The consolidation of ITV's Wales, Midlands and north west England operations has ended an era, says Geraint Talfan Davies:

If ever a departure from an organisation signalled the end of an era, it is the departure of Elis Owen from ITV Wales, announced last Monday.

His departure and the simultaneous rolling up of ITV Wales into an amorphous ITV management entity encompassing Wales, the Midlands and north west England, signals a final end to any notion of Wales as a discrete and forceful entity in the ITV system. It has a disturbing similarity to the recent merger of Trinity Mirror’s previously separate newspaper groups in north and south Wales with newspapers in the north west of England.

It underlines, if any underlining was needed, that, with the exception of S4C, none of Wales’s media organisations, large or small, are indigenously owned or controlled. It also explains why in any future reorganisation, regulators need to create a discrete licence for Wales within the ITV framework.

But this is not the time to re-run arguments about broadcasting policy but rather to remark on the rich contribution that Elis Owen has made to journalism and broadcasting in Wales, even at the risk of making this read like a premature obituary.

He has been captain of the ITV Wales ship at Culverhouse Cross in Cardiff for the last nine years, but it is for his work as a hands-on programme maker and an incorruptible journalist that he should be lauded by all who care for public service broadcasting in these less caring times. He has been an editorial force in the company for 30 years.

He and I both share a background in print journalism, in days when newspaper journalists could actually leave the office to find stories. But we first worked together when Elis joined HTV to work as a researcher on documentaries that we made to explain devolution to a bemused public in the run up to the 1979 referendum.

He stayed to become a terrier-like editor of Wales This Week, the weekly current affairs programme that was launched in 1982 and is one of the few remaining programmes to survive in ITV’s disappearing service for Wales. In more senior positions he also led its Welsh language twin, Y Byd ar Bedwar, that has also survived as a mainstay of current affairs on S4C.

Elis Owen has never been a media luvvie. The passion, doggedness and integrity with which he has pursued countless stories over three decades has lived alongside a shyness that is not the usual hallmark of the media world.

For ten years he has judiciously managed a centrally imposed decline without public complaint, carefully preserving core elements of the service for as long as possible, and resisting the easy temptation to jump ship. ITV has had the benefit of his determined pursuit of public purpose and total loyalty to a beleaguered staff for longer than ITV plc dared hope or deserved. He is an unsung hero of Welsh broadcasting. Diolch, Elis.

Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.
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Betsan Powys reflects on last night's European election hustings - organised by the IWA - on her blog. She has chosen to focus on the row over the three out of four of the Welsh Conservatives' candidates who apparently do not live in Wales. This debate was first aired in the Western Mail last weekend.

Above the media talk and party squabbles the theme of this election is likely to be voter 'apathy' - whether real or stirred up. Meanwhile there should be considerable concern at ITV's move to 'consolidate' its Wales, Granada and Central operations. ITV Wales has now lost Elis Owen, who did his best in difficult circumstances and who could have escaped ITV Wales much earlier for more comfortable media climes elsewhere. And while the devolution process is transferring more responsibility towards Wales, the continued centralisation of media operations in Wales (as we saw with Trinity Mirror earlier this year) is making effective scrutiny of this process more difficult than ever.

Nick Morris is the IWA's Research Officer. Read more...

Geraint Talfan Davies on the storm over MPs' expenses:

In responding to the crisis generated by the row over MPs expenses we all have three choices: first, to regard it as one of those whirlwind media crises that will blow over, second, to see it a single serious blight on our otherwise fine democracy or, third, to see it as a manifestation of a wider endemic failure in our system of government.

We can dismiss the first option. The degree of voter anger is unprecedented, and it comes right in the middle of a UK-wide election campaign for the European Parliament and for local government in England. Voters will have an early opportunity to express their anger in the still glowing heat of the moment on June 4th. They will do it either by massive abstention or by voting for parties that they would never normally support.

The result will almost certainly exaggerate the true support for the BNP and UKIP, and could give those two deeply negative parties a platform that will distort debate for the next four years.

Over the rest of this year many constituency parties are going to be embroiled in anguished debate about whether or not to de-select sitting MPs. This will fill pages and airtime in national and local media, and will also create a very different climate for the next Labour leadership election whenever that comes. Expect the issue to raise its head, too, during the election for a successor to Rhodri Morgan in Welsh Labour in the latter half of this year.

This autumn all parties will have to respond to proposals from Sir Christopher Kelly’s Committee on Standards in Public Life. In Wales there may even be implications for the National Assembly, already awaiting an independent report from Sir Roger Jones on the financial support available to Assembly Members. Indeed, it would be surprising if Sir Roger’s conclusions had not hardened up as a result of the Westminster revelations.

The parties will also have to grapple with the impact on party funding, already facing the challenge of low levels of party membership and recession effects on private giving.

In short, this will not blow over. We are at the beginning of a long saga for parties and public. In this case the media will not move on. There is just too much grist for their mill.

Is it then an isolated problem or a symptom of a more chronic disease? Surely, only the wilfully blind, such as the Speaker of the House, could argue that this is a stand-alone issue. Judging by the reactions of the public in phone-ins, television programmes, letters, e-mails and blogs, people are already making the connections: to the long remarked public disengagement from party politics, to the collapse of values that has also been at the heart of the international banking crisis, to the lack of transparency in our governmental systems, to Parliament’s persistent failure to reform itself.

If we are to wish for any silver lining to this very dark cloud, it must be that Government and Parliament is shaken out of its historical complacency about our system of government. The public does not share the misplaced belief in the superiority of the workings of the Mother of Parliaments that is so prevalent at Westminster.

You do not have to be a student of the constitution to be aware of the gross imbalance between the power of the executive and the legislature, or of the decades of failure to reform the House of Lords. If Parliament cannot deal rationally and rigorously with the simple matter of its own house-keeping, it is no wonder that it cannot grapple with even more fundamental issues about its own operation.

It has long been fashionable to dismiss constitutional debate as a matter for the chattering classes. That was always a short-sighted and self-interested argument. Just how short-sighted that was is now becoming clear.

Movements like Charter 88 or the more recent Power Commission under Helena Kennedy have only ever been allowed limited purchase. Governments have usually seen constitutional change as a distraction, to be avoided if at all possible, but if not, then to be minimised and boxed in, with wider linkages ignored or denied. Even devolution has conformed to some of this pattern. The European Union has been a more effective driver of reform on human rights than Parliament. In England proponents of more local democracy, for a long time accorded the same respect as train-spotters, even now are to be indulged before elections but probably ignored after them.

The appropriate response to the current crisis by Government, Parliament and the political parties should be: first, the immediate appointment of a new Speaker with a mandate to lead a process of reform; second, to rid Parliament of those who have seriously abused the expenses system; and then, following he next general election, to establish a cross-party constitutional convention to consider an all-embracing agenda of constitutional reform that would take in both Houses of Parliament, devolved administrations, and local government.

At the same time the political parties will need to look at their own structures, and particularly at the way in which they can reach out to a public – perhaps through American style primaries - beyond the shell organisations that exist in too many constituencies.

Only in these ways can our political system regain the moral authority desperately needed to re-introduce, with some semblance of credibility, a fresh moral dimension into the way this country is run and financed.

Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA. Read more...

John Osmond peers into the future for devolution:

Don Anderson, the former Labour MP for Swansea East and a late convert to devolution, once described it as a mystery tour. Speaking during a House of Commons debate on legislation to allow the 1997 referendum, he said: “I recall the fine story of a bus tour from Cwmrhydyceirw in my constituency. There was a sweep about where the tour would end, and it is said the driver won. The people of Wales are driving this mystery tour. They will decide the pace and direction.”

Indeed, in this respect the sovereignty of the people has been institutionalised by referendums. The 2006 Wales Act allows a referendum to be held, following a two-thirds majority vote in the National Assembly and Westminster agreement, to enable Welsh devolution to move to the next stage of acquiring full legislative power along Scottish lines. The One Wales agreement that created the coalition between Labour and Plaid Cymru committed them to “proceed to a successful outcome of a referendum ... as soon as practicable, at or before the end of the Assembly term.” And an ‘All-Wales Convention’ has been established charged with reporting by the end of 2009 on the projected outcome.

In practice, the opportunities for holding a referendum before the next Assembly election in May 2011 are limited. Given that the Electoral Commission has advised against holding a referendum at the same time as the Assembly election, and assuming that a British general election is likely to be held in the first half of 2010, that leaves the Autumn of 2010 as the only realistic window of opportunity. However, by then a Conservative administration may well be in control at Westminster with a raft of other more immediate legislative priorities.

Significantly, one of these will be a plan to reduce the size of the House of Commons. In an interview with the Financial Times (13 January 2009) in early 2009 the Conservative leader David Cameron said his efforts to cut public spending would extend to Westminster: “I think the House of Commons could do the job that it does with 10 per cent fewer MPs without any trouble at all.” An additional purpose would be to instigate a constituency boundary review to ensure that all seats had roughly the same number of electors in time for the general election that followed. The Financial Times speculated that this would entail the number of seats in Wales, traditionally over-represented at Westminster, being cut from 40 to about 30. A day later an embarrassed Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, Cheryl Gillan, told the Western Mail that this would only happen if the Welsh Assembly was granted further powers.

The scene therefore appears to be set for a Welsh referendum a year or so following the next Assembly election, some time during 2012 or 2013. By then the impact of a Conservative government at Westminster, coupled with the threat of a reduction of Welsh MPs, will have served to induce a unity of purpose within the Welsh Labour movement, which is traditionally divided over devolution. In turn this should provide the background for a successful outcome to a referendum, a device that is always fraught with hazard for those advocating change.

Beyond this it is difficult to hazard any predictions for the further advance of constitutional change in Wales. The course of the current recession, together with the over-reliance of the Welsh budget on public expenditure emanating from the rest of the United Kingdom, will be critical factors. So, too, will be constitutional changes elsewhere, especially in Scotland and England. To adapt Don Anderson’s analogy, Welsh devolution may be likened to a charabanc and a mystery tour, but for the foreseeable future it will be circumstances beyond the control of the people of Wales that will be in the driving seat.

John Osmond is Director of the IWA. This is an extract from ‘Independence in an Era of Inter-dependence’, a chapter in a new book Breaking Up Britain: Four Nations after a Union edited by Mark Perryman and published this month by Lawrence and Wishart.
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