It is fascinating, and rather telling, that since launching
his draft Wales Bill last week (‘a final constitutional settlement for Wales’),
Stephen Crabb has not once taken the opportunity, whether in press releases or
in speeches, to passionately outline its virtues in detail, highlight where it transfers
the all-important new powers to the Welsh Assembly which will conclusively reverse
economic decline or improve public services, spell out how its structure and
provisions bring much needed clarity and simplicity to the legislative system,
systematically demonstrate (counter to all contrary accusations) that it does
not reduce the competence of the Assembly but actually increases it, and conclude
(in a flourish) with a clarion call to the faithful that this is indeed the
Wales Bill to end “constitutional obsession” for a generation.
No, he has done none of these things. The bill, its specific
provisions, its envisioned processes and systems, its long-term implications,
its vision for a well-functioning Welsh democracy, have hardly been mentioned
at all. It has neither been aggressively promoted nor aggressively defended. It
has simply been shoved into the darker recesses of the Wales Office press team’s
‘U-drive’ (they’re always U-drives aren’t they?). That is, of course, because
the more attention the actual provisions of the bill get, the more obvious it
becomes that it is an exercise in deceitful regression, a bill designed (pre-meditatively)
to reverse Welsh devolution at the same time as being presented as deepening,
clarifying and finalising it. That’s too much for even the brass-richest of un-reformed
Conservative centralist necks to defend in the (admittedly tame) cockpit of Welsh
political debate.
Credit where it’s due though, Mr Crabb and his advisors are
smart enough to know that you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can’t launch
a completely new constitution for Wales and simply not talk about it; whistle,
as it were, and hope that the public and media will buy a pig in a poke on face
value. So what do you do? You don’t want to talk about the bill itself and you
don’t want to answer specific, authoritative criticisms and questions directly.
You know you will lose. You also know you will look sly or stupid.
So you turn to that age-old rhetorical strategy of pre-emptive,
aggressive diversion. You will aggressively ‘occupy’ the public forum on your own
terms for as long as is needed, at least until the opposition tires or neutrals
and the uninformed credit you by default with ‘authority to conclude’. Hence, you
accuse your critics of displaying unreasonable, irrational and emotional
reactions whether they do or they don’t (it’s impossible to prove or disprove).
You falsely, but subtly, conflate non-related arguments with the one you want
to put forward (it takes a long time to untangle conflated arguments). You exaggerate
unproven or minor consequences of ‘not agreeing with me’ and present them as important
or even existential (material/financial ‘risks’ always command disproportionate
attention until they are proven or disproven). You make claims of reasoned
truth whilst knowingly omitting key facts that would actually undermine your own
argument (calculus provides answers based on the factors used not on the
factors available).
If you are bright, have a lot of stamina, and the media and your
opposition is either weak or disinterested, you can sustain this diversion for as
long as you want. You may never have to openly or honestly answer the questions
you were originally presented with, questions, in this case (and I take the
liberty of paraphrasing a myriad of critical sources), such as: ‘If the Silk
Commission presented a potentially enduring ‘devolved’ constitutional
settlement for Wales, in what way does this bill realise that vision?’ ‘If it
doesn’t realise that vision, why, and what is the alternative vision?’ ‘Legal
and academic authorities claim that this Wales Bill reverses devolution in
Wales vis-à-vis the GoWA 2006. Does it, and if so why?’ ‘What referendum, manifesto
or electoral mandate entitles you to reverse the constitutional settlement
established by the referendum of 2011?’ ‘If you believe it doesn’t reverse that
settlement, what legal advice has been provided to defend that claim?’
These are just some of the very basic but crucial questions
Mr Crabb has been successfully avoiding for a week with elementary rhetorical diversion
and obfuscation techniques about “nationalist lawyers and academics”, “emotional
reactions” and “economic impacts”. But as I said, if the media or your
opposition is either weak or disinterested…
