.

There is nothing like a row between different disciplines in the academic world, and there was certainly an edge to Beenstock’s lecture, entitled Global Warming: the Greenhouse Gas Illusion. 

According to Beenstock climatologists are naïve data analysts and more volatile than the climate. “They don’t understand statistics,” he said. Global warming was “a fluke”. The panic about global warming was the result of a “doomwatch psychology” initiated by the Club of Rome 40 years ago. IPCC predictions are “unfounded” he declared, adding that there was “no need for carbon abatement”. The Stern report was “much ado about nothing”. It was “fortunate that Copenhagen had failed”. European carbon policy was a “white elephant”.

His argument was that data from the 20^th Century does not support the greenhouse theory, but that when carbon emissions accelerate, global temperature increases temporarily, but not permanently. “Global warmers have made the simple error of confusing a temporary effect with a permanent one”. 

He was asked why no-one else had spotted this fundamental statistical error. In response he referred to the “tendentious” nature of climatology, and claimed that he was “99.8 per cent” sure of his conclusions – always a dangerous contention. He said he had been attacked for his views “as a simple economist who had strayed out of his area”.

This was an altogether a more no-holds-barred, and political, performance, than Colin Robinson of Surrey University delivered at the same event in 2008, although even he spoke of the climate change lobby as a religious movement that regarded sceptics as heretics. Robinson even quoted the same 1975 Newsweek article that Beenstock cited, worrying about prevalent fears of a new ice age. Both espouse a benign view of the capacity of markets to deal with issues.

The Hodge lectures have often provided a valuable contrast to economic orthodoxy, especially valuable in social democratic Wales. But do I detect a trend in these lectures, and perhaps an orthodoxy of view within the Institute of Applied Macro-economics? Discuss.

·      Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.