Anders Hanson

I’ve just received in the post my winnings from the Ceredigion Liberal Democrat Supporters Club draw.  It was just £17.50, (but then I don’t enter for the amount I can win), but as I worked in Ceredigion at the time of the last Welsh Assembly elections, it seems very appropriate that I have won this draw for the first time in the run-up to the current ones.

Winning Ceredigion was one of the highlights of the last General Election for me.  I hope that one of the highlights of this year’s elections will be us winning the assembly seat too.

Ceredigion has come along way in the four years since I worked on the campaign there.  Our primary aim then was to win a seat on the Mid & West Wales regional list rather than the constituency.  Unfortunately we were around 1,500 votes from winning the final list seat - just 190 votes per constituency.  But in politics, very near is not good enough - we still lost.  Still the work we did then helped prepare the ground for winning the Westminster seat, and even the BBC acknowledges that the result in the last assembly elections was a big achievement:

In the 2003 assembly elections, he [John Davies, the Lib Dem candidate] managed to gain ground, securing the largest swing to a Lib Dem in any of Wales’ 40 constituencies.

This time, with an MP at Westminster, things are very different.  We are now in a really good position to win the seat and elect John Davies as the Assembly Member for Ceredigion.  I don’t mind admitting, and even he knows this, that I was unsure of John when I first met him, but he grew on me a lot as the campaign went on.  He was new to political campaigning but was prepared to learn and really worked hard.  His gut instincts on what was the right thing to do were also pretty sound.  His big advantage though will be what he will bring to the Lib Dem group in the assembly if he is elected.  He is from a farming background, he is an articulate, effective and passionate debator in Welsh and English, he knows the constituency and many of its key figures incredibly well but has also seen more of the world than just West Wales.  He is not the sort of candidate who usually appeals to me, but during the last campaign he proved to me how good he was.

I am a little sad that I couldn’t go and help them in the run-up to this campaign, but obviously being here in Sheffield is more important when we have elections too.

BBC NEWS WALES: Ceredigion warning to complacent

Ron Davies has announced that he believes that all Independents standing for election to the Welsh Assembly should sign a “charter” so that the voters know where they stand.

In theory this sounds sensible. But these are some of the things that the charter is going to contain:

The charter sets out a series of commitments, including turning the assembly into a Scottish-style law-making parliament. Its supporters also want an end to “postcode prescribing” on the NHS and a review of the Barnett formula to allocate money from Westminster to Wales, which is says penalises poorer areas.

Call me fussy, but that all sounds like a manifesto to me. Isn’t the point of Independents that they all vote for whatever they want and do not have a common set of policies? Something with a common set of policies is what the rest of the population would call a political party.

But to contradict this, Ron Davies has then announced that the independents:

would not “accept any collective discipline” and would put the interests of constituents first

Fine, but what if the interests of a constituency is against something in the charter that the independent has agreed to? Would they then break the charter by voting against the policies laid out in it, or would they break their promise to put their constituents first and instead vote with the policy contained in the charter?

Independents have become very fashionable of late. But as many people in politics know, independents are often members or supporters of a particular political party but aren’t prepared to tell the electorate that for fear of them not voting for them. I accept that I have a bias, but I’d far rather people stood under a party banner so you have a rough idea where their politics are.

People complain that politicians always tow the party line, but many politicians do rebel sometimes, and when they do it is often on an issue where the voters knew they differed from their party line when they were elected. I’d far rather we elected people like that than a random bunch of independents who may agree, may not agree, where there is no common vision on what they want their administration to achieve and where every vote is decided by backroom deals or what civil servants/council officers propose.

BBC NEWS WALES: Independents unveil poll charter