Welsh Devolution: Just the Latest Character in Reform’s Shadow-Play

James Downs, Mental health campaigner

Reform UK’s party conference in Doncaster produced its first Welsh headline when Laura Anne Jones declared that the party would not rule out scrapping the Senedd. Jones, the former Conservative Member of the Senedd for South Wales East, crossed the floor to Reform earlier this year and wasted no time in dangling abolition as a possibility, if not quite a policy.

A party spokesperson quickly clarified that axing the Senedd won’t appear in the manifesto. But then came the caveat: “we do not want to shut the discussion down.” In other words, Wales’ Parliament is safe, unless it isn’t. Secure, unless it proves inconvenient.

Permanent, until it becomes temporary.

This ambiguity isn’t indecision: it is the method.

The Politics of Grievance

At the heart of Reform’s politics is phantom debate: arguments conjured not to resolve anything, but to keep grievance alive. Reform is a movement built on perpetual complaint, a self-sustaining outrage machine. Problems must remain unsolved, otherwise the oxygen of grievance runs out.

Take immigration. A complex social and economic reality is boiled down to a bogeyman: borders collapsing, communities swamped, civilisation on the brink. Grains of truth are distorted out of all recognition, then plastered across billboards and panel shows.

Now Welsh devolution is at risk of being treated in the same way, with the Senedd being portrayed as a looming symbol of Welsh decline, rather than a flawed but necessary institution. It has been offered up as a grievance-in-waiting.

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Denying Reality

What makes this politics particularly corrosive is not only Reform’s co-dependency on phantom problems, but the deliberate denial of the real, grinding problems that might demand actual reform.

These problems are too complicated, too unglamorous, too much like hard work to think about solving. Take climate change, for example. Where overwhelming evidence demands urgent action, Reform’s response is to delegitimise net zero policies as expensive fantasies. One of the greatest existential challenges of our age is reduced to just another culture-war grievance, folded neatly alongside immigration and devolution.

Shadow-Play

Instead, Reform grasps for power by exploiting phantoms, distortions, and spectres of the national imagination. Plato’s cave is retold in a Doncaster conference hall: the public is invited to stare at flickering images on the wall which portray immigration as invasion, devolution as disaster, and net zero as a con.

In the clear light of day, reality is harder to deny: the rampant inequality that drives poverty and lack of opportunity in Wales, the global crises displacing people abroad, and the planetary emergency accelerating before our eyes. Reform might even - heaven forbid - glimpse the harms of leaving the European Union.

But of course this is the party that never had any answers for how Brexit would actually be implemented, only the slogans that made it saleable. Reform UK is simply the latest incarnation of the same project: grievance without governance, rage without responsibility.

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Refusing Reform’s Terms

We only have to look at the media to see the gravitational pull exerted by Nigel Farage, where debate is framed to his advantage, and the spotlight is fixed where he chooses. When it comes to the substance of Reform’s policy agenda, the danger is not only in the popularisation of divisive rhetoric and imagined enemies. It is that the rest of us become trapped in debating on Reform’s terms, too, subsumed into a politics of grievance.

If we are to resist being recruited into Farage’s shadow-play, then calling out the emptiness of Reform is not enough. That would only mirror their own politics: pointing, blaming, and never building. It would allow Wales to be used as a prop in what Reform sees primarily as their warm-up act for Westminster.

The real task is to drag debate back into the light of day, and to meet the challenges of Wales with meaningful solutions.
Delivery over Discourse

This means grappling with the realities Reform denies: poverty and inequality in Wales, the public services straining under decades of neglect, the climate emergency that will not wait. It also requires defending the Senedd, not just as a constitutional principle, but as a forum that has the potential to provide real answers to real problems.

Reform’s politics of grievance thrives in the current climate of political monotony, economic stagnation, and poverty of ambition in Wales. It is a hollow pantomime that feeds on despair rather than addressing it. The 2026 Senedd election must mark a shift towards a democracy that delivers for Wales - one that demonstrates a clear superiority to both the status quo and Reform’s specious solutions.

James Downs is a mental health campaigner, researcher and expert by experience in eating disorders. He lives in Cardiff and can be contacted at @jamesldowns on X and Instagram, or via his website: jamesdowns.co.uk