Saviour? Leader of Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth. (Photo by Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Images)
There is a type of political upheaval that changes everything on the surface but very little underneath. Yesterday’s Senedd result has the makings of just such an upheaval.
Welsh Labour’s century of dominance has ended, which is the kind of statement that will animate history PhDs, commentators and a certain type of political obsessive for years to come. Pub quizmasters must be thrilled to have a new question: who was the first leader of a government in the UK to lose their seat while in office? (Eluned Morgan). The explanations, though, are not hugely complex. Twenty-seven years running the devolved government without making Wales richer and more prosperous. Stubbornly staying put in Old Labour comfort zones, opposing school and public service reforms purely because they carried Tony Blair’s fingerprints. And, finally, the special strategic genius of abandoning a distinctive Welsh identity in order to demonstrate loyalty to a UK party leadership that Welsh voters were not especially keen on anyway. Parties have made worse miscalculations, though not many spring immediately to mind.
The constitutional implications of this result in Wales are worth pausing on, if only because many in London will prefer not to. Pro-independence administrations in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast at the same moment may put considerable strain on the union, particularly if the next general election produces either a Reform government with no instinct for accommodation or a progressive coalition that requires the SNP to stay upright. The United Kingdom is not about to dissolve overnight. It is, however, quietly becoming harder to take for granted, and the odds of a crisis have just risen.
The more immediate question for Plaid Cymru, forming its first ever Welsh government, is what it will do with this historic moment. Depending on your preferred timeframe, it has taken 100 or 700 years to arrive at a government led solely in Wales, by Wales, for Wales. For a country that has for too long been characterised by diffidence about its status, or even existence, this is a material achievement by Plaid. The elation among supporters who have spent the last decades on a long march to this moment is hard to overstate and would be churlish to deny.
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More relevant to the future of Wales, however, is the shallowness of support for Plaid beyond the appeal of “stopping Reform”. This is not a mass political revolution. The conservatism of Plaid’s programme is also notable. In the party’s prospectus for its “first hundred days”, I counted 59 proposed reviews and consultations. This is not governing; it is the simulation of governing, perhaps the activity you produce when you want to look busy while hoping you can get away with a grievance narrative in which London gets the blame for everything. Plaid’s plans for symbolic legislation (a law to prevent politicians lying, a Welsh Human Rights Act) suggest a party governing for a political theory seminar in Scandinavia rather than a country that is, by most measurable indicators, desperately and tragically falling behind.
This recent Welsh campaign confirmed what Welsh campaigns usually confirm: that our country’s political culture has a remarkable capacity to avoid its own most pressing questions. Why has Wales not done what England did with schools, breaking the local authority monopoly to raise standards? What, exactly, is the theory behind Wales having 22 councils, 12 NHS trusts and bodies, and four police forces for just three and a half million people? Why do we continue to choose stagnation and the stifling of economic ingenuity? These are not edgy questions. They are obvious ones. Their absence from serious debate is the more telling fact.
Welsh Labour, now the third party (let that sink in for a minute), faces a choice that parties often face after a shock: reinvention or therapy. Experience suggests that therapy usually wins. There will be recriminations, a circular firing squad around who was really to blame, and eventually a new leader who promises a fresh start without quite specifying what that means. At Westminster, the temptation for Welsh Labour MPs to make Plaid’s life uncomfortable – to chip away at devolution, bypass the Welsh Government in distributing money, and generally create friction with the Plaid government to remind Wales what it has given up – will be described internally as principle and externally by others as something else entirely.
For now though, Plaid has the ball. The early weeks of their administration will be revealing in ways that early weeks usually are, before the unrelenting pressures of government absorb all available energy. Does the party already have priority legislation drafted, and will they force the Senedd to sit through the night next week to pass it? Plaid quite rightly plans to resurrect the Welsh Development Agency which Labour abolished in 2006, but does it have a highly effective and disruptive operator already lined up to chair the agency? Will the new first minister Rhun ap Iorwerth spend some of his political capital on something that actually costs him something, perhaps challenging his base on Nimbyism or the rationalisation of the NHS, which is the only kind of political act that tends to leave a mark?
The optimistic answer is that surely they do and they will, recognising that Wales needs urgent, courageous and reforming leadership. The cooler assessment is that governments that start with committees, reviews and consultations tend to continue with them. For Wales’ sake, I hope to be positively surprised. But the balance of evidence, and of history, suggests that the wait will go on.
Owain Williams is is a former Welsh Labour Senedd candidate. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan and is a management consultant having previously worked in the Department for Education im Whitehall.
[Further reading: Welsh Labour is dying]
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