Monday, November 22, 2010

More devolution would be very welcome... for the Devo-crats.

A couple of weeks ago, the Plaid Cymru ex-MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Adam Price rattled some well-gilded cages:

He delivered his attack on current politicians at the Welsh assembly by telling BBC Wales' CF99 programme for S4C that a "lack of skills amongst politicians is making it difficult to tackle big economic challenges".

He said: "The gap between the problems we face in Wales and the skill-set of the people we're drawing in to politics is huge"

Mr Price, who is currently pursuing a scholarship in Harvard University, accused political parties of drawing politicians "from a vanishingly small gene-pool".
This piece of research from The Druid, confirmed Price's assertion: "87% of the Plaid Cymru/Labour coalition in Wales have never had a wealth-creating job"; not one single Lib Dem in the Welsh Assembly has been anywhere near a business!

Devolution has created a layer of professional politicians in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and too many of these Devo-crats have no idea about how the real business world outside Stormont, Holyrood or the Senedd operates. In normal times, this wouldn’t have mattered that much: after all this parish pump political elite have been shuffling paper-clips and swopping meaningless motions between themselves for well over a decade now without, despite their best efforts, causing too much damage to their respective economies but as we are being reminded on a daily basis we’re not now living in ordinary times.

What the devolved politico fears most is the collapse of the present system, not because of any possible detrimental effect of the local economy but because this system permits him/her to enjoy a very comfortable life-style for not a great deal tangible in return. The typical denizen of Holyrood, Stormont and the Senedd most certainly do not want to be forced into the real world to hunt for the kind of 9-5 that many of their voters have to endure.

So, when Conservative Leader in Wales, Nick Bourne suggested: “It’s important that we are all united behind the campaign to ensure we get that yes (to extra powers for the WAG) vote we all need.” he was quite right... but only from his own and the devo-crats' narrow, selfish perspective.

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