The House of Lords Reform Bill which was flagged up in the Queen’s Speech last week could have far-reaching implications for Wales. The precise provisions of the Bill are awaited with interest – and much speculation. The Coalition Government’s commitment to legislate seems to have waned by the month, as both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats realise that they will face enormous challenges in getting such legislation to the statute book, Certainly, they will if the Bill resembles the original proposals published last year as a White Paper.

Since then, two alternative sets of proposals for reform of the Second Chamber have emerged at Westminster during April, 2012. The first was the Main Report of a joint Committee of both Houses, chaired by Welsh peer Ivor Richard; and the second an alternative minority report produced by that Joint Committee.

The original Draft Bill, contained in the 2011 White Paper, proposed a much smaller Second Chamber  – reduced from the current 818 to some 300 members, of whom 240 would be elected and 60 members nominated by an independent commission. There would be a dozen English bishops – half the present number – and a handful of Ministers, appointed by the government, to speak for them in the reformed Upper House.

The Draft Bill proposed a Second Chamber elected by STV, to be phased in over three elections, simultaneous to elections for the Commons – in 2015, 2020 and 2025. Members would serve for one 15-year term, without being re-electable. This provision of not being accountable once elected, would seem to negate the democratic answerability that the reforms are meant to provide!

Wales would probably be one multi-member constituency, with four new members elected every 5 years, as currently happens with the European Parliament. By 2025 Wales would therefore have its full compliment of 12 elected members in the new Second Chamber.

The current 818 Members of the House of Lords is an inexact figure. Every month some die and some new peers may be appointed. Thirty-six don’t participate for various reasons. Of the active Members, 90 are hereditary peers, 667 are life peers, and 25 are bishops. The present party composition is:  235 Labour, 214 Conservative, 186 Crossbenchers, 90 Liberal-Democrats and 57 others, including bishops.

The Draft Reform Bill proposes that each party group would be scaled down by about a third at each of the three transitional elections, so that numbers would drop to about 650 in 2015, to 475 in 2020 and to 312 by 2025.

However, in their majority  Report the Joint Committee chaired by Lord Richard recommended that  the reformed Second Chamber should have 450  members with election by the STV system used in New South Wales. It proposed different transitional provisions. It agreed that non-elected members should be selected by a statutory independent commission. They also, notably, suggested that the proposed reforms should be subject to a referendum.

The Alternative Report, produced by a substantial minority of that Joint Committee, departed even further from the proposals of the Draft Bill. It recommended that there should be a Constitutional Convention to consider the whole issue – and that it should include representation from the National Assembly for Wales and from the Scottish Parliament. The Convention should consider the implication of devolution, and the possible independence of Scotland, on the role of a reformed Second Chamber. They also concluded that any reform proposals emanating from this Convention should be put to a referendum.

These two conflicting reports from the Joint Committee, both including referendum provisions, has undoubtedly caused the Government to exercise caution as they move forward with this reform which was an intrinsic part of the deal  which underpinned the Coalition Government in 2010.

The Queen’s Speech, delivered on 9 May, contained the words: “A Bill will be brought forward to reform the composition of the House of Lords”. This form of words was interpreted as being “vague and non-committal”, without indicating any timescale for achieving the proposed reform and not even mentioning the key words of having a wholly or even partly elected chamber. Some commentators saw it as being “dead on arrival”.

So what, by now, are the prospects of any such change occurring?

Since all three UK parties had commitments to Lords Reform in their 2010 election manifesto, a whipped vote in the Commons should secure the Bill its third Reading, if the two coalition partners have the commitment to its enactment. It may well be, however, that the Government would have to concede a referendum in order to deliver the Bill through the Commons without acrimonious rebellion. If that were conceded, the Bill would get Commons approval.

By no stretch of the imagination can such endorsement be anticipated in Lords. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. There isn’t the slightest possibility of the Bill being passed by the House of Lords in this coming session of Parliament. The question therefore arises whether in 2013-14 the Coalition Government would use the Parliament Act to insist that the Commons has its way and that the Lords Reform Bill gets enacted.

Even if that happens it will be difficult for elections to a reformed Second Chamber to take place by the 2015 general election, as intended in the 2011 Draft Bill. If such a delay is accepted as inevitable, it may well suit the Liberal-Democrats to make a virtue of necessity, and themselves to concur with the proposal of the Alternative Report of the Joint Committee to establish a Convention to consider the whole subject. This would have an additional appeal to the Liberal-Democrats if it considered the role of the second Chamber as a quasi-federal chamber, reflecting the reality of devolved Britain – a dimension which has been close to the Liberal Party for a century or more.

The central weakness in the Draft Bill is its failure to address the new role for the Second Chamber. It states:

“Nothing in the provisions of this Act… affects the status of the House of Lords as one of the two Houses of Parliament, affects the primacy of the House of Commons, or otherwise affects the powers, rights, privileges and jurisdiction of either House of Parliament, or the conventions governing the relationship between the two Houses”.

This is facile. To pretend that an elected Second Chamber can carry in the same way as the unelected House of Lords over the last hundred years beggars belief. We saw in the last Parliamentary session how Lords amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill, the Legal Aid Bill and the Health and Social Care Bill, were thwarted by whipped votes in the Commons.

As a nominated chamber, the House of Lords has to yield to the primacy of the first chamber. A new Second Chamber with a directly-elected mandate would hardly submit so easily to the views of the Commons. I suspect that this will be used by some timid souls as an excuse to retreat from the principle of a directly elected second chamber, and to contemplate an indirectly elected chamber.

The composition of a Second Chamber elected by STV, would differ fundamentally from the political balance of the Commons, which is elected on a first-part-the-post basis. The Government would still be formed by the largest party in the Commons. However, that party would rarely have a majority in the reformed Second Chamber. The Government would only have a majority in both chambers if it were a coalition government. Even then there would be no certainty. Consequently, the UK would regularly see political deadlock, as was faced by President Obama last summer with his financial proposals.

The future role of the Second Chamber cannot be considered in isolation from other constitutional developments, as recognized by the Alternative Report of the Joint Committee. The Scotland Bill has just completed its parliamentary passage, giving the Scottish Parliament significant new taxation powers. The Silk Commission will consider this for Wales. Any responsible government should have taxation powers, so that electors can judge the Government’s priorities.

The Silk Commission will look at more than taxation. In its second phase, next year, it will consider new functions for the National Assembly. High on the list must be powers over police and prisons, and the judiciary in Wales, though further pressure from Scotland may augment this list.

Carwyn Jones has also suggested that Westminster’s Second Chamber might become a federal chamber for the UK with responsibility for defence, foreign affairs and broad economic policy. His suggestion arose in the context of Scotland securing independence. It was perhaps easier for him to postulate the idea for what is still a hypothetical situation. He is, however, aware of discussion at Westminster that if ‘devolution-max’ gained momentum – a model supported by former Tory Prime Minister John Major in a keynote speech last July – some envisage the Second Chamber as a UK quasi-federal chamber, a consideration which the Alternative Report took on board.

If maximum devolution also applied to Wales and Northern Ireland, this would leave the House of Commons as essentially a chamber for England. This would overcome the West Lothian question. Somewhat tongue in cheek I suspect, Carwyn Jones flagged up that there should be equality of representation from Wales, England and Northern Ireland (and Scotland, if it hasn’t seceded) within a federal chamber. Aeronautical pigs come to mind!

The UK is heading for a constitutional quagmire. The old saying is that ‘form follows function’. A federal Second Chamber must surely be an option if ‘devolution-max’ emerges from Scotland’s referendum debate.

If the UK has a future, creative thought must now be given to the powers devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – and indeed England. Such consideration may well change discussion about the Second Chamber. But if the English body politic isn’t prepared to contemplate this, it must accept partial responsibility for the approaching break-up of the United Kingdom.

This is about as inauspicious a time that you could imagine to launch a legislative process to make sustainable development the central organising principle the way to run a government. It is not a good moment to call for limits to growth when social democratic forces across Europe, let alone in Wales, are calling for greater expansion to combat the double-dip recession.

Yet this is precisely what the Welsh Government is bravely attempting to pull off. Last week it launched its consultation document (available here) on the Sustainable Development Bill it will be introducing into the Assembly next year.

Today the IWA, together with WWF Cymru and Cynnal Cymru/Sustain Wales are publishing a book Wales’ Central Organising Principle – Legislating for Sustainable Development that explains why what the Welsh Government is trying to do is so vital. All the contributors agree that unless the world starts taking some real measures now to tackle global warming we are heading for a slow train crash.

If you remain unconvinced about this then I urge you to read a long, but forensic essay in the book by one of Wales’s leading experts on climate change impact, Professor Gareth Wyn Jones. His essay is entitled Overshooting limits: seeking a new paradigm. Certainly, it convinced me that the current widespread response to the fiscal and employment crisis in the Eurozone in the form of calls for more economic growth, describes an addiction that, if we don’t find a way of getting off it, will lead inexorably to catastrophe.

A real problem with all of this is simply getting your head round it. Although some of the most harmful impacts of climate change – such as sea water rise due to melt of the Greenland icecap, leading to flooding of Bangladesh and other low lying areas – may be only 20 or 30 years away, that could be an ice age so far as contemporary politics are concerned.

In his essay Gareth Wyn Jones includes a quotation from Raymond Williams that should spur us on:

“There is wealth only in people and in their land and seas. Uses of wealth which abandon people are so profoundly contradictory that they become a social disaster, on a par with the physical disasters which follow from reckless exploitation of land and seas.”

Another Raymond Williams quotation in the essay, which I particularly like, addresses the sense of hopelessness that so often accompanies climate change debates: “… to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” That should be a motto for the Welsh Government in its efforts to make a mark in the global requirement for measures to mitigate the impact of climate change.

We’ll get a chance to measure the Welsh Government’s determination on Friday when First Minister Carwyn Jones delivers a keynote address to a conference we are organising on Putting Wales at the heart of Rio+20 (details here). The conference examines the practical impact the forthcoming Welsh Government sustainable development legislation will have on delivering the June internatiional summit’s twin goals to:

• Promote the green economy to eradicate poverty.
• Put in place institutional frameworks for delivering sustainable development.

Both themes underpin the Welsh Government’s efforts in making sustainable development the central organising principle in its policy development and delivery. The challenge for Carwyn Jones will be to explain what practical contribution he thinks Wales can make when last week’s consultation document was so cautious in its approach. For instance, in describing how a duty in the legislation “to compel organisations delivering public services to act consistently with sustainable development”, the document offers this get out clause (paragraph 74):

“We want to ensure that organisations can be held to account for their performance, but we wish to avoid a system that places unreasonable expectations on decision makers.”

A key part of the legislation will be the placing the Commissioner for Sustainable Futures on a statutory footing, along the lines of the Children’s’ and Older People’s Commissioner. A key question here is how exactly the legislation will set out the role and powers of the Commissioner. A whiff of the Welsh Government’s thinking is provided in paragraph 142 of the consultation:

“We see a role for the new body as an advocate for sustainable development, but we think that to position the new body as an arbitrator of individual grievances against organisations would be the wrong emphasis. We want a significant part of the new body’s role to involve working collaboratively with the organisations delivering public services to encourage sustainable development behaviours. We think that the mutual trust and goodwill needed to bring that about will be better served if the new body has no formal role in adjudicating disputes about operational behaviour.”

The consultation document typifies the attitude of well-meaning governments around the world, which see sustainability as a desirable, but distant objective. As Gareth Wyn Jones puts it in his essay, ‘Oh Lord, make me sustainable but not just yet!’ Of course, as he also states, “This is a sure recipe for overshoot.”

Hilly Wales is not low-lying Bangladesh. Memorably, some years ago, Rhodri Morgan pointed out that there might be desirable changes to Wales’s climate. We might become more of a Mediterranean region with prospects for developing a wine-growing culture. Nevertheless, one way or another the effects of climate change will come knocking at our door, if only in terms of the global economic impact. As some regions of the world disappear beneath the waves the population stress on those that remain will become severe.

Unable to find a man on a Clapham omnibus at short notice, I’ve been taking soundings from some Swansea taxi drivers. They’ve been a nourishing source of food for thought. Employing the words “bendy buses” in my conversation to provoke a Pavlovian urge to talk local politics, I waited to see what they volunteered.

I was expecting – and got – variations on a theme of the press headlines of the day: Grannytax, Pastygate, Murdoch and the Minister, and those Tories and Lib Dems up in London not creating jobs. Interestingly, it was always “Tories and Lib Dems” and not just “Tories”. And it was “not creating jobs” rather than “cutting jobs”. There were occasional references to the council wasting money, but no mention of the Assembly.

That was ironic, since responsibility for local government lies in Cardiff Bay, not Westminster.

Just as interesting was the conclusion that Labour would make no difference. This opinion expressed in terms varying from the rueful to the expletive. But they’d voted for them anyway, because they always have done.

There’s never one reason for an election result. The bigger picture never identifies local assassinations, where councillors of any party or none can be punished for indolence. They may be victims in a fiercely fought local derby. Meanwhile, the independent candidate provides a guilt-free home for the tactical voter.

Then there are the predictable reasons. It was inconceivable that Labour wouldn’t do well, emerging from its subterranean position of 2008. Then it would be Hammered Time (‘Don’t touch Them’) for the mid termers Con-Dems. With these three parties, it was just a matter of scale. Least predictable was the Plaid vote.

The Labour vote did more than recover respectably. People rushed back to their comfort zones then out to the ballot box. People who’d once agreed with Nick don’t any more. The angry turn out to vote; the merely disgruntled don’t. Labour’s ‘send a message to Westminster’, hardly ignored by the Welsh media, made swing voters just about angry enough. Labour’s claims for their local manifestos are meaningless – nearly all ward literature is local. Whether it gets widely read is another thing.

Those who’ve previously voted Lib Dem because they’re ‘not the other two’, couldn’t logically use that reason this time. Those who’d really gone against the grain to vote for Cameron in 2010 weren’t prepared to do it now. Individuals who have felt personally affected by UK government decisions would have their say – even if the root of the problem might, on closer inspection, have been a Welsh Government decision. The vaguely disillusioned Welsh Conservative repeat voter stayed at home because ‘it’s only local elections’.

When it comes to how the UK coalition parties were punished, there was a marked difference. Already bruised by the Assembly election results, the Lib Dems were struggling with losing activists, and a smaller cohort of candidates. Bruises became wounds, but whether they prove fatal remains to be seen.

The Welsh Conservatives, who improved their position in the Assembly elections, fielded more candidates in every local authority area. More resilient, and defiant of noises off at Westminster, we lost councillors and even councils, but still emerged with our second best result, and gained ground in Powys. Across Wales and England we still have more councils and councillors than Labour and the Lib Dems put together. We’re bruised for sure, but with plenty more rounds left in us.

Why couldn’t Plaid take advantage of the Con-Dem mid term blues in the way Labour did? A common enemy in Westminster provided a problem not a boost, yet the Assembly election strategy of Labour bashing didn’t work either. They couldn’t quite make the most of the general Lib Dem malaise, in either town or country. The Lib Dems lost half their seats on Swansea Counci, but Plaid lost all theirs. Meanwhile, the Welsh Conservatives lost just one seat – to an independent.

All parties have some thinking to do. Plaid will be asking what the hell happened. Like the English rugby team before the World Cup should have done, Labour should be asking whether it might be a mistake to believe their own publicity. It’s not just the leaflets that need delivering now, it’s the promises.

The Lib Dems will be asking how to rebuild confidence and regain trust. Welsh Conservatives will be asking how to get people to distinguish between what they stand for and what people prefer to believe they stand for.

Some recognition must be given to the Welsh Conservatives’ success in securing respect and sustained support in recent years. Good strategies still need refreshing. Nevertheless, it would certainly help if the both elements of the coalition government could do better at getting across their good news. They also need to prove that the posh-boy tag is irrelevant. Cameron must remember, generally speaking, that people in Wales have selective memories. They are still inclined to forgive Labour their sins and credit them with the successes of others, while blaming the ‘Tories’ and refusing to accept our achievements.

They say the polls never lie and therefore no one should be surprised at developments in the local elections on 3 May. The polls indicated that Labour would make a comeback from its dire results in 2008, and so it came to pass. With an out of touch and ideologically driven UK Government pursuing aggressive cuts, a Cabinet mired in sleaze, and a double dip recession – Labour couldn’t have asked for a better set of circumstances.

The key question for Labour is whether this is the beginning of a reversal in fortunes that will see the party sweep back into power at Westminster come 2015, or was it a mostly a protest vote.

Personally I don’t think Labour Shadow Cabinet Ministers should get over excited about high office yet. The key election battleground will be the economy, and despite the completely wrong direction being pursued by the Coalition with their huge austerity experiment, I can’t see the voters of middle England in those key swing seats that determine who holds power in Westminster putting their faith in Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. Both Eds were key players in the discredited Blair-Brown regime. Their irresponsible economic policy was based on housing and credit bubbles, light touch regulation of the financial sector, and the decimation of the production side of the economy. Labour can’t offer a Hollande type narrative of change with them at the helm.

In the elections, Plaid withstood the swing back to Labour far better than the Tories or the Lib Dems.  The last local elections in 2008 was a high point for us, and it was unrealistic to expect a similar sort of performance across the whole of Wales considering that this election was fought in a far less favourable environment. We lost 66 seats across Wales, and gained 25.  Nine of our gains were from Labour, such as in my home town of Ammanford. This shows that with a good candidate and an organised campaign we can beat Labour despite all the cards being stacked in their favour.

On the plus side, where we made in roads for the first time in 2008, such as in Torfaen we more than held our own. In the Vale of Glamorgan we held on to all our Councillors. In our traditional strong areas of Gwynedd, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire we emerged as clear winners. There was no Labour revival in my constituency of Carmarthen East and Dinefwr where we put seven thousand votes on our rivals.

However, losing seats in the central valleys and Cardiff was a bitter blow, particularly in Caerphilly which was one of Wales’ better run Councils. Under a fairer voting system such as employed in Scotland for local elections, the number of Plaid Councillors would have better reflected our share of the vote.

At the risk of sounding like a Lib Dem, attempting to project a first past the post result on to a different voting system is, of course, difficult. However, in some areas we can say with certainty that the result would have been different. For example in the Cynon Valley Labour had 90 per cent of the council seats on 57 per cent of the vote, whilst Plaid only received 10 per cent of the seats after gaining 33 per cent of the vote. In Cardiff we polled 13 per cent of the vote but only have 3 per cent of the councillors. If that’s not a democratic deficit I’m not quite sure what is. Of course, with tribal Labour reasserting a vice like grip on Welsh democracy I’m not holding out much hope for progress.

Having been actively involved in Welsh politics since 1997 it seems clear to me that the fate of Welsh elections are largely determined by events in Westminster. When Labour are in power, the electoral environment is far more favourable to Plaid, and the other two unionist parties. When the Tories are in, the reverse is true. This protest vote style politics against Westminster comes as a result of a failure of the national movement to create a Welsh political context.

The blame is also shared by a weak civil society which is far too closely associated with one political party, and a Welsh-based media that, apart from the BBC, lacks political penetration. The Labour-Tory tag team have a deplorable record in Wales. The challenge for my party is to convince the people of Wales is that the real alternative is the growth of our democracy rather than changing colours of the ruling clan in Westminster.

During the campaign a journalist from the BBC in Wales asked, “What message will voters send the Prime Minister?” When Welsh journalists begin asking, “what message will voters send the First Minister?” we might be getting somewhere as a political nation.

The first Global Civil Society yearbook was due to launch in New York at the United Nations on September 17 2001. The events of 9/11 did not only mean the cancellation of our event – they blew off course the whole project of ‘civilising’ globalisation. Just before 9/11 we felt that our ideas were entering the mainstream; both Newsweek and the New York Times expressed interest in attending the launch. Instead, the newly proclaimed ‘War on Terror’ betokened a return to sovereignty and geopolitics and to the marginalisation and sidelining of values, perspectives, movements, groups and tendencies that comprise what we call global civil society.

This month marks the publication of the tenth edition of the Global Civil Society yearbook. For us, the tenth anniversary offers an opportunity to look back over a decade of trying to explain, interpret, conceptualise, describe and measure the phenomenon that we framed as global civil society, and to reflect critically on what we have learned as a result of the research that was undertaken to produce the yearbooks. This anniversary edition was written during 2011 in the midst of a new wave of global civil society mobilisation – the Arab Spring, the occupation of squares all over the world, and, at the same time, the rise of the xenophobic right, accompanied by numerous riots and uprisings.

The question we ask is whether our project is back on course: whether today’s generation of protestors represent the harbingers of a new emancipatory agenda, or whether the opposite is the case, that social fragmentation and polarisation from above as well as from below could usher in an even more dangerous and divided world. Or both?

From the beginning we conceived global civil society as a ‘fuzzy and contested concept’ with both descriptive and normative content, and envisaged the yearbook project as a journey into unknown territory where we would discover unconventional ideas and sources of information and different ways of seeing the world.  For operational purposes, we adopted an empirical definition of  global civil society as ‘the sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organisations, networks, and individuals located between the family, the state, and the market and operating beyond the confines of national societies, polities, and economies.’ (GCS 2001, p.17). As the journey progressed, we became increasingly critical of the dominant associational notion of global civil society that is often equated with international NGOs. In the pages of the yearbook, we began to experiment with alternative, more normative versions of the concept: communicative power, for example, or the space where justice is deliberated, or a realm of civility and non-violence.

One way in which we chose to interpret civil society is as the medium through which individuals participate in public affairs, and through which they endorse or challenge the dominant discourse. It is a constantly shifting medium – sometimes characterised by consensus and sometimes by sharp polarisation and struggle, sometimes changing slowly and sometimes, in revolutionary moments, dramatically. Its concrete manifestations – as coffee houses or market places in the eighteenth century, town hall meetings and party conferences in the twentieth century, or Facebook and tent cities most recently – vary according to time and place.

In our yearbooks, we demonstrated that the 1990s were a period of consolidation for the post- 1968 movements. This was a time when a new post-1968 generation came to power and when the end of the Cold War fatally weakened the dominant ideologies of socialism and post-colonialism. It can be argued that the 1989 revolutions opened the space for the new narratives of the post-1968 movements and, indeed the very idea of global civil society – a kind of radical democratisation – could be said to be the big idea of the 1989 revolutions. In the aftermath of 1989, many of the actors in the new social movements transformed themselves into NGOs. If workers’ movements had turned into national institutions, then the new movements consolidated themselves within a more global environment. Our yearbooks showed a dramatic increase in the number of international NGOs during this period. Furthermore, much of the agenda of the post-1968 movements was formally adopted. Our yearbooks described how global civil society had contributed to a new global consensus on human rights, leading to the new norm of humanitarian intervention, the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), or to new treaties like the Land Mines Treaty. Likewise the emerging importance of climate change, or of addressing AIDS/HIV can be treated as global civil society achievements.

Figure 1. Source:GCS 2012.

Of course, this was also a time of triumph for the neo-liberal ideas of the right. Both the global market and global NGOs were agents in the intensifying process of interconnectedness. The new humanitarian discourse effectively was displacing an earlier discourse about social justice and was interpreted by some as a form of cooption – a way for the neo-liberals to salve their consciences about inequality.

It was only towards the end of the 1990s that a new anti-capitalist movement emerged. The protests at the G20 meeting in Seattle in 1999 represented the first dents in the so-called Washington consensus. The events of 9/11 and the proclamation of the War on Terror constituted a profound setback to the humanitarian agenda and a resumption of notions of sovereignty and unilateralism.  Subsequently, in contrast to the 1990s, the period of the 2000s was one of political and social polarisation in which movements, especially the Social Forums, mobilised both against the War on Terror and against the dominance of the global market.

The mobilisation of 2011, while building on the experience of the 1990s, signifies a very new phenomenon that is too early to interpret. Not only in the west, but also in growing parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, today’s generation are the children of the Internet, the mobile phone and cheap air travel – the ‘globalisation generation’. As Moore and Selchow argue, for them, the Internet is not just a tool of communication and participation or a space for debate and exchange that is separated from the ‘real’ world but it is a set of resources, engagements and structures through which the world is constantly renewed; it is part of the everyday, with profound implications for political culture and how to understand it. The new generation can look sideways as well as backwards and forwards.   They know that the world is one fragile eco-system – and that while the nation state has a role to play, it is part of a broader global community. Above all, as has become so movingly obvious in Tahrir Square, in the streets of Syrian towns or even in the Yemen, most believe in non-violence as a fundamental guiding principle and in a new understanding of democracy involving horizontality, leaderlessness, and replaceability.

In Global Civil Society 2012, we describe developments in global civil society in very different fields – democracy and citizenship, peace and justice, and the economy and society. In this series of essays for openDemocracy, some of the authors reflect and expand on the subject of their chapters. Moore and Selchow suggest a reconceptualisation of the mainstream notion of the Internet with the aim of triggering a reconfiguration of political analyses and the naturalised assumptions and concepts that guide them. Ferenc Mislivetz and Bernard Dreano write about the crisis of democracy in Europe and what has happened to the Arab Spring. Moyes and Nash describe the twenty-first century disarmament campaigns – the new technologies and the new forms of violence with which civil society actors are engaged. And Robin Murray describes the extraordinary rise of what he calls the civil economy: the spread of social innovations, in reaction both to neo-liberal brutality and to state inflexibility as well as failure.

I hope that these very different perspectives and topics, along with the yearbook itself, will help to stimulate new thinking about how to re-imagine politics and social transformation in contemporary times and, importantly, about the role and impact of individual responsibility in finding ways to navigate and indeed surmount the current democratic crisis.

The policy influence of think tanks such as the IWA usually operates in long-term and diffuse ways. Think tanks help to set the parameters for the political weather in the way of long-term forecasters. Rarely do they score direct hits. However, this week proved to be an exception with the National Assembly’s publication of the Report by the Task and Finish group on the future outlook for the media in Wales, available here.

The Group’s main recommendations are closely aligned with those made to it by the IWA’s Media Policy Group. The first and most important recommendation is that “the Welsh Government should establish an independent forum to advise on policy in relation to Wales”. This follows our suggestion which is described in paragraph 42 of the report, as follows:

“The IWA said that a working group should be established to bring forward proposals for the devolution of some responsibilities within the media and broadcasting sectors – within a UK framework. Priority should be given to responsibility for S4C, community radio and commercial radio licensing in Wales. The IWA said that the Welsh Government should work to secure across-party consensus on any proposals that emerge from that work.”

Later (paragraph 45) the report notes that:

“The IWA told the Group that, in their view, there is an urgent need to establish systems that will generate continuing debate on media policy in Wales. These systems should also create autonomy in governance and lead to executive action. They should incorporate Welsh and UK Ministers, the Assembly, regulators, broadcasters, producers and Welsh civil society. The IWA also said that Wales needs to urgently develop a cohesive response to specific technological, content and funding issues around the media. As a foundation for this, they suggested that the Welsh Government should commission a full review of the needs of Wales in terms of broadcast and online services and developing technologies.”

This last point is reflected precisely in the Group’s second recommendation:

“The Welsh Government should commission a review to map the media needs of the people of Wales. This review should inform media policy across all sectors, including existing and developing technologies.”

It is significant that in addition to its preoccupation with the broadcast and new media the Group finds time to consider the current plight of the print media in Wales. It suggests (paragraph 169) that the independent forum

“…should consider, as part of its role, sustainable models for the print industry, and that this consideration should also include the issue of public subsidy, as happens in other small European countries. A strategic approach to the sustainability of Welsh Language publications should also be a focus for the independent forum’s work.”

The Task and Finish Group – chaired by Labour AM Ken Skates (Clwyd South) with Lib Dem AM Peter Black (South Wales West), Conservative AM Janet Finch-Saunders (Aberconwy), and Plaid AM Bethan Jenkins (South Wales West) – reports our concerns at some length (parargraphs 17 and 18):

“The IWA emphasised that there are significant legislative and regulatory changes on the horizon for the media in Wales, namely the renewal of the Channel 3 licences in 2013; a new Communications Act by 2015; and the renewal of the BBC Charter in 2016-17. Technology and media policy is moving quickly, yet the IWA expressed concern that there is insufficient capacity in Wales to keep pace with events.

“The IWA was particularly concerned about the lack of capacity amongst the Welsh civil service and said that this makes it difficult for the Welsh Government to analyse changes and to develop the necessary foresight to anticipate and shape developments in the Welsh media. As such, the Welsh Government’s heritage department’s capacity to provide expert advice to Ministers on media policy should be strengthened. In oral evidence, Hywel Wiliam of the IWA said:

‘I strongly believe that the Government needs to look carefully at the whole range of questions surrounding the media in Wales and the industry more generally. Otherwise, it will miss out on the opportunity to be part of that discussion and part of the opportunity to develop Wales specific policies. That is vitally important, not only from a heritage perspective, but also from the perspective of developing strong economic policies for the future. We believe that the civil service resources need to be strengthened.  We want to see a greater capacity to look at these areas independently and to assess them, with more monitoring work being carried out by the Government and its officials.’ ”

All these concerns are closely reflected in the Group’s comments and recommendations. So, for example, recommendations 4 to 7 state:

• The Welsh Government should continue to strengthen linkages across Government departments to ensure that the maximum benefit, economic and cultural, can be drawn from the media sectors.

• As part of its role, the independent forum should keep under review the issue of the devolution of broadcasting in Wales and advise the Welsh Government as appropriate.

• The Welsh Government should develop a protocol with the UK Government for dealing with broadcasting issues which are not devolved.

• A relevant Assembly committee should, on an annual basis, invite Ofcom, public service broadcasters, and other key providers in the media, to report to the committee on their responsibilities and commitments to Wales.

Other recommendations include the Assembly having a role in monitoring the amount of political coverage provided by BBC Wales, particularly in light of budget cuts recently announced by the Corporation. The group also noted the need for the funding of Welsh language channel S4C to be closely monitored.

But the major consequence of the Group’s work is likely to be its agreement with the IWA’s view that an independent panel should be created to keep the Welsh Government up to speed with the rapidly evolving media world. As the Chair Ken Skates put it:

“What has become clear during the course of our inquiry is that there is still a healthy appetite for Welsh-focused media and information in Wales. However, the way that people are consuming that information is evolving rapidly. Therefore we believe that an independent body, consisting of experts with experience across the sector, should be charged with monitoring the Welsh media landscape and provide advice and guidance on how to sustain it.”

There is no getting away from the fact that last week’s local council elections were bad for the Welsh Liberal Democrats. Not only did we fall back from our high tide marks of 2004 and 2008, when we had benefitted from national swings against Labour, but we lost a lot more ground on top of that. Councils like Swansea, Cardiff and Wrexham, which we led for eight years and where it has been acknowledged that we had done a good job, were lost. In addition two Welsh Liberal Democrat Council leaders were unseated.

At the same time Welsh Liberal Democrats achieved one or two remarkable results. In Aberaeron for example, Elizabeth Evans polled 91 per cent of the vote against her Plaid Cymru rival. Nevertheless, it was a difficult and disappointing night for many candidates and councillors who had worked hard in their communities, often to very good effect. The final total for the Welsh Liberal Democrats was 74 Councillors, a net reduction of 92.

In Cardiff Welsh Liberal Democrats produced one of the lowest Council Tax rises across Wales over the four-year term. An average band D property pays just £936.53 in the capital city of Wales. That is in stark contrast to the rises that Labour-led Rhondda Cynon Taf have seen, with council tax increasing from a massive £998.12 in 2008 to an incredible £1148.82 this year.

Welsh Liberal Democrat-controlled Cardiff council was praised by the independent Wales Audit Office as showing “clear and firm leadership within the council and finances are managed effectively”. Cardiff has become a capital city to be proud of. Major developments include the new international sports village, with an Olympic sized swimming pool, ice rink and white water rafting centre, the city centre redevelopment and St David’s 2 which has the largest John Lewis outside of London. Tourists now flock to the City to shop.

Despite that, we lost 18 seats, including the Council leader and dropped to being the second largest party. Labour gained 33 seats to secure overall control.

In Swansea, Liberal Democrats froze the council tax this year, having previously kept rises at less than half the rate of the previous Labour administration. They reopened the Leisure Centre that had been closed due to Labour neglect, funded free bus travel for under 16-year-olds in the holidays, opened a new bus station, opened a new central library and contact centre as well as refurbishing and building new schools.

And yet they lost ten seats as Labour gained 22 to take control.

In Wrexham, the Wales Audit Office said that the Welsh Liberal Democrat-led Council “has strong and well developed financial management and a history of not overspending on its annual budget.”

Careful financial planning resulted in lower council tax bills, plus improved quality of life for those living in Wrexham. Regeneration of Wrexham town centre, reduced waiting lists and higher quality services were all benefits of the readjustments of the way money was spent.

Unfortunately, that record of success was not reflected in the way people voted. The Welsh Liberal Democrat Leader of the Council lost his seat and the party’s representation fell from 11 seats to four. For once Labour failed to take overall control, though they are the largest party.

What is surprising is how few activists saw this coming. The opinion polls were very clear, but the message on the doorstep was consistently that people liked our record locally and supported what we were doing. Yes, many were disillusioned with our role in government but it seemed that the message that this election was about local issues was getting through.

This was evident in my own ward. However, over 600 people who normally vote for the Welsh Liberal Democrats failed to come out to cast their vote. That was a pattern that repeated itself across Wales. This was not a turnout issue or apathy, it was a deliberate abstention to make a point and it cost the party dear.

The issue that exercised most people was the budget. Despite the fact that the rise in the income tax personal allowance contained in it will put £130 back in the pockets of over a million low and middle income workers in Wales, and will take a further 51,000 of the lowest paid people in Wales out of paying income tax altogether. But that message did not get through.

Instead, people focussed on the pasty tax and on the cut in the higher rate of tax to 45 per cent. The weeks of poor publicity around the measures announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer took their toll and people voted accordingly or, in many cases decided not to vote at all in protest.

Welsh Liberal Democrats have benefited in the past from protest votes. On 3 May we found out what it was like to be on the receiving end. We cannot ignore the views that have been expressed.

The UK Coalition and the Liberal Democrats Ministers in it need to listen. We need to reduce the deficit but we also have to recognise that there is a human cost to that and respond accordingly. Above all we need to revisit measures that might stimulate growth in the economy and get people back to work.

We can recover and rebuild our support and our local council base. But now we are a party of government we have to understand that local work and successes may no longer be enough. Listening and responding to concerns at a national as well as a local level is essential as we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and get back to campaigning. We have been at lower points than this and bounced back. We will do so again.

Last week’s county council elections were outstandingly successful for Welsh Labour, meeting and beating the Party’s own expectations. Not only did the party resume its dominant position in its traditional heartlands, it also exceeded the substantial success it had obtained in 2011, in the urban concentrations of Newport, Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham, as well as making emphatic gains in the Vales of Clwyd and Glamorgan. Moreover, for the first time since 2001, Labour advanced rather than retreated west of the Loughor and the Clwyd. Looking ahead to the General Election intended for 2015, and the Assembly elections of 2016, Labour’s revival in Carmarthenshire and Conwy may be the most significant result of all.

The timing of Labour’s revival prevents the long-term hollowing-out of the party, in a way which has inflicted such deep and long-term damage on the Conservatives in Wales, from the 1980s onwards. Amongst the best news for Labour is the diversity of its new councillors. For example, in Cardiff every constituency now has Labour representatives from minority ethnic communities, people in their twenties to their sixties, as well as an unprecedented number of women.

Labour’s decision to leave manifesto production to local parties resulted in the involvement of hundreds of members in working groups, plenary meetings and detailed drafting. The process has carried further the rejuvenation of the party’s grass roots, which began as soon as the election of May 2010 was over. One example of the results can be seen in the Swansea Manifesto and its comprehensive set of policy proposals which will form the basis of Labour’s administration in that city.

In politics, weather really does matter and this year’s campaign was conducted in the worst April for a century. Temperatures on 3 May across Wales were lower than they had been on Christmas Day. Bad weather hits Labour disproportionately. On any dry day there are more Labour activists in the field than any other party. On a wet day, all parties are equally absent. If April had been a less cruel month, Labour’s victory would have been even greater.

If weather matters, then leadership  matters too. Carwyn Jones is both the best recognised and the most highly regarded of all political leaders in Wales, bringing a breadth and depth of popular appeal which no other leader is able to rival. But if leadership is important, it is also perilous. This year every party lost at least one politician who had led a Council during the previous four years, including the independent leader of Ceredigion. Welsh voters appear to have embarked on a spontaneous decapitation strategy, making 2012 remarkable as a year when personal political prominence and personal political peril became inescapably intertwined.

Within a single Parliament, it is now clear that the Lib Dems will have lost all the ground gained, in thirty years of pavement politics. Only where the party is defending its own core territory can it stem its more general collapse. Beyond that core, it is in full free fall. All this will surely play directly into the prospects of the next Westminster election that will be fought on new boundaries. For Lib Dem MPs to endorse boundary reforms that spell their own oblivion is not simply a matter of turkeys voting for Christmas, but of such turkeys self-stuffing and placing themselves in the oven. Last Thursday’s results suggest that, on current boundaries, Lib Dem MPs in Wales would all have some chance of retaining their seats, even if only remotely in Cardiff Central. On new boundaries not one will survive.

Last Thursday’s results were sobering for Plaid Cymru. I have a real respect for Leanne Wood as an individual, but last week demonstrated that she has the bad luck to be the wrong leader, at the wrong time. Plaid’s heartlands remain Welsh-speaking and Poujadist. The gamble was that they would remain loyal, while the new leader could appeal, instead, to the very different demography, and politics, of the south east. The results in Gwynedd, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire, suggest that the jury is still out on the first part of this proposition. The widespread losses across the old Glamorgan and Gwent demonstrate the death of the second. When the Conservatives are in power in Westminster, the political leverage to prise away Labour voters disappears. This is precisely the time when the new Plaid leader’s particular appeal is least likely to make itself felt. Last year’s Assembly elections began a period of decline for Plaid Cymru which accelerated last week. It is a trend which is set to continue.

As for the Welsh Conservatives, 2012 leaves them reliant on the life support machine which is the Assembly’s electoral system. In first-past-the-post elections, which it so strongly favours, it lost seats in 11 of the 14 Councils where it has representation. During the 1990s, the Tories more or less disappeared as a party in Welsh local government. Now, it has lost much of the rather thin ground which it regained in the years when Labour was in office in London. It is heading back to oblivion.

If last Thursday’s elections do nothing else, surely they provide a challenge to every political party to drag democracy into the world which today’s voters occupy.  Ballot papers need to be redesigned, to be clearer and simpler to read – for example, by grouping candidates by party, rather than alphabetically. New technologies mean that voting can be made much easier, without the greatly over-stated fears of fraud. Voting could take place at weekends. Mobile voting booths could take polling stations to people, rather than the other way around. Polling could take place at supermarkets, over the phone and in many other ways. We have to shake off the shackles of voting on a Thursday, using a pencil tied to a piece of string in a draughty church hall a long walk away from where people live.

Lastly, to more fundamentally radical proposals to revive Welsh democracy. I am in favour of compulsory participation, proportional representation and of councils being elected in thirds, each year. Taking part in elections is a duty, not simply a right – even if participation amounts to ‘none of the above’. PR would give all parties an incentive to campaign, and put up candidates, in every part of Wales. In Scotland, in 2012, not a single seat went uncontested. In Wales, nearly 140,000 voters found that there was to be no election, because a single candidate has been returned, unopposed. PR would also revive the Labour Party where we have to rebuild for the future, such as in Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion. Annual elections keeps power in the hands of voters, and gives parties a real incentive to keep in touch with their electorates. Such reforms are much better mounted from a position of strength. That’s why, after 2012, Labour remains the best hope for anyone with a genuinely radical reform agenda in Wales.

The Calman Commission report, now largely embodied in the Scotland Act, was a considered piece of work that received a good deal of unfair criticism in Scotland.  Much of the criticism was politically motivated and analytically inaccurate.

At its core were proposals for tax devolution, notably the sharing of the income tax base between the Scottish and the UK governments. That approach, based on Canadian practice, is sensible and many criticisms made of it were wide of the mark. However, I remain persuaded that the precise form of the income-tax sharing adopted in Scotland is not ideal and would not work at all well in Wales.  It is a great pity it was not amended in the Scotland Bill as some of us proposed to Scottish Parliamentary Committees. If Wales is to get some devolution of income tax, it must not be done the Scottish way.

Writing on ClickonWales on Monday Jim Gallagher, Secretary to the Calman Commission, claims that objections to the Calman proposals “have melted away”. Some may have melted but it would be more true to say that others have foundered on the rock of Treasury obstinacy and determination to concede as little as possible.

What is the issue? As Mr Gallagher says, the new Scottish rate of income tax will be a single rate levied on all taxable income. This has the grave drawback that any increase or reduction in the rate has the same effect on the marginal tax rate of lower and higher income-earners. The devolved government cannot alter the marginal rates of higher and lower tax payers differentially.

The justification given for that is “decisions about redistribution… lie at the UK level”. Whatever you think of the politics of that position, it is based on a misunderstanding. Take current rates of income tax at 20 and 40 per cent; the ratio between them, one measure of progressivity, is two. If the Scottish government raises “its” income tax by 2p, the rates will become 22 and 42 per cent, a ratio less than two, so progressivity is reduced.  Similarly a cut in the tax would increase progressivity on this measure. The attempt to reserve ‘redistribution’ to London is a vain one.

Yet the effects of altering the basic and higher tax bands are economically different so a devolved government should not be forced to yoke the changes together. In Wales, higher rate tax-payers contribute nearly one third of all income tax receipts while making up only about 13.5 per cent of all tax payers. The harsh truth is that Wales could hardly afford to raise income taxes on this group. If someone is making a million pounds a year, for example, they should be contributing nearly £400,000 a year to the inland revenue. If Wales raises its income tax by 2p that would cost such wealthy tax payers another £20,000 a year. If they live in Abergavenny or Hawarden, it is easy to move to Ross on Wye or Chester.

There are only about 700 tax-payers in Wales earning £500,000 or more each year. It takes just 100 of them to move to cancel the revenue effects of an increase in higher rate tax and turn it negative. And we don’t know the numbers of English residents who would be deterred from moving in.

Some 90 per cent of the Welsh population live within 50 miles of the English border, while nearly 14 million people live within 50 miles of the border in England. Every day 100,000 people commute across that border to work one way or the other. The scope for tax avoidance if the Welsh higher income tax rate differs from the English is enormous. Raising the rate would surely cost revenue over time – not for any fanciful economic effects like the infamous Laffer curve, but just because it is so easy to move.

Yet, on the Scottish proposals, cutting the higher rate would involve cutting the basic rate, too, which would be expensive, costing perhaps £150 million for every 1p off the rate in Wales.

The conclusion is that a Welsh Government would never change such an income tax rate. If Wales is to acquire income tax powers it needs to be able to change higher and lower bands differentially. It can then cut higher rates if it wants to attract high earners, or not, as it chooses. It can then raise the basic rate if it wants to raise revenue, or not, as it chooses. It should share the income tax base by being allocated at least half the tax points in each band. That would still only give the Welsh Government revenue of about £2 billion compared with spending of £15 billion each year – so allocating two-thirds of each band would not be too much.

Devolving taxes in this way has another advantage. Because income tax is progressive, tax receipts tend to rise slightly faster than incomes and, because of that, GDP as well.  In Wales income tax has tended to rise 1.23 times as fast as real income. Consequenty, if the Welsh government took a proportion of each tax band, its revenue would rise at that rate.  But if it merely had a tax of so many pence across all incomes, as in Scotland, its revenue would grow only at the same rate as income. Devolving  a proportionate share of tax bands rather than a flat rate tax would result in devolved taxes having greater buoyancy, reducing dependence on a block grant over time.

These are strong arguments, which were put forward in the Independent Commission on Finance for Wales that I chaired. They are not ones that should be allowed to melt away. It is to be hoped that the Silk Commission will give them due weight.

And there is no reason to despair and conclude that if the Scots got an inferior settlement, at best Wales is condemned to getting the same. It is possible for logic to win. The Calman Commission proposed a formula for how to reduce Scotland’s block grant when more income tax was devolved. The Welsh Commission pointed out that formula had clear flaws and proposed an alternative. The SNP-dominated  Scottish Paliamentary Committee agreed and argued that the Calman formula should be dropped and the Welsh formula adopted. In almost the sole concession concerning the Scotland Bill, the Secretary of State for Scotland agreed with Scottish Ministers to adopt the Welsh formula. The SNP played that up as a concession which greatly reduced the risks of the arrangements to Scotland – as indeed it did.

I firmly believe that we were right in our proposals for how to devolve income tax as we were right on the offsetting grant formula. The Silk Commission should gird its loins and insist on the right approach. Then in due course, no doubt, if income tax is devolved to Wales, Scottish arrangements will again follow the Welsh lead.

In the next few years Scotland can offer some real opportunities to Wales if it chooses to take them up. The worse thing for Wales would be if there is a No vote in the Scottish referendum on independence in autumn 2014. The metropolitan political system would breathe a collective sigh of relief. It would be business as usual, and the Celtic periphery could be put on the back burner.

On the other hand, a Yes vote would open up all manner of opportunities for Wales. The Barnett mechanism for determining the block grant would go and a new funding formula would have to be found. There would probably be an enhanced desire by England to keep Wales and Northern Ireland within the fold, with an increased willingness to make concessions. The Welsh bargaining position would be stronger as it will be in any case in the next two years leading up to the referendum.

However, a bargaining position is only of any use if you know what your position is. Wales could lose the opportunities being presented to it if it is not clear about what it wants.

In Scotland the opposition parties have refused the offer of a second question in the independence referendum, which I think is tactically bad from their perspective. If there was a second question on the ballot paper, the prospects for a high independence vote would diminish.

What Salmond has successfully done is to manoeuvre his opponents into saying that the choice in this referendum is between independence or the union with nothing in between. This gambles on the assumption that the Yes has no chance of winning.

However, a Yes vote in the referendum is possible, though undoubtedly difficult to achieve. At the moment the Yes camp is scoring between 35-40 per cent in the polls. There are a lot of ‘Don’t Knows, especially among women. So there is a long way to go.

Certainly, the Yes side is in a stronger position in terms of putting a campaign together. It is unified and has access through the SNP Government to the skills of a Constitution Unit able to produce high quality factual material especially in terms of the economic benefits that would accrue to an independent Scotland.

The Yes side will also have a more powerful team to campaign on the ground and it has plenty of money. The SNP was left £1 million by the poet Edwin Morgan specifically to spend on an independence campaign and more recently has been given a further £1 million from a couple (SNP members) who won £168 million in the Euro lottery.

In contrast the No side has much greater difficulty in putting together a coherent campaign, linking together the three unionist parties and the CBI. The trade unions are clearly unenthusiastic at the prospect of working with a No campaign. No substantial  leadership figures have yet to emerge.

On the themes of the campaign it looks as though:

• The Yes side will emphasise Values and Opportunities.

• The No side the security of being within a larger unit and fear of change.

The Yes side has the advantage that there is evidence, in terms of values, of a policy gulf opening upwith England over such issues as:

• No university fees in Scotland and commitment to comprehensive education within local authorities.

• Free personal care for the elderly.

• No marketisation of the NHS in Scotland.

• Scotland retaining the water industry within public control.

• Rejection of PFI in Scotland for funding capital projects.

In these policy areas Scotland is maintaining a social democratic approach and establishing positions that are moving further and further away from those in England. These growing policy gaps reflect a very real difference in values between the Governments of the two countries, including when Labour was in power at Westminster.

Of course, from an SNP point of view a major factor is that only indendence will deliver nuclear disarmament for the UK. It could happen within the first year of independence since Scotland could follow New Zealand in prohibiting nuclear warheads in Scottish waters or land.

The implications do not seem to have been fully taken on board by policy-makers in London. All UK nuclear capacity is based at Faslane-Coulport and there are no other suitable sites.  Even if a greenfield site was found, it would take many years and many billions to create the substantial infrastructure required.

So, on the yes side there will be essentially two moral themes built around the values of strengthening Scotland’s identity as a social democratic society and insisting that the country becomes nuclear free and does not participate in foreign wars unless this has been the decision of the Scottish Parliament. These are red line issues.

It won’t be easy and compromisies will have to made. The SNP has already compromised on the monarchy, acceding that the Queen will remain Head of State in an independent Scotland. There will also be a ready willingness to co-operate across the British Isles, with one option being to strengthen the already existing Council of the Isles in which Scotland would join theRepublic of Ireland as an independent member state.

Alex Salmond has also said he would keep the pound sterling as Scotland’s currency following independence with a longer-term option remaining of joining the Euro if the situation in the Euro-zone stabilises. If the Bank of England was retained as a central bank, this would of course have implications for monetary policy.

The outcome of the referendum will depend to a great extent on whether the Scottish Government can generate confidence on the economy.  A lotof work has been undertaken on Scotland’s future economic strategy, focusing on:

• Scotland’s resource base – oil (on tap for another 30 to 40 years with the prospect of building up a modest sovereign wealth fund for Scotland), a very high ratio of land to population, and good fresh and sea water resources.

• Large-scale investment in renewable energy.

• Substantial higher education resources.

• Good export opportunities.

Of course, all kinds of events and problems can crop up which could derail the campaign. Nevertheless, the Scottish Government is banking on the creation of a ‘feel-good’ factor influencing the outcome, with the Commonwealth Games taking place in Glasgow just ahead of the referendum, with a wide range of associated cultural events. The autumn 2014 date has been carefully selected.

Meanwhile, the position of the unionist parties should be challenged:

• Most Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster are against any more powers for the Scottish Parliament, regarding what has already been devolved as too much of a threat to their status.

• The Conservatives don’t appear to be interested or engaged.

• As for the Liberal Democrats, it may be that their Scottish and Welsh components are committed to federalism, but there is no coherent line being put forward on federalism by their leadership in England. They are willing to go along with devolution for Wales and Scotland, but are unwilling to address the issue so far as England is concerned.