Failing Devolution

Ben Wildsmith 

There are two schools of thought on devolution. Some believe it to be a gateway through which independence movements can drag their timid countrymen. In this reading, most usually applied to the SNP in Scotland, the increased prominence bestowed upon minority parties allows them to magnify their agenda.

Certainly, it seemed for a while that this was the case after the 2014 independence referendum was narrowly won by the unionists.

The SNP had managed to reframe politics so that independence was not only a plausible alternative to the status quo, but a seeming inevitability.

How that position unravelled may never fully be known but the downfalls of Nicola Sturgeon and the late Alex Salmond were certainly convenient for the British state, some might say conspicuously so.

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Personal failings

Whether interference occurred or not, time in office is never a friend to insurgent political movements.

As years go by, the personal failings of politicians, alongside the diminishing returns of any electoral mandate will conspire to tarnish the image of a party in power.

Whilst traditional managerial parties like Labour and the Conservatives can just change the top team and refresh, a party wedded to fundamental change like independence risks seeing their cause sullied by the day-to-day grind of governance.

The high principle of it all gets lost in budgetary crises, sexually incontinent politicians, and base politicking.

So, the counterargument to devolution acting as a gateway to independence is that the fundamental compromises required to operate it always serve the status quo. If independence supporting politicians drink from the poisoned chalice of Westminster-funded power they lose the moral authority to object to it.

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Trap

Beyond these abstractions, though, lies the real trap of devolved government, particularly as it applies to Wales. Without even the limited powers to raise revenue that Scotland enjoys, any devolved government here is funded entirely at the whim of the UK government.

It can be made to fail without anybody in Wales putting a foot wrong. It exists thanks to a form of patronage that, arguably, serves to defang Wales of its singular, rebellious politics.

Which brings us, as ever, to the relationship between the blessed Labour Party and our nation.

It can sometimes seem as if the two are indivisible. The general reaction here against what used to be called Thatcherism has created a mighty orthodoxy. Come election time, any objection to the Labour offering, regardless of how meagre it might be, is met with moral outrage by believers who refuse to see that nothing seems to improve here at a pace that anyone can notice.

What if Jones comes back….

Underachievement

The bloated, self-satisfied underachievement of endless Labour governments in Wales has brought us the thick end of fuck all.

To see them cancelling Plaid Cymru’s objections to the outrageous designation of HS2 as an England and Wales project is to witness their unpatriotic uselessness to the people who have sustained them for as long as we can remember.

When did you last hear a loud word from our representatives demanding our due? Why isn’t our Senedd the cutting edge of dissent?

For all our Labour politicians draping themselves in the inheritance of the Miners’ Federation, and making an icon of Nye, as if he were Frida Kahlo printed on a souvenir cushion, they deliver us nothing but middle-class tinkering.

If Labour in Wales doesn’t exist to demand our due from the HS2 disaster, then what is it for? Its pitiful submission to the UK party, far from empowering the Welsh government, has castrated it.

Then again. if Plaid Cymru can’t articulate opposition powerfully enough that people feel it, then what are they for?

Reform UK might be creaking, but their opponents need to make a case quickly or see our devolved institutions become a plaything of the international right.