All professions have their annoying buzzwords and shibboleths they use to talk to each other and the Welsh political bubble is no exception.
When it comes to political speeches and contributions I’ve always valued content and substance over style and delivery. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone through various Senedd speeches thinking to myself, “Just get to the point”, as much as you probably have with my tomes.
It gets to a stage though where some words just lose their meaning entirely. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek look at a few of them.
Normal usage: “When democratic political institutions fall short of democratic values (i.e. lack of integrity amongst elected officials, restricting voting rights).”
Welsh usage: “Lack of coverage of, and engagement with, the Senedd.”
The most interesting people in any opinion poll are the “don’t knows”.
All those people out there who don’t engage with the Senedd or politics are the “don’t knows” of Wales. It’s often assumed that people who don’t have strong opinions on anything are uninformed or uneducated, when in fact they may be useful in pointing towards significant problems in society. After all, the largest group of the electorate in Wales are people who don’t vote at all.
Those problems could be with the voting system, lack of representation, the standard of political debate, the quality, accessibility of and range of political journalism focused on Wales or a lack of agency (such as public consultations having no impact on decisions). At one end it’s disillusionment with democracy itself and party politics which results in people “tuning out”.
Those politicians and people in civil society who say they’re concerned about engagement with the Senedd and the democratic deficit have never given us an idea of what they mean by it. That’s why “democratic deficit” has itself become so meaningless. It’s a shoulder shrug because nothing’s really been done to address it and the people seeking to address it are perhaps asking the wrong questions or coming up with the wrong solutions.
Some may argue that we need to have compulsory voting, but the right to abstain/the “pox on all your houses” vote should be as cherished as the right to vote itself. All those people drawing cock and balls and writing “wankers” on ballot papers are heroes of democracy.
In terms of coverage of Welsh current affairs, the breadth and quantity have improved in the last few years and there are some very talented journalists coming through. The overall quality and reach haven’t necessarily improved alongside it and it may have even gone backwards.
Here are some revelations that may surprise many of you and go back to before I first started doing this in 2011.
I don’t watch the news. My engagement with the Welsh media is often minimal. The sum of my daily newsgathering is usually a scan of the BBC homepage now and again. I haven’t read a UK newspaper since the 2000s and stopped reading them altogether (including local) in the 2010s.
I haven’t watched an episode of Question Time since the expenses scandal. I don’t watch political TV shows. I couldn’t give a shit about micro-developments at Westminster. I find the obsession with American politics a bit weird. I don’t listen to the radio and rarely listen to podcasts.
I’ve never cared about personality or angry press release based political stories and I don’t wait on tenterhooks for press conferences or the latest Twitter drama. I rarely watch parliamentary proceedings and even when doing Senedd Home only did so when I absolutely had to.
Instead of being one of the supposed hardcore political anoraks in the country, all of the above would mark me down as one of the uninformed, uncultured great unwashed. I’m the very type of person the Senedd would otherwise be desperate to “engage with” before I become too “disillusioned” – which is hilarious in hindsight.
It’s either a testament to my bullshitting skills, to the amount of knowledge and information you can access freely without academic, journalistic or cultural gatekeepers, or that I’m well along the path of enlightenment to becoming a “don’t know”.
