However, I would take issue with Stig over Schedule 7 becoming a "living thing" in the sense that it will be updated in the same way as Schedule 5 has been. Schedule 5 is regularly updated (on average every other week or so) either as the end result of an LCO or, more usually, by Parliament in Westminster adding more responsibilities directly. The LCO process will come to an end after a Yes vote in the referendum.
However Westminster—because it is sovereign—has always been, and will always be, able to do whatever it likes in terms of transferring powers to whatever body it likes.
So, for example, if we look at the current situation in Scotland, the Calman Commission proposed that some further areas of responsibility should be transferred to Holyrood, and that some should be taken back to Westminster. These things can be done by means of an Order in Council rather than by primary legislation (i.e. passing an Act) and in fact the SNP drew up draft Orders to enable the Secretary of State for Scotland to do it straight away. He has preferred not to do it immediately, and instead the Government has published a white paper saying that it intends to do some of what Calman recommended by means of an Act after the next election. We can judge for ourselves whether that translates as "We'll leave it up to the Tories" or "We want to delay doing it for as long as we can."
So yes, Schedule 7 (because it is the definitive list of what the Assembly can and cannot do) is capable of being amended in future if that is what Parliament is determined to do ( ... and if the Assembly is prepared to take on those powers.) But it will not be a constant process, as LCOs are now. The mechanism would probably only be used as rarely as has been the case in Scotland: a couple of times in ten years.
There are also—just to be really nitpicky—one or two instances where powers that have been transferred under LCOs and framework Acts give the Assembly more powers in a particular area than are listed in Schedule 7. So that will need to be tidied up. But there are only a tiny number of such anomalies, and it certainly won't require a "Super Order" to tidy up just a couple of loose ends.
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OK, so much for technicalities, let's move on to opinion. In short, the advantage of Schedule 7 is that it is a stable list, and therefore we as voters will know which set of politicians is responsible for what. What we have now is the messy situation where two sets of politicians are squabbling over the same thing ... something which is wasteful, time-consuming and expensive.
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Obviously I'm all in favour of moving to a referendum. But I also think that referring to Schedule 7 in the referendum question is the best way of avoiding terms that are capable of being misunderstood, or at least interpreted in different ways by different people. As you say, Betsan, what is on offer certainly isn't "full" lawmaking powers, and terms like "increased" or "like Scotland" are not precise enough. The question needs to be impartial, but at the same time precise.
So I think the referendum question should be put in this form:
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Do you agree with the following proposition?
The National Assembly for Wales should have primary law-making powers in the areas devolved to it, as listed in Schedule 7 of the Government of Wales Act 2006
YES, I agree NO, I do not agree
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For more, including the Welsh version, please look here.
MH @ Syniadau
P.S. Am I the only one to have noticed that the list of ten things in the last post only contained nine items?
But the AWC continued with it. However, in an interview which I highlighted here, Sir Emyr picked Felicity Evans up for wrongly using the very same term ... even though the AWC website was still using it to describe one of the two options.
It is now clear from the detailed survey report by GfK NOP (it was called the "executive summary" on the AWC website but the link has now been fixed) that the term "full lawmaking powers" was very widely misunderstood ... so much so that a huge 26% of people thought that "full lawmaking powers" actually means independence.
As I now don't know how to link to the document, please will you accept a quote from it.
The research demonstrated that there was a poor understanding of a number of the terms surrounding the debate on increased powers. Critically, the term ‘full law-making powers’ was not well understood.
Findings from the second wave of quantitative research suggested that understanding of the concept of ‘full law-making powers’ has not increased since Wave 1. The majority of respondents recognised that full law-making powers mean that the Assembly “will have more powers in certain areas of Welsh life such as health, education, housing and tourism” (80% in Wave 1, 81% in Wave 2);
Confusion was evident over whether the Assembly “will have law-making powers in all areas of Welsh life”, 48% of respondents in Wave 1 and 49% in Wave 2 incorrectly thought this was true;
Three in ten respondents incorrectly thought it was true that the Assembly “will be able to change the basic rate of income tax” (30% in Wave 1, 28% in Wave 2);
A quarter of respondents seemed to equate full law-making powers with independence. Twenty six per cent of respondents in both waves incorrectly believed it was true that “Wales will be independent of the UK”.
The qualitative research also shed light on the effects of poor understanding of ‘full law-making powers’, which was frequently misinterpreted as meaning that the Assembly would be able to make decisions in all areas of Welsh life. This could result in an impression that the debate on increasing law-making powers was one of independence, a less popular option. In this sense, poor understanding hindered the debate on increased powers.
I would therefore suggest that the 51% / 31% split in the ITV Wales/YouGov survey is probably not so very wide of the mark.
If you look at the table I put here, it examines what people meant when they ticked the "I can speak Welsh box" in the census. It seems clear that if someone speaks a what I'll call a "moderate amount of Welsh" and lives in an area where only a low percentage speaks Welsh, they will call themselves a Welsh speaker. But if that same person, with exactly the same ability, were to move to an area where a high percentage speaks Welsh, they would probably NOT call themselves a Welsh speaker.
Apply this test: What would your neighbours call you? If you can put together a couple of Welsh sentences and get the gist of Pobl y Cwm without subtitles, then neighbours in Monmouth would say you were a Welsh speaker, but neighbours in Caernarfon would probably say you weren't ... simply because, in each case, the standard that your neighbours will apply is their own ability in Welsh.
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It might also be worth noting that the last BBC/ICM poll (Feb 2009), asked a "Do you speak Welsh?" question, and the figures were:
Fluently ... 14% Enough to get by ... 21% Not at all ... 65%
Noting the difference between "do" and "can", I would say that this total of 35% for "do" is not so very incompatible with YouGov's 42% for "can". Look at this post for more details.
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Finally, I noticed that you said, on the "Minding your language" thread, that:
"Estyn found that Welsh medium schools had fewer students taking foreign languages than English medium schools and that the performance of students in Welsh medium schools was significantly worse in terms of grades."
Can you tell me where you found that information? Either a link or the title and enough info for it to come top on Google.
Labour would be prize fools if they trusted Cameron to deliver and he then failed to do it.
Cameron, some time in 2011 or 2012, would just say, "Labour had plenty of opportunity to fulfill their firm commitment to give Wales a referendum, but they failed to do it. So it's not me you should be blaming, it's them!"
The parallel is almost exact ... scarily similar.
Come on Labour, you don't trust the Tories one inch on anything else, so why put yourselves entirely in their hands on this referendum? Act while you are still in control in Westminster.
The Assembly feeds are available on senedd.tv (and there are live feeds from the other institutions too) so in that respect it doesn't offer more than being an alternative, and rather attractive, interface ... and that should mean more people will be drawn to watch, which is good. The video clips and highlights are very good.
But the real measure of how good Democracy Live becomes will be in how well you manage to link what goes on in the Assembly (and all the other political institutions in the UK) with how those same matters are being discussed elsewhere. The BBC's political blogs seem to be well linked-in ... which is a good start. But ultimately it's not so much about the new technology, it's about the breadth and standard of political journalism. It always has been, and always will be.
Looking through it, there seems to be good content in both Welsh and English. But one of the criticisms I have made in the past is that the English and Welsh versions of some articles are different ... with the Welsh version often, though not always, having less content than the English version. The two "sub-sites" accessed by the "Wales" and "Cymru" buttons are not directly linked to each other. It would be very much better if each page in both Welsh and English had its own button that would link to the other version of that page, rather than having to start over again from the "Wales" and "Cymru" menus.