Some Electoral Arithmetic for Ynys Môn (updated)

    

      Prompted by the Ynys Môn Conservatives selection of Anthony Ridge-Newman, the Druid has been checking the odds William Hill is offering on the Anglesey election result:

                          Now             Nov '09

Plaid Cymru           1/3                1/3
Labour                  9/4                5/2
Conservative          12/1              10/1
Lib Dem                100/1            100/1

So, the Conservatives’ selection of an English candidate has lengthened their odds from 10/1 to 12/1, whilst the Labour odds have shortened very slightly to 9/4. But as far as William Hill are concerned at 1/3 Plaid Cymru’s Dylan Rees is Red Rum - he’s a racing certainty.

But are we really so sure that the results are this certain?

Wales-only Voting Intention polls are pretty thin on the ground, but YouGov published their first last November, and here are the headline figures for All-Wales (the comparison is with the 2005 General Election results in Wales):

Con 31% (+9.6)
Lab 34% (-8.7)
LD 12% (-6.4)
PC 15% (+2.4)

Now, in predicting the 2010 general election results in Ynys Môn, All-Wales polls aren’t actually all that helpful as Wales isn’t really a very homogenous place. North West, Mid and West Wales leans strongly towards Plaid Cymru, Labour is strong in the North and the South, with Conservative support picking up towards the borders with England. Luckily the November ’09 YouGov poll also include a break down of these results regionally. The North Wales results were:

Con 40%
Lab 29%
LD 10%
PC 16%

Now, if we compare these poll results with the actual 2005 election results in North Wales, we get the following figures (look at the bottom 2 lines of the chart):

click image to enlarge

The Plaid Cymru vote is pretty steady with the Lib Dems are slipping some 5%. However, the big news is a MASSIVE 13.3% swing from Labour to Conservative in North Wales.

What does this mean for Ynys Môn?

Of course the situation isn’t really homogenous in North Wales either but, frankly, its the best guide we can get from the data available. So, if for the sake of argument we assume that Peter Rogers decides not to stand (a very big assumption) and his support from 2005 swings behind the Conservatives, this is what this polling data predicts for Ynys Môn:

So what can we conclude?

• Ynys Môn in 2010 is a three-way-marginal. If Peter Rogers decides not to stand, there only looks to be about 400 votes between Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives. 
• But we know that Peter Rogers not only split the Conservative vote in 2005 - he also took some Plaid Votes. If those voters fall in behind Plaid Cymru then Dylan Rees will just overtake Albert Owen and will be our next MP.
• If however Peter Rogers DOES stand this year then the Conservatives are doomed and it will be a straight fight between Labour and Plaid - and probably much, much closer than William Hill is calling it.

Ynys Môn in 2010 is on a knife edge...
      
UPDATE: Another YouGov Wales-only voting intention poll, commissioned by ITV, has just come out here. The headline All-Wales figures are:

Con 32% (+1)
Lab 35% (+1)
LD 13% (+1)
PC 13% (-2)

YouGov don't seem to have published the regional data yet, but as soon as they do the Druid will re-compute the Ynys Môn 2010 prediction accordingly.

UPDATE 2: YouGov how now published the regional data of their latest Wales-only poll here. The figures for North Wales are:

Con 33% (-7)

Lab 34% (+5)

LD 11% (+1)

PC 17% (+1)

The comparisons are with the previous November YouGov Wales poll we discussed avbove. The North Wales sample is only a very small 236 people so there is more than enough room for error - however if we calculate the change from the 2005 General Election results as before we get:

Using this swing data to recalculate the predicted Ynys Môn result this year (with all the same assumptions as earlier) we get:

The Conservatives now seem to be out of it - with or without Peter Rogers standing - and it looks like a pretty close fight between Labour and Plaid Cymru - Albert Owen still has everything to fight for.

  
UPDATE 3: Thanks to Meurig in comments for pointing out that YouGov does not include the Meirionydd Nant Conwy area in their definition of 'North Wales'. The Druid has recalculated accordingly to give a more accurate prediction. So the revised YouGov North Wales numbers compared with 2005 General Election results in North Wales (excluding Meirionydd Nant Conwy) are as follows:

And the revised Ynys Môn predicted result based on these updated numbers are:

The gap between Labour and Plaid Cymru is now down to less than 100 votes. Dylan Rees may or may not be Red Rum - but its going to be a photofinish!

  

A birds eye view of Llangefni in the 1950s

  

click image to enlarge

The Druid has come across this 1950s photo of Llangefni taken from the air. This was back in a time when Llangefni was still a very wealthy Market Town with:

• 2 Livestock Auction Houses (one is visible on the bottom left of the photo, and the other is just above the centre on the right hand side)
• 8 pubs (The Red Lion, The Cross Keys, The Bull Hotel, The Market, The Ship, The Good Lion, The Foundry Vaults, and the Railway)
• A cinema (visible above the Auction House in the bottom left) 
• An electricity generating plant (top centre)
• 2 Elementary Schools (Ysgol Penrallt and Ysgol British)
• 1 High School ("County School")
• 4 Butchers
• 4 Banks
• 3 Iron Mongers
• 2 Tailors
• 2 Blacksmiths
• 3 Newsagents / booksellers
• 2 Undertakers

And all of this in a town which must have had only half of its current population. Neither of the Auction Houses exist anymore, four of the pubs served their last pints years ago, the cinema is long gone and the rest of the businesses decimated. Indeed a large portion of the stores now are boarded up or replaced with endless Charity Shops.

As Llangefni was built on the wealth of the surrounding farms and the regular livestock markets held there, its decline is directly connected to the decline of agriculture on the island. The admirable Dylan Jones-Evans has posted on the plight of agriculture in North Wales, noting:

• the economic contribution of agriculture in North Wales has declined by 67 per cent during the period 1997-2007 as compared to an overall UK decline of 7 per cent
• whilst agriculture accounted for 2.5 per cent of the North Wales economy in 1997, this had fallen to 0.6 per cent by 2007. Indeed, agriculture was producing £175 million for the North Wales economy in 1997 but this had plummeted to £57 million a decade later. Unbelievably, this decline accounts for 8 per cent of the total reduction in overall UK agricultural output during this period.
• worst of all, if the relative contribution of agriculture to the North Wales economy had been the same in 2007 as it had been in 1997, then the sector would have been generating an additional £187 million in output that year.

Its a very sad picture - and the effects of this rural malaise are writ large in today's Llangefni.


What will an ariel photo of Llangefni taken in 50 years time show? Will there be anything left?

   

How can Anglesey County Council help local businesses?

    
Yesterday the Druid swung his sickle at Anglesey County Council for not having done more to prevent the job losses at Anglesey County Foods and elsewhere. This may not have been entirely fair.

Why? Because the powers which Local Councils actually have to set the economic climate in their responsible areas are minimal.

Lets take an example: suppose a Council wanted to strategically attract more businesses to relocate into their authority area (or support existing businesses during a recession) - the obvious way would be to reduce business taxes so as to make their area more attractive financially than surrounding areas. And as more companies would be attracted to move there - employing more people in the process - even though the tax rate itself had gone down the Council would actually raise more revenue because there would be more companies paying it. Sounds like a good idea to the Druid.

So, what business taxes are there? In the UK, there are basically only two:

• Corporation Tax
• Business Rates

The rate of Corporation Tax, which has to be paid by all companies which turn a profit, is set and levied by central Government in Westminster so Local Councils have no power whatsoever to reduce Corporation Tax just within their region.

That leaves Business Rates. Now Business Rates are levied by Local Councils on all businesses within their authority area based on a valuation of their premises. This is how business contribute towards the provision of local services. So, surely Local Councils could make a strategic decision to reduce Business Rates in their region in order to make it more attractive to companies to move there, right?

Wrong. The problem is that even though Local Councils collect Business Rates locally they have no control over the actual rate they charge nor do they keep the money raised. In Wales the rates themselves are set by the Welsh Assembly Government and the money which Anglesey County Council raises from local businesses is also sent to the WAG where it forms part of the Business Rates Pool (which we discussed in my earlier post about Council Tax). The WAG then works out how much money each Local Authority should get from that pool according to the size of the local population within each authority area and by using other social indexes (such as the social deprivation index) and sends it back. So in the end Local Council’s have zero power through the tax system to either attract new businesses or support existing businesses - we are stuck with a one-size-fits-all approach administered jointly by Westminster and Cardiff.

You can see there might be advantages to this system as the the effect of pooling all locally collected Business Rates means that in theory areas which have lots of businesses subsidise areas which do not. But theory does not always work in practice - and as it is allocated back to Local Authorities according to population this does not help Anglesey, which has the smallest resident population of all counties in North Wales, and the second smallest resident population in Wales after Merthyr Tydfil (no doubt because of a migration of people out of the Island due to job losses and general lack of opportunities). Indeed, as per my earlier post on Council Tax in Anglesey, Anglesey County Council had to negotiate a minimum ‘floor’ of a 1% increase with the WAG or we would have received even less cash from the Business Rates Pool.

So what can be done about it? The Druid will return to this topic shortly...
  

200 more jobs to go on Anglesey

      
Fresh after the closure of Anglesey Aluminium with the loss of 400 plus jobs at the end of last year, news emerges today that Welsh Country Foods, an abbatoir in Gaerwen, is also to shed 200 jobs.

Apparently senior Anglesey Council officials have expressed "disappointment". Well thats alright then.

Pity they didn't do something sooner - a temporary Business Rates cut to get small and medium-sized companies through the recession for example would have been a lot more useful than this kind of hand-wringing afterwards. In the meantime we can add Welsh Country Foods to the list of companies which have recently closed or shed jobs on Anglesey:

• Anglesey Aluminium, Holyhead - 400 jobs
• Eaton Electric, Holyhead - 250 jobs
• Eastman Chemical Company (Peboc), Llangefni - 100 jobs
• Vion - Llangefni plant went down to one shift - 140 jobs
• Menai Electrical, Gaerwen - 50 jobs
• Anglesey Country Foods, Gaerwen - 200 jobs

By my reckoning that makes 1,140 jobs lost over a relatively short period - not counting the additional small scale jobs losses at supporting companies. Before long there won't be any jobs left - and who will pay the 15% Council Tax increase then?

Incidentally, I note the Council still have enough money to spend on inviting Rolf Harris to open an exhibition in the Oriel Ynys Môn gallery next month. Wonder how many jobs that will save?

A look at Albert Owen's expenses

The Druid has been taking a look through Anglesey MP Albert Owen's expenses this morning. To be fair to him, based on the figures and receipts now publicly available on www.theyworkforyou.com and the Parliament website, Albert appears to have acted with some probity - certainly no moats, duck houses or even bath-plugs.

Over the period for which his actual receipts are available (up to 2004) his one luxury has been the purchase of a Sony 32" LCD TV and matching DVD Player back in July '07 for a total of £629.99. The Druid can just about live with that.

If one was to take issue, it would be with his food claims. According to the regulations prior to the recent expenses debacle, MPs were entitled to claim for "food - reasonable additional costs while you are away from home" as part of their 'Additional Costs Allowance' - without the need to provide any supporting receipts. As MPs can only eat once whether they are in their constituency or at their second home, the Druid struggles to understand the need for a tax-free food allowance whilst away from home.

You can see Albert's food claims broken down by year and month here (questions marks indicate months were data is not available) and decide for yourself if you think they are fair:

Click to enlarge

As you would expect Albert claims less, or sometimes nothing, whilst Parliament is in recess and the Druid is also glad to see that his average monthly claims have generally fallen over the years. However he is worried by the number of claims that seem to come in at just under the £400 maximum figure. Strange that.

Anglesey Council Tax to rise by 15% over 3 years.

Before long all Anglesey residents will be hearing the sound of a big fat envelope dropping through their letterbox. Unfortunately it will contain their 2010/2011 Council Tax bill and is likely to cause several residents to choke on their morning paned. It seems certain that Anglesey County Council will be asking us to pay up to 5% more than last year - the largest such increase in some time. What's more, the bills for 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 could also see a rise of 5% year-on-year too, adding up to a whopping 15% increase over 3 years. Whats going on?

If it seems like a very big jump in the middle of a recession, thats because it is. A survey conducted by the Local Government Chronicle last November found that the average Council Tax bill in England is only set to rise by just 1.6% this year. Even more suprisingly 34 of the 81 English councils which responded are actually planning to freeze or even cut their Council Tax bills. Would that we too could be so lucky.

Considering that Anglesey is officially the poorest County in the entire UK - poorer even than some parts of Poland - one would hope that the Welsh Assembly Government would be doing everything in its power to support the Island. You might hope that - but you would be sorely disappointed. In fact Anglesey County Council was awarded the the lowest settlement in all Wales by the WAG - an increase of just 1.0% and well below the Welsh average of 2.1%. As the actual amount awarded to each council is calculated by some vast Excel chart in Cardiff based on all kinds of demographic data, it seems we should count ourselves lucky that we got even that much as apparently Anglesey could have received even less cash if the Council had not managed to negotiate a 'floor' of 1%.

The size of the WAG settlement (consisting of the Revenue Support Grant and a contribution from the Business Rates Pool) matters as it makes up the lion's share of the Council's budget. The Council Tax we pay only actually covers some 13% of the total, with the rest made up by income and the WAG settlement.

Because of the paltry increase in cash from the WAG, Anglesey County Council now needs to find £2.1 million in cuts to balance its proposed net budget of £117 million for 2010/2011. It intends to do this through "a cut on advertising, an 'austerity drive' and energy savings. Schools will also face a 2% spending cut, saving the council £600,000. Savings of £500,000 will be made on the waste budget as the council reaps the reward of an increase in recycling and reduced landfill." The rest of the cuts will be announced later apparently. Despite all of this, Anglesey residents will still need to stump up 5% more in Council Tax as the WAG Local Government Minister, Brian Gibbons AM, has strictly forbidden councils to use the settlement to reduce the Council Tax burden.

So residents of an Island already devastated by the loss of Anglesey Aluminium, Octel, MEM / Eaton, Peboc and many other smaller companies - plus the imminent decommissioning of Wylfa - will now need to pay 15% more in Council Tax over the next three years. Craziness.

The Druid is not an expert but he would have thought that it would make more sense to see how much money is available first and then decide what services can be delivered for that budget - rather than deciding in advance how much money they want to spend and then scrabbling around trying to find funds to pay for it all.

UPDATE: If you're upset by all of this (and you should be) you may want to attend one of the several public meetings that the Council Leader, Cllr Clive McGregor, has called over the next month:

20 January 2010	7 - 9pm	Ysgol Uwchradd, Bodedern
21 January 2010	7 - 9pm	Ysgol Syr Thomas Jones, Amlwch
25 January 2010	7 - 9pm	Holyhead High School
27 January 2010	7 - 9pm	Ysgol David Hughes, Menai Bridge
1 February 2010	7 - 9pm	Council Chamber, Llangefni
2 February 2010	7 - 9pm	Village Hall, Aberffraw
3 February 2010	7 - 9pm	Beaumaris Leisure Centre

What were the real reasons behind the closure of Anglesey Aluminium?

Excuse my tardiness in posting on this topic - but please remember that the Druid has been dead for most of the past 2000 years so better late than never!

There has been of late much gnashing of teeth from Anglesey's Labour MP, Albert Owen, over the recent closure of Anglesey Aluminium with the loss of over 400 jobs. Here he is in the House last week carefully covering his back hailing the Government's failed intervention:

"The decision by Rio Tinto Alcan to cease production at Anglesey Aluminium has left a massive hole in the regional economy of north-west Wales, but I put on the record my thanks to the Wales Office and, indeed, to the Government for their efforts with their generous offer and intervention to keep production going. Unfortunately, the company's internal matters took precedent."

Albert Owen is right to be despondent. The jobs which have been lost at Anglesey Aluminium were of the highly-skilled and high-value-added variety - in other words ones which Anglesey can most ill afford to lose. 

In fact so highly skilled are the AA ex-workers that they are now being headhunted by Dubai's new state-of-the-art Aluminium smelter 4000 miles away. So we can be sure these jobs will never return to Anglesey.

So how did the Island lose its jewel in the crown? The apparent reason was the demise on September 30th, 2009, of the cut price electricity deal which the company enjoyed with the nearby Wylfa nuclear power station. Aluminium smelting is a vastly power hungry process and AA used 12% of the Wales' electricity supply daily - making it the largest single user of electricity in the whole of the United Kingdom. AA was able to access cheap electricity as it provided a permanent base load for Wylfa and thus saved the National Grid the cost of keeping a power station on standby. A win-win situation one would have thought.

Electricity Supply planning failure

So why and how did it go so wrong?  The Welsh Office did offer AA a grant of £48 million to stay open after all - was that not evidence of the Government's best of intentions? One not so charitable to the Government as Albert Owen - the Druid for instance - might ask why was not more done earlier? The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which owns the Wylfa power station, said "There's been no breakdown in the relationship between ourselves and Anglesey Aluminium but we have explained to them the situation. We cannot extend the current contract with them due to new European legislation on providing subsidies to private companies." That doesn't sound very helpful.  Indeed the company management says it had "worked intensively with the UK Government and others" to find an alternative power supply, "but had been unable to do so". And this surely is the crux of the matter: the government has for too long prevaricated about rebuilding a series of power stations which are all about to be decomissioned. As the admirable EU referendum blog says on this subject:

That - EU interference apart - is the reality of the Government's failure to deal with one of the most fundamental requirements of a modern society – a secure and sufficient electricity supply.

While it has been pratting around with its obsession with "renewable energy" – with the support, one might add of the Blue-Green Conservatives - pushing the proliferation of useless windmills across the land, it has taken its eye off the ball and let vitally needed supplies run down. This is nothing short of criminal negligence that will cost our economy – and us – dear.

Quite. Wylfa B may well be commissioned (though that is still far from certain - this is a subject the Druid will be returning to shortly) but it in all likelihood will not come into service for another 10 or more years. A bit bloody late for Anglesey Aluminium then.

There is little point in Albert Owen and the UK Government wailing that they did everything they could to save AA. Their failure to address the issue of power supply sooner has directly lead to the loss of 400 plus skilled jobs in an area which can least afford it. That's criminal.

But there is more to this story.

EU Import Tariffs

Step forward Peter Mandelson. As a Druid it could be said I know something of supernatural forces, but even my not inconsiderable powers pale in comparison to those of the Dark Lord.

We have already noted that EU legislation prevented the NDA providing a cut-price electricity deal to AA. But it also transpires that in 2007, when Mandelson was still the Trade Commissioner, the EU decided to cut duties on the import of raw aluminium into the EU from 6% to 3%. A prime beneficiary of this move was the Russian metals giant Rusal which has been estimated to have saved them up to £117 millon a year in import duties ever since. Who is the owner of Rusal? One Oleg Deripaska - on who's yacht Mandelson enjoyed such well publicised hospitality last summer. The Druid can put it no more eloquently that David Jones MP, Shadow Wales Minister, who said:

“The lack of reliably-priced electricity was the principal cause of Anglesey Aluminium’s demise, but the 2007 duty decision put further pressure on them at the worst possible time.”

The closure of Anglesey Aluminium is metaphorically beginning to resemble one of the War Elephants employed by Hannibal which the Druid remembers so vividly. Sadly these proud beasts died not of one fatal wound, but of a thousand small pricks.

So, predictably, there is one more.


Carbon Trading

The final point we need to consider in this tragedy is the World's current obsession with Carbon. As you may know, the current Government has rushed to pledge that it will cut the UK's carbon emissions by a staggering 80% by 2050. An until recently little documented 'side effect' of this obsession strategy has been to make the closing of heavy industrial plants, such as the Corus steel works in Northern England, more profitable than keeping them open. Dominic Lawson writes:

"The owners of the Corus steel company stand to gain up to $375m (£234m) in European Union carbon credits for closing their plant in Redcar, only to be rewarded on a similar scale by the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism fund for switching such production to a new “clean” Indian steel plant."

Could something similar also be behind the closure of AA here in Anglesey? Indeed Robert Goodwill MP, the Shadow Transport for Minister, said the following during last week's Anglesey Aluminium debate in the House:

"is not the fundamental problem the operation of the European Union emissions trading system, which is making it increasingly difficult for primary metallurgical industries to operate in the EU? It would be all well and good if it resulted in the reduction of global CO2, but it merely results in carbon leakage to other economies such as China and India, which are not constrained in the same way."

It sounds to the Druid that he is hitting the nail squarely on its head. But he will leave the last word to Dominic Lawson:

"the three main British political parties — under the mistaken impression that CO2 is itself a pollutant — are asking us to vote for them on the promise that they are committed to subsidise the closure of what is left of our own industrial base."

Pithily put.

In conclusion perhaps Albert Owen and his Labour Government, despite their bleating, are not so blameless in the closure of Anglesey Aluminium as they would like us to think.