Daily Archives: March 31, 2021

Sr. Eileen Reilly of the School Sisters of Notre Dame (Courtesy of Eileen Reilly)

Sr. Eileen Reilly of the School Sisters of Notre Dame recently joined the Washington-based Catholic Mobilizing Network as a religious engagement associate.

The network's mission is to mobilize "Catholics and all people of goodwill to value life over death, to end the use of the death penalty, to transform the U.S. criminal justice system from punitive to restorative, and to build capacity in U.S. society to engage in restorative practices."

In her current ministry, Reilly is focused on advocacy against the death penalty, an institution that is beginning to be dismantled in a number of states, most recently in Virginia. However, the penalty was used significantly during the last months of the Trump administration: The United States executed 13 people from July 2019 to January 2021.

"Hopefully, that is now over," Reilly said.

If President Joe Biden sticks to his vow to ban federal executions, Reilly said she and others "will be turning our focus to the individual states considering abolition."

Also important, Reilly added, is working to raise the voices of murder victims' family members who oppose the death penalty, as they can be "the most powerful voices in this struggle to abolish the death penalty."

Her work with Catholic Mobilizing Network follows her time in various ministries, including nine years as her congregation representative at the United Nations. Trained as a teacher, Reilly holds a master's degree in peace and justice education and a Master of Divinity from Weston Jesuit School of Theology. (Weston merged with another institution in 2008 to become the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.)

While living in Connecticut in the early 2000s, Reilly began to correspond with Michael Bruce Ross, who was then a death row inmate. Ross, who had been convicted for serial murder and rape, had decided after 17 years on death row to forego all further appeals and ask for an execution date.

Michael Bruce Ross is seen in prison in 1994. Convicted in 1987 for serial murder and rape, he was executed in 2005. (Newscom/ZUMA Press/Lou Jones)

Reilly agreed to meet Ross, though initially, she was wary of doing so over Ross' insistence that he would not talk to her about his decision to end all of his court appeals.

"There would be no point to a visit if we couldn't discuss what really matters," she later wrote in an unpublished reflection, noting that she had been a public opponent of the death penalty for years, first in Virginia, where she organized vigils on the days of executions, and then in Connecticut, where she had testified at state legislative hearings against executions. She also persuaded her religious community "to toll our bells each and every time an execution occurred anywhere in the country."

Eventually, Reilly met with Ross and would continue to do so through the winter and spring of 2005, becoming his spiritual adviser. On the first visit, "I could not help but think of Sr. Helen Prejean's reminder to any of us who work with people on death row, that we are all more than the worst thing we have ever done," she wrote in the reflection.

The two disagreed on whether the execution should go ahead, but Reilly always affirmed Ross' humanity and her belief in the "sacredness of all human life." Ross was executed May 13, 2005 the last execution Connecticut performed and the first and only done by lethal injection in that state. Connecticut outlawed the death penalty in 2012.

GSR: Tell us about your early experiences with the death penalty.

Reilly: I grew up in Massachusetts [which outlawed the death penalty in 1984 and saw its last executions in 1947], and so in my early life, I never really thought about it. But when I moved to Virginia in 1988, Virginia seemed to be almost with Texas to see which state could perform more executions. Happily, Virginia just recently outlawed the death penalty.

What are the origins of the Catholic Mobilizing Network?

It grew out of the tradition of Catholic social teaching and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty. We felt that they couldn't let the statement just sit on the shelf, and so now we're engaged in several areas: education, which includes providing resources to churches; advocacy in supporting state and local campaigns against the death penalty; and prayer, which includes organizing prayer vigils and distributing prayer material.

We've also expanded the mission to include promoting restorative justice, the idea that crime should be understood by how individuals, families and communities have been harmed. The U.S. justice system is focused on punishment. Restorative justice focuses on the human cost of crime, asking who got harmed, what harm was done and what can be done to right the harm. In many cases, this means having those who committed crimes and those who were harmed by them to meet and begin the process of healing.

Despite Catholic social teaching and statements like the one from the bishops, there are still many U.S. Catholics who support the death penalty. How do you counter that support?

Sometimes it takes a gentle reminder that this work is part of the pro-life agenda, which says that all life is sacred. Other times, the witness of murder victims' family members who say, "Don't kill in my name," can change hearts. And we never tire of quoting Pope Francis in his 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, which says that "the death penalty is inadmissible" and the church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.

Your focus continues to be on the death penalty, and your experience with Michael Ross is one basis for that ministry. Looking back on that experience, what do you remember about him?

Michael was a mixture of good and bad, as we all are, and I still believe what Helen Prejean said about all of us being better than the worst thing we have done. He was very kind and respectful to me. But his crimes were absolutely egregious. We never discussed the crimes, per se. But one thing he always said was that he didn't want to cause the victims' families more pain by continuing the appeals process.

What was the reaction in the prison to your visits and to Ross?

I was treated very sternly. The contempt everyone felt for him was palpable. The attitude seemed to be, "Why would you want to visit that piece of trash?"

Looking at the issue more broadly, I assume you welcome President Biden's opposition to the death penalty?

It's great progress, yes, but we still have to keep pressure on, which is why we're gathering signatures for a petition that, among other things, asks the president to impose a moratorium on the death penalty at the federal level. We recognize that if Biden does that, he will get a lot of grief; there is still a vocal minority of people who support the death penalty.

But the percentage of Americans opposing the death penalty is now as high as it's been in decades, and the high number of federal executions has helped that. There is also the way the death penalty has disproportionally been applied against those who are not white, and there's more awareness of that now.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signs legislation outside the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt March 24, making Virginia the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty. (CNS screenshot/Courtesy of Catholic Herald)

Why did Virginia change its position on the death penalty?

The demographics of the state are changing, particularly with more people moving to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., so the legislature has changed. But I think the fact that there have been more and more cases of people being exonerated in death penalty cases has also played a role.

Your organization says the families of murder victims are often the best advocates against the death penalty. Why?

They are such powerful witnesses and are very clear that murdering another person in the name of justice doesn't accomplish anything. I've heard families say, "It's horrible to lose a child. I don't want anyone else to experience that."

We've had two mass shootings in the U.S. recently, the first in Georgia and the second in Colorado. Notably, Colorado outlawed the death penalty last year. But when a mass shooting event occurs, there may be questions about opposing the death penalty. What do you say to those who, in the wake of these killings, might reverse their positions and support the death penalty?

We mourn, pray for and stand in solidarity with the victims of these terrible tragedies in Georgia and Colorado. Incidents like these mass shootings certainly give us pause, but when we return to our core belief, that all life is sacred, we continue to stand against the death penalty. Acts of mass violence do not change the fundamental teachings of our church on the inherent dignity of every person.

How has your experience in this work connected with your spiritual life?

Something within me has been called to reach out to those most in need. Visiting Michael Ross, particularly at first, was a very difficult experience. But I felt I was fulfilling a role. People asked me, "How could you do that?" And I said, "It needs to be done. Here I am."

But there is another issue here. As everyone knows, Catholic sisters are an aging population in this country. But we're a committed, educated group of women who have what is needed to stay in the struggle. Sisters have so much to offer, and it's good that my organization and others recognize the gifts and importance of sisters. There's more to be done, and there is more that nuns can do.

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Continued here:

Q & A with Sr. Eileen Reilly, advocating against the death penalty in the US - Global Sisters Report

I watch too much true crime, so I know how it goes. There is a particular type of crime story that is supposed to be more gripping than the others. It's the story of violence befalling the quiet person, in the quiet family, in the quiet town.

"This was supposed to be a safe neighborhood!" the host exclaims, passing his shock along to the viewer like a closed circuit. "These types of things don't happen here," the officer who investigated the case confirms breathlessly, desperately trying to make her work appear more skillful and elaborate than it was.

Beyond the scandal and drama inherent in conjuring such personal trauma into a piece of entertainment, I'm most interested by the unspoken questions this framing provokes: "This neighborhood was supposed to be safe for whom?" "Where do these types of things happen, and why is it more acceptable to happen there?"

These are also the questions guiding my work toward a world without police and prisons. I believe they hold the answer to another question that often meets calls for prison/police abolition"Who will keep us safe in a world without police?"because they illuminate that safety is not a universally recognized phenomenon, as much as it is pretended to be. The meaning of safety depends on what exactly you find worthy of protection, and police and prisons are only understood to keep people in general safe because this society generally deems a particular group of us unworthy.

But there is another way to think about safety and protection, and police abolition demands it.

According to my realtor, I live in a "safe" neighborhood by which he means at least heading in the direction of the neighborhood featured in that gripping "Dateline" special where "there is a police station right around the corner!" I live in a neighborhood where gentrification is metastasizing more quickly than you can say "kombrewcha," where those police officers around the corner go out of their way to fine and throw Black people in jail just for living in a pandemic. I live in a neighborhood where most Black people can't afford the steadily increasing rent, where the clusters of homes Black people are able to hold onto amid pressures from banks and landlords become COVID hotspots quickest, and the people who live there die of the disease at much greater rates.

When a person asks, "Who will keep us safe in a world without police?" I think about how I have never felt "safe" as a Black person in the places police make "safe," and I am not even one of the local poor people who is most targeted for clearing away. To be "kept safe" in this way is only for the necks of Black people to be kept safely under the foot of everyone else.

Admittedly, this is a macro level understanding of safety that doesn't necessarily address the everyday threats that most people including many Black folks rationally fear coming to pass if policing were to disappear. It's true that people in our community aren't always kind. We aren't always peaceful or forgiving, even when we should be (and we shouldn't always be). It's true that without police, we would sometimes get into violent conflict just like we do with police. But it isn't true that policing is the best institution to address these conflicts, or that we can't address intra-communal violence without punishment and prisons.

After the lie that everyone's idea of safety must be the same, the next most harmful belief fostered by prison culture is that people within a community should have no stake in their own protection. Many of us have spent so long outsourcing problem-solving to police and prisons who are trained only in punishment that we have lost all reconciliation skills ourselves, sacrificing a healthy connection to our community in the process. We learn to falsely think of our neighbors as disconnected individuals whose propensity to harm can be snuffed out without snuffing out anything in ourselves, and forget what it is like to struggle together to take care of the people around us.

It's true that having a stake in one's own protection demands a certain level of bravery, but I'll be the first to admit that I am not brave always. I haven't called on the police for anything in years, which has forced me to face some difficult situations I'd rather not face on my own, and I haven't always stepped up. But I have stepped up more than I thought I would, and I have seen others who have come to embrace abolition step up when someone in their neighborhood is in danger with de escalation or crises management tactics they've studied, with a promise to defend or actual defensive actions, with a call to someone outside of the police who might be better able to and I know it doesn't take any more bravery than any of us are capable of because we have done it before. We did not always rely on modern policing. And there have been less such difficult moments than I assumed would occur, too. In spite of what popular media portrays, my community is not full of mindless monsters who would run rampant killing and assaulting one another if there were no untrained, state-sanctioned white supremacists to keep us in check.

So, who will protect us without police? We will. I've seen it. Outside of physically stepping up in moments of crisis, we will join our local cop-watchers or community defense organizations, or other abolitionist organizations like Critical Resistance and Common Justice. If we can't join for lack of time, we will support with donations and getting out of the way when these organizations need us to.

Most importantly, we will find safety by recognizing that prison and policing is a culture that extends beyond its officers and agents. This is a culture that says all problems must be solved with punishment, including the ways we punish ourselves with shame and guilt, which has left many of us with deeper scars than anything our neighbors could ever physically do to us. It is a culture tied up with a capitalist system that exploits the poor so much so that they might use violence out of desperation and necessity even when they otherwise wouldn't.

Abolition is not just the closing of physical buildings that hold prisoners or the disbanding of police forces. It's a process of reckoning with the punitive history of which we are all part that birthed this culture. Abolition is in how we respond to being wronged by our friends, family and neighbors, and in how we respond to our own mistakes with accountability and healing. It's acknowledging our own capacity to wrong others, and being intentional about avoiding doing so.

As I've written previously, we won't ultimately be able to get rid of police without getting rid of the abusive culture that relies on them, and so there is no void police abolition leaves behind that we should spend all our time worrying will be filled with more abuse. The void is prisons, and they are already being filled with the abuse of Black people and children everywhere. By committing to police and prison abolition, the statewhich teaches those of us who today commit intra-communal harms without facing accountabilityis the target. And without such a state, what exactly would we need to be kept safe from?

In the true crime episode, just because the quiet person in the quiet town is harmed or killed doesn't mean they aren't safe, depending on one's perspective. This is part of the reason why, I think, white folks find so much comfort in this genre. Until abolition is here, their whiteness remains safe, regardless of what happened to the individual person being featured. Even if the police don't catch the bad guy, they might as well have. One's sense of a world where there are "good" neighborhoods and "bad" Black ones is safe, even if a single person's physical body determinedly isn't.

Only abolition truly threatens the safety of a white supremacist society; though it asks for us to give up some comforts around what we believe to be our individual safety within it, rather than finding entertainment in watching someone else be the sacrifice (and even if not on-screen, Black people are always being sacrificed). Abolition shows that a more equitable experience of safety is possible, but you must become part of creating it.

Follow this link:

Who will keep us safe in a world without police? We will - Salon

This is a lightly edited excerpt from The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World (The University of Chicago Press, 2019) by Miles Ogborn.

The Jamaican slaveholder and novelist Matthew Monk Lewis recorded in his Journal of a West Indian Proprietor (1834) for March 1816 that a conspiracy had been discovered at Black River when a funeral conversation was overheard by an overseer hidden behind a hedge. The plot involved 250 people, a Black ascertained to have stolen over into the island from St Domingo, and a brown Anabaptist missionary. They had elected a King of the Eboes and intended to massacre all the whites on the island at Christmas. The plot discovered, evidence was given at the kings trial that the words to a song had been found on his person, and that he had sung it at the funeral feast, with others chanting the chorus: Oh me good friend, Mr Wilberforce, make we free! God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty, make we free! Buckra in this country no make we free: What Negro for to do? What Negro for to do? Take force by force! Take force by force! Chorus: To be sure! To be sure! To be sure!

Lewis mocked the King of the Eboes for the failure of the revolt and hinted at the dangers posed by dissenting missionaries and the inter island movements of Haitian revolutionaries. His story invoked the political and religious voices raised against the Jamaican plantocracy and tied them, through the songs lyrics and the name of William Wilberforce, to those who spoke out in Britain for the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the enslaved.

Although the relationship between speech and antislavery is the focus of this chapter, these concerns within both the movements to abolish the slave trade and to emancipate the enslaved, and in the ways in which the enslaved sought to free themselves have been foreshadowed from the beginning of this book. They are there in the insolent words heard by Madam Sharp, which led to the execution of the old Negro man in Barbados in 1683, and in the knowledge that Edward Longs History of Jamaica, and its considerations of who could speak, was a response to the antislavery activity of the early 1770s. Indeed, these matters are an important part of all the intervening chapters. The consideration of slave evidence as part of the reform of slavery, as suggested by Joshua Steele in 1789, was a crucial question throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries as both abolitionists and imperial reformers sought to bring slavery under the rule of law. Indeed, political battles over this issue, and any other reforms that were interpreted by the islands legislative assemblies as limits on their deliberative power, were understood within the framing of political talk hammered out over the previous century of debates on the freedom of speech. Indeed, as this chapter will also show, the nature of political talk among the enslaved remained a crucial matter in the early 19th century as it became entwined with abolitionist discourse. More broadly, the questioning of the future of the civil government of the sugar islands, a questioning of the organisation, if not always the existence, of slavery, was played out through forms of speech in natural history, as Thomas Dancers oratorical work in the botanic gardens in 1790 attests, and in religion, as the battles over speech between clergymen, missionaries, planters and the enslaved testify.

However, instead of knitting all these threads together, this chapter engages directly with the ways in which it was possible to speak in favour of what Manisha Sinha calls the slaves cause: abolition of the slave trade and freedom for the enslaved. How were abolition and freedom talked about and what difference did that make? While there is important previous work among the vast literature on abolition concerning how those who spoke out against slavery and the slave trade spoke, it has tended to concentrate on set-piece presentations parliamentary speeches and abolitionist sermons, for example and on the rhetoric of abolition as a component of a wider discourse of antislavery. However, taking seriously the range of voices raised against slavery, the modes and contexts in which they spoke and the variable evidence we have of those speech acts that is, dealing with abolition on the asymmetrical common ground of speech set out in this books introduction requires more attention to speech practices, and oral cultures broadly conceived, than to discursive structures and rhetorical work, although questions of practice, form and content can never be completely separated. Pursuing this emphasis on speech practices, the chapter works through three distinct, but related, inquiries into orality and antislavery: first, how the voice of the enslaved was represented in the abolitionist and proslavery literature of the late 18th century; second, how questions of class, race and gender shaped the speech practices of abolitionist debate and activism during the attempt to build a mass movement in the late 18th century; and third, how the abolition and antislavery movements in Britain intersected with the political talk of the enslaved in the Caribbean during the conspiracies and revolts of the early 19th century. Taken together, these inquiries show that examining the oral culture of antislavery can add significantly to the rethinking of abolitionist activism that has already encompassed print culture, visual culture and material culture. Such an examination also opens the possibility to understand abolitionist politics on the same ground as the antislavery activities of the enslaved themselves.

The questions of racial difference and the unity, or otherwise, of humanity at the heart of the debate over abolition made speech as important an issue in the 1780s and 1790s as it had been for Long in the early 1770s. In his 1784 abolitionist Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, James Ramsay argued that before we proceed to claim the rights of society, and of a common religion for Africans we must first put them in possession of that humanity, which is pertinaciously disputed with them. He questioned David Humes assertion of innate racial difference and argued that as far as I can judge, there is no difference between the intellects of whites and Blacks, but such as circumstances and education naturally produce. He admitted that there might be some superficial physical differences in hair texture, nose shapes and skin colour But their tongues are as musical, their hands as elegant and apt, their limbs as neatly turned, and their bodies as well formed for strength and activity as those of the white race. One abolitionist clergyman even argued, drawing on Volneys reading of Herodotus, that since the Egyptians were actually Negroes, then we owe [them] our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech.

Instead, for Ramsay, differences between people were a product of Sacred history and contingent circumstances. He argued that humanity was originally unified, but that God, at the confusion of Babel, then divided them into families and languages, giving to each distinctive features and a separate speech. This divine action set social groups on divergent paths but also promised the ultimate reunion of mankind. Differences in capacity could not simply be lined up along racial lines. So Ramsay argued, against Long, that although Francis Williamss verses bear no great marks of genius, an argument based on innate intellectual inferiority would have to show that every white man bred [at the same university] . . . has outstripped him. In turn, Ramsay heard forms of speech among the enslaved as evidence of both their intellect and the repressive influence of slavery on them. Drawing on his experience in the Caribbean, he argued that Negroes are capable of learning anything that requires attention and correctness of manner. They have powers of description and mimickry that would not have disgraced the talent of our modern Aristophanes. Yet slavery suppressed these talents so that a depth of cunning that enables them to over-reach, conceal, deceive, is the only province of the mind left for them, as slaves, to occupy. As a magistrate he had heard examinations and defences of culprits, that for quibbling, subterfuges and subtilty, would have done credit to the abilities of an attorney, most notoriously conversant in the villainous tricks of his profession.

Ramsays view supported a vision of slaverys future similar to that of Beilby Porteus, the bishop of London. Enslaved men should be objects of civil government, and as such, Ramsay contended, they should be protected by the law and encouraged to marry, have families and tend their own small properties. Such civil privileges would, Ramsay argued, go hand in hand with religious instruction, with the union of liberty and religion both advancing slowly together, without any abrupt or violent change in the condition of the slaves themselves. Like Porteus, Ramsay admired what he saw as the French practice in relation to new Negroes whereby with the first rudiments of a new language, they draw in the precepts of a religion that mixes itself with every mode of common life, as opposed to the situation where foreigners are said to learn English, by the oaths and imprecations with which our tongue abounds. However, such visions of slaverys future, and the place of speech within it, could leave slavery and the slave trade in place. For example, an anonymously authored pamphlet from a member of the Society of Universal Goodwill in Norwich argued, in 1788, that this race of men, only wants a proper education and instruction, to answer every good purpose in society. The place to start was the way they spoke. If new Negroes and children were taught to speak the English language, with propriety, fluency and correctness rather than the almost unintelligible jargon, of native and half English words, placed and used without regard to grammar or pronunciation, and which was dangerously shared by slave and slaveholder alike, then every future proceeding would be rendered easy and pleasant.

It is unsurprising that when Ramsay represented the words of the enslaved in his Essay, describing moments of fine sentiment, honour and self-sacrifice, he portrayed them as men speaking standard English. This portrayal was common to most of the sentimental literature of abolition, in prose and poetry. For example, William Cowpers The Negros Complaint, first published in 1788, was, when republished to encourage readers to boycott slave-grown produce, accompanied with the instruction that readers should place themselves in the same position through a poem that offered a simple and pathetic delineation of what may naturally be supposed to pass, at times, through the mind of the enslaved Negro. This was acknowledged as an imagined moment of speech, but one that, in the act of identification, carried the truth with it: However incapable he may be just in such a manner to speak the sentiments of his mind, yet, from his condition and circumstances, we may easily imagine that similar with the following he, as a mere percipient being, must frequently feel. Cowpers Negro then speaks a clear poetic English, evoking the sympathy of the reader via sentimental identification uninterrupted by barriers of language and difference. The same effect might be achieved by evoking the sighs, groans and cries of the enslaved, along with their tears.

However, questions of race, language and difference could not be so simply dealt with in abolitionist attempts to ensure that the cruelties of the slave trade were no longer talked of with an indifference, common to other commercial considerations. If, as well as sharing a common humanity that should invoke sympathy, enslaved Africans also needed to be represented as requiring moral guidance, education and conversion to Christianity, then that needed representing too. This tension is well captured by an abolitionist artifact that combined speech, script and print into something that, like Cowpers poem, might be circulated to engage those who read, saw and discussed it in relation to the boycott of slave-grown produce. Probably created by the Quaker printer James Phillips, whose presses produced vast numbers of abolitionist tracts, including those incorporating Josiah Wedgewoods famous Am I Not a Man and a Brother emblem, the printed side echoes that emblem through a simulacrum of a trade card on which the enslaved subject speaks a poetic language of misry, sentiment and sympathy in a supplicant appeal based on a common brotherhood with those who could provide relief from oppression. Yet, in manuscript, and probably in Phillipss hand, there is an alternative text for the figure as annexed that used the voice of Mungo to appeal to the reader or listener. Here, the authenticating and heartfelt accents of an imagined creole speaker calls on these male smokers and drinkers to tink how poor Mungo toil poor Mungo bleed! They are asked, in the accents of a racialised difference, to pledge themselves to the cause of this victimised husband and father, and by implication his family, and to seize de glass, and say Be Mungo free!

The question of the slaves two voices, and how they might be deployed, demonstrates above all else the complex and contested cultural politics of speech and the debate over abolition and freedom, showing the matters of race and gender were crucial in shaping the meanings of voice within both pro- and antislavery arguments.

Read more from the original source:

New Books | Freedom and the politics of speech - newframe.com

A recent WalesOnline poll suggested that the Abolish the Assembly party were on course to win five seats at the upcoming Senedd election.

Putting aside the fact that there is no longer a Welsh Assembly (it became the Welsh Parliament/Senedd last year) this would be the first time that a party running on an solely anti-devolution ticket will have won seats in the Senedd on that mandate.

As you can probably guess from the headline this column does not support abolishing the Welsh Parliament but it is totally understandable why someone would think that removing the Senedd and rolling back devolution is the right thing to do.

There is a long list of reasons why voting to get rid of the Senedd is a perfectly reasonable course of action.

Covid has exposed the total inadequacies in our current system. The madness of the First Minister of Wales and the Prime Minister not speaking for over a month is just one example. You cant look at the current situation and say: This is something that is working well."

In the handling of Covid there have been well-documented mistakes from the Welsh Government over the course of the pandemic. Care homes, ineffective local lockdowns, a fire-break that came too late and was too short.

When you are sat in your house, heading into the fourth month of a far-from-inevitable long lockdown, havent seen your close family since last year, and have lost your job why wouldnt you look at Cardiff Bay and say: 'We need change'?

Perhaps you look around the community you love and believe that two decades on from devolution and feel like nothing has improved. Maybe you are a proud supporter of the union who feels like abolishing devolution will help safeguard the United Kingdom.

Add to this the fact that a significant amount of the Senedd Members hire their own family members at the publics expense and many are still unsure exactly what the role of the Senedd is and it is totally understandable that calls to abolish the institution would strike a chord.

Though I totally get this point of view it isnt one I personally agree with. Actually I think it would be utter madness to try and abolish the Senedd and roll back devolution. But if the EU referendum has taught us anything it is that shouting at people who happen to disagree with you and questioning their intelligence when they have legitimate grievances leads only to an entrenchment of views, not to persuasion.

Firstly, but by no means most importantly, lets start with the politicians who are calling for the halting and rolling back of devolution.

Abolish the Assembly have currently got two MSs Mark Reckless and Gareth Bennett. Both have been vocal in criticising waste in the Senedd.

Lets first take Mark Reckless, who has joined more parties than Charlie Sheen. The one-time Tory MP defected to Ukip, then left Ukip in 2017 to join the Conservative Group in the Senedd, before becoming the Brexit Party leader in the Senedd. He has now jumped ship again as a member of the Abolish the Assembly party.

Despite now running solely on a platform that the Welsh Parliament should be abolished because it is a waste of money Mr Reckless has employed his wife Catriona Brown-Reckless since December 2016 as a senior adviser for 37 hours a week, earning up to 40,972.

If it seems strange that MSs are allowed to do this then it should. In October 2018 an independent Remuneration Board recommended an end to MSs being allowed to employ their own family members citing "public trust in and perception of the reputation" (though for some bizarre reason those already doing so can keep them in post till 2026).

In November last year Mr Reckless wrote in a column that the Senedd should be abolished and that it falls to us to bring their gravy train to an end. The hypocrisy of employing your partner at the public expense while campaigning about abolishing a gravy train is self-evident.

Mr Bennett, while not employing his family members, has also wasted his fair share of taxpayers' money when he spent 10,000 of public money on an office that was riddled with damp and was unusable. This was done without a survey and against the advice of solicitors. That office never opened.

It is not just Abolish. The Welsh Conservatives have toed a far more sceptical line on devolution recently promising to put a halt on any further powers going to Cardiff Bay. Just last year then Welsh Conservative leader Paul Davies vowed to end the Assembly gravy train but again these promises seem hollow because Mr Davies employs at the public expense the spouse of one MS and the son of another.

The new Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies also employees his wife as PA. A WalesOnline investigation found that she was actually running a hypnotherapy business as well as being the PA to her husband with several former employees casting doubt on whether she was really working enough to justify her full-time salary (Mr Davies strenuously denied these claims).

Then of course there is Ukip's Neil Hamilton who has also called for the Senedd to be abolished as a waste of money while not mentioning the fact that he claimed 7,620.30 in travel expenses between Cardiff Bay and his manor house in Wiltshire while a member. Add to that an additional 1,471.70 in travel costs for his wife Christine who he has employed a senior adviser since May 2016 on up to 40,972 a year at the public's expense.

In terms of the debate around the Senedd the hypocrisy of Wales loudest devolution sceptics is only a side issue. But it is still worth being aware of the inconsistencies between what they say and what they do. You cant argue that we should stop the gravy train when you have bought a first class ticket and you cant be the cure when you are part of the disease.

But just because politicians advocating for the abolition of the Senedd are opportunistic doesnt mean that they havent tapped into legitimate concerns or grievances.

One legitimate grievance is that the current system, where Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England have all had different policies, has made it harder to tackle the coronavirus crisis.

Issues around misleading messages (like May last year when people in England were told to drive as far as they want without any mention that things were different in Wales), conflicting policies (like when people in areas of England with high infection rates were not told they couldnt travel out of area and spread the virus to Wales), and overlapping policy areas (the UK Government is responsible for prisons but the Welsh Government for healthcare in prisons) were all real problems in managing the pandemic. But the reason that these issues arose is not because there has been too much devolution it is that it has been done badly, haphazardly, and doesnt go far enough.

The issues outlined above would be resolved by having a more clearly-defined constitutional setup across the UK. At the moment Boris Johnson doubles as the Prime Minister of the UK and the First Minister of England. This is like the President of the USA also being the Governor of California. This is a bad deal for people in Wales because the primary focus of the PM is on England. And it is also a crap deal for people in England because they do not have the same level of representation/voice as people in other UK nations have because there is no English parliament. If you had separate governments for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland with an overarching UK Government above that you are less likely to end up in the facial situation we saw when the UK Government didnt extend furlough during the fire-break but did when England announced a similar policy. Clearly defined areas of interest would reduce confusion and enable the public to hold the right politician accountable for their failings.

Whenever I cover the Chancellor announcing the Budget in Westminster my first job is to work out what applies to Wales and what doesnt. My first port of call is to the Welsh Government. But up until the announcement they are as much in the dark as everyone else. That is a bonkers state of affairs when you think about it. How can a devolved government possibly tackle Wales myriad problems when they have no idea what resources they have year to year? A clearly defined structure to the UK, with robust, fair mechanisms and communication lines in place, would enable devolution to actually achieve its potential.

We have seen throughout the pandemic the inherent advantage of decisions being made as closely as possible to the people they affect. The whole UK needed a circuit-breaker lockdown as early as September 22 last year to combat the rise in cases. Because Wales had devolved powers we were able to lock down on October 23 well before England on November 5. Politicians here were able to look at the unique situation before us and think: 'What is best for the people of Wales?' and act accordingly.

Now dont get me wrong even on October 23 this was far, far too late. But it still shows the benefit of being able to take decisions here in Wales in a way that will most benefit Wales.

If the reason you want to abolish the Senedd is because you want to safeguard the future of the union then I fear you are doing more harm than good. Covid has awoken Wales devolved consciousness people here are more aware than ever before that Wales can do things differently to England and it be effective. To simply remove the ability to act independently through the Senedd won't quell calls for independence it will inflame them.

Intransigence from unionists will destroy the United Kingdom a long time before nationalists ever do. History is full of examples where the continued inability to give an inch leads to greater demands and not fewer. Ignoring legitimate concerns over a lack of representation for Wales will only strengthen the independence argument rather than weaken it.

If instead your support for abolishing the Senedd is based on the fact you feel that nothing has improved in Wales for 20 years that is an understandable position. Some parts of Wales still have 50% of children living in poverty. But to feel that the answer to this is to abolish the Senedd is flawed. Would a mass movement of powers to Westminster really lead to a golden age of prosperity for Cymru?

One party has constantly been in power since the start of devolution. If you are not happy with what you see a far better use of your energy would be to vote for a political party at the Senedd you believe can make a difference in your life if they form a government whoever that may be. Devolution is still relatively new in Wales and to discuss abolition at this point would be like deciding a toddler isnt going to ever walk because it fell over. Just use your vote to elect politicians you think would do better.

And as a voter in Wales you are in a far better position than a voter in England to do just that because the Senedd is elected on a more proportional (but by no means perfect) basis than the UK Parliament. If you live in an English constituency which is a safe seat for any party your vote is worthless and so are, electorally speaking, any views you have. First past the post is an electoral system that entrenches the gravy train mentality at Westminster that advocates of abolishing the Senedd claim to hate.

Back on the topic of reform being better than abolition even if you elected the most competent group of 60 MSs of all time in Cardiff Bay they would be unlikely to really be able to get to grips with Wales deep-seated issues because they do not have the resources at their disposal to do it. The problem stems not from too much devolution but not enough. At only 60 members there is no way that the Senedd can perform all the tests required of a functioning parliament. How can proper scrutiny of the Welsh Government take place with so few elected representatives actually there? To think that the answer to this democratic deficit is to remove the Senedd and put policy-making soley back in the hands of a House of Commons elected using a system created in 1884 (without even mentioning the utter mess that is the House of Lords) is bananas.

The answer to an under-performing Senedd is not to abolish it but enable it to fulfil its function with appropriate powers and resources. If a hospital or a school is not performing how it should be or how you want you dont abolish it. You reform it, you resource it properly, and then replace the leaders if necessary.

Ultimately everyone should want the same thing. We want a Wales which is fairer and more prosperous. Wherever you sit on the political spectrum you cant look at the situation at the moment and say: 'This works'. This isnt to make a point that you cast your vote for any particular party in May. It is just to say that the idea that Wales is going to be a better place because we give people in Wales less say in what happens here just makes no sense.

See the original post here:

Why it is utter maddess to think of abolishing the Senedd - Wales Online