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Pressing buttons

Betsan Powys | 13:26 UK time, Monday, 13 October 2008

There's an element of poetic justice in it really. Mike German, the outgoing Welsh leader of the Liberal Democrats is incensed by a leaflet that was shoved through his door in Cwmbran while he was at the party conference on Saturday.

It came from True Wales, and is, says Mr German, 'lacking in truth'. What is doesn't lack is button-pressing. They are all there - AMs in shiny palaces with snouts in the trough, dreaming of more powers, next inevitable stop: independence and bust.

That's the journey True Wales makes in its first leaflet - read on and decide whether you're prepared to make it with them. This is the gist of their message:

The All Wales Convention is a publicly funded Yes campaign "travelling around Wales with £2.5million of your money"; if you vote yes in a referendum then "on previous form, AMs will award themselves an inflation-busting pay rise" and you'd probably get another twenty of them, queuing up for more cash and second homes.

The referendum would "set the country on the road to separation from the UK" so forget law-making powers alone and when you vote in a future referendum, think independence as an inevitable consequence. Given Wales pays £9billion less in taxes than it gets in public spending, in "an independent Wales we would either have to scrap the NHS and every council, or every man, woman and child will have to pay another £3,000 in taxes".

Will their arguments have traction with an awful lot of voters in Wales? Yes, of course they will.

Is Mike German right that they're more un-true than true?

Take just one figure: the '£2.5m' being spent on the All Wales Convention. There is a half a million per year in the budget to be spent on the Convention. The figure is there in the budget line for three years but given the Convention intends to report back in its second year, it should cost £1m.

Where does the £2.5m figure come from? It includes £1.5m for the Convention and the £1m budget of .

So no, It isn't accurate. But if you were on the 'other' side of the debate, would you relish having that argument ("it's just a million") with True Wales just now?

And is Sir Emyr Jones Parry's Convention going to take on those arguments while it gathers evidence and when it finally reports? That's not what it's there for. Yes, it is absolutely there to advise the government on how best not to lose a referendum. Hardly surprising then that not everyone swallows the 'neutral' tag. But does that make it a Yes campaign? Only in the same way that £1m can add up to £2.5m.

Will the arguments True Wales is taking to the people of South East Wales (and beyond in months to come) kickstart an official Yes campaign? Hardly. Mike German believes his Labour and Plaid colleagues in the shiny palace in Cardiff Bay are 'laggards'. They believe that to launch a campaign now - just when you're more worried than ever about next month's fuel bills - would do very little for further devolution and in Labour's case, do even less to promote party unity: a happy coincidence.

It's not going to happen. For now, it's just no.

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