Devolution has been a disaster

From the vantage point of 2026, where Labour is reportedly on the cusp of losing control of the Welsh Parliament, it is possible to appreciate the extraordinary, breathtaking scope of the failure of New Labour’s devolution project. 

Officially, the Labour manifesto of 1997 promised that: “The Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed.” Instead, separatists now occupy two of the three first ministries and may soon claim the third; in Scotland, those separatists came within a few points of breaking up the United Kingdom in 2014, less than two decades after the Scottish Parliament was set up.

But if the constitutional implications of devolution have played out exactly as its opponents said it would — as Tam Dalyell put it, they were “predictable and predicted, foreseeable and foreseen” — it at least for a time seemed to serve the narrow interests of the Labour Party perfectly well. It held power in both Edinburgh and Cardiff, whilst Tony Blair’s ducking the West Lothian Question allowed its Scottish and Welsh MPs to blithely vote for devolution and still prop up the government on English matters.

(Tellingly, the one measure that prompted these MPs to wax lyrical about the interconnectedness of our country and the importance of national decision-making was David Cameron’s “English Votes for English Laws” — by far the most limited devolution measure of the past two decades, but the only one which threatened their own importance.)

Labour’s complacent assumptions about perpetual rule were, of course, dramatically overturned in Scotland, first when Alex Salmond secured a plurality at Holyrood in 2007 and then, more decisively still, with his supposedly impossible overall majority in 2011. Yet this was to a strange extent treated as a Scottish event; perhaps because so doing meant drawing on devosceptic analysis, few people seem to have appreciated — or at least, have the nerve to say — that Welsh Labour was on exactly the same trajectory.

That it has taken Welsh Labour longer to find itself on the chopping block is not surprising. Welsh nationalism has historically been much weaker than its Scottish counterpart, being rooted in the Welsh-speaking parts of the country (including crucially its elite section, the Crachach). 

Much of English-speaking Wales, meanwhile, was so hostile to the idea that even with Blair putting his thumb on the scales in 1998 (by holding the referendum a week after the Scottish one), the country only barely voted for devolution at all. That hostility, or uninterest, has since benefited Labour electorally; in no Welsh election has turnout topped 50 per cent, and comparing the relative performance of the Tories in devolved versus national elections, the bulk of the difference is right-wing, devo-sceptical voters not turning out. 

But the underlying dynamic of devolution was identical. Local politicians had every incentive to aggrandise themselves at Westminster’s expense (by demanding more powers) whilst shifting the blame for poor outcomes onto the British state. Local MPs, who might under more rational arrangements have provided a counterpoint that defended the national parliament and its role in Welsh life, had no incentive to do so as they could still vote on all Commons legislation, even if it had nothing to do with their constituents. 

As a result, Welsh Labour became, especially under Mark Drakeford, a more-or-less explicitly nationalist (but not separatist) party. This worked for longer than in Scotland because the tiger they were riding was smaller and took longer to fatten up. But they were still riding it, and still feeding it, and thus they were always eventually going to get eaten.

The basic problem is that no unionist party, even one whose unionism is merely mercenary or nominal, is going to be able to out-nationalist the actual nationalists. Even Welsh Labour cannot wholly anathemise a British Government headed by a Labour prime minister. Since 1998, successive Labour governments in Wales have been setting the rules of a game they were always, eventually, going to lose.

As in Britain more widely, this persistent failure of the status quo has paved the way for radical challenge

Compounding that problem are the miserable fruits of their long reign. Welsh Labour took the opportunity afforded by the carving out of their one-party state to opt out of any unpalatable public service reforms. This had predictably dire consequences; the condition of the Welsh NHS allowed Cameron to brand Offa’s Dyke “the line between life and death” at the 2015 election, whilst school performance fell off a cliff. At the same time, generous fiscal transfers under the Barnet Formula sustained a bloated public sector and gave Welsh ministers little incentive to grow their tax base.

As in Britain more widely, this persistent failure of the status quo has paved the way for radical challenge. In theory, this could have taken the form of a critical reassessment of devolution; according to YouGov, up to one Welsh voter in three would be up for scrapping the Senedd altogether. 

But this position is so totally contrary to the interests of the devocrat class that it is actively shut out of the political conversation, a job made easier by the lack of interest of those voters in taking part in Welsh politics at all. An official review of devolution concluded that the only options were the status quo, more devolution, or independence, on the basis that it couldn’t even find devosceptics to talk to (it must not, on polling evidence, have tried very hard). Even the Conservatives, who might have tried to channel this tendency, have instead fought an ugly civil war to exclude anti-devolution candidates.

That the result of this complacent conspiracy between the major parties should be a Senedd dominated by Plaid and Reform UK is, at least, poetic justice. But it is not a recipe for a stronger United Kingdom or a happier, more prosperous Wales.