´óÏó´«Ã½

It's the Legislative Competence Order that's become known as the Hell-co. I'm talking, of course, about . Yes, go on, prick up your ears. We're talking about transferring powers to legislate on matters concerning 'the language' to the Assembly.

Some of you have an unhappy tendency to comment on the language, no matter what the blog posting is about. The draft budget? Why should a single penny be spent supporting the Welsh language? Labour leadership campaign? Which candidate speaks Welsh, which one doesn't, why do we even mention it? Edwina Hart's terrifying shoes? Photographed in ... a Welsh language magazine. Why should it get any public subsidy?
And so it goes on.

It's a bit like a game of six degrees of separation, except most of you don't need anything like six moves to kick off a thread laying into the language, those who speak it and those who spend any public money supporting it.

This morning, let me make it easy for you.

We're about to be presented with . I seem to remember a pledge to publish a draft on March 1st - St David's Day last year that is. There'll be more details later but I gather that there are some key changes to the LCO as we knew it. Here they are:

The threshold for organisations receiving public money has gone up from £200k to £400k in a financial year before they fall under the scope of any future legislation on the language. It's understood there was pressure from Whitehall to push the limit up to a million. Sounds as though they met somewhere near the middle.

There will be an appeals mechansim, so that any organisation that feels it's been wrongly included in the scope of any future measures can ask to be excluded on the grounds of 'reasonableness and proportionality.

Shops won't fall under the scope of future legislation, neither will electricity and gas transmission companies. Bus services will, as will telecommunication companies.

Watered down versus common sense? Expect the Wales Office to claim they've brokered the deal and that common sense has won the day. The Welsh Assembly Government will try very hard to bite their collective tongue and insist this LCO still allows them to deliver their key One Wales agreement commitments: all together now - the language commissioner, linguistic rights and an official status for the Welsh language.

Either way there's confidence the LCO will be with the Privy Council be next February, which suggests the right to legislate will be translated into actual legislation before the next Assembly election. Ah yes, never forget that crucial bit of punctuation.

Next week the Welsh Grand committee meets to discuss the Welsh Affairs Select Committee's take on the old LCO. Got that? By then it looks as though the new one will already have been agreed upon.

A strange process this, in anybody's language.

UPDATE

The Assembly Government lobby briefing is always translated. Questions asked in Welsh are translated to English and the same goes for the answers given. Because I speak Welsh, I don't wear a headset which means the translations I'm about to offer you are my own.

Alun Ffred Jones, the Culture Minister took the briefing. He was asked what he'd made of the role of the Welsh Affairs Select Committee in scrutinising the language LCO. Hadn't the Secretary of State said this morning on Radio Wales said that it was the scrutiny process - and the Welsh Affairs Committee's input as well as the Assembly Committee - that had made this piece of legislation "fit for purpose?"

The Welsh Affairs Committee had had "a far more interventionist role than anticipated - I can't deny that" said Mr Jones. His choice of word was 'ymwthiol.' I've gone for 'interventionist'. 'Pushy' does the job too. But that wasn't just the case with the language LCO. It went for their role in general with regard to drawing powers from Westminster. That process he called "cumbersome", quoting the First Minister. It was incomprehensible to the public he said and therefore, seriously weakened.

No need to translate Conservative David Melding's take on the process of transferring powers: "the areas of conflict have been greater than people anticipated." Or to put it another way, "messy and a dog's breakfast".

I wonder what his colleagues in Manchester have in mind by way of an alternative?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?