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: “To formally ask a person or group of people to undertake a specific piece of work.”
Welsh usage: “To ask for views and recommendations and then not follow through with them; to stall, delay.”
Welsh political synonyms: consult/consultation, deep-dive, task & finish, national conversation, national debate
The sandwiches are out. The cups of tea are ready. The committee arrives. This is how we actively don’t do anything in Wales.
To “actively not do anything” shouldn’t even make sense, but it’s the best way to describe some of the decision-making processes here. Are there any other ways of describing it? “Busy work”? “Presenteeism”? “Parkinson’s law“?
Part of this is because we don’t have executive forms of leadership in the UK or Wales. It’s not in our working or civic society culture, particularly here where decisions have been made by committees or groups of people. Bureaucracies and decision-making bodies usually become less efficient the larger they get.
So instead of delegating responsibility to one person who stands and falls by their decisions – and can make those decisions as quickly as they like – we end up with larger numbers of people not taking responsibility for anything and additional stages added to processes slowing everything down.
It’s not always a bad thing. It could be that a government (local or national) has committed itself to do something too soon and are trying to stall. So they undertake consultations or set up a commission to give the impression of “doing something” in the interim.
Where this becomes annoying in Wales is when there’s an urgent issue – or an issue that doesn’t seem particularly controversial – that has to go through various committees, task and finish groups, deep-dive exercises and alike before any proposals are drafted. Actions that should be taken or started in under a year often take several.
These exercises may even come up with recommendations and findings that the decision-makers/decision-making body has already been told to do several times in the past (as has happened with Wales’ various constitutional commissions). Then it becomes a merry-go-round. Then it pisses everyone off except those on the committee.
That said, committees, commissions and consultations aren’t bad in themselves. They’re useful for gathering views from different perspectives and to consider factors that would otherwise have been overlooked. They should be there to double-check, advise and refine and there’s nothing wrong with pausing and reflecting before following through on a decision.
In Wales, it seems like they’re often used to stall, delay or confuse. “Going to consultation” is a guarantee that a decision won’t be made any time soon – even if such a consultation is required by law.
And even after all of this, many people will say, “We weren’t told.” So another issue in Wales is, “Who is being consulted?”
