What is the UK for?

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The PM returned this week to an issue which he has raised previously, namely the need for the UK to have a written constitution. In principle, he’s right: the current approach is an antiquated patchwork of law, precedent, custom and practice, leaving the UK as an outlier in the world. The motivation for his latest statement appears to be based around the need to entrench and codify the relationship between the Westminster government and the regional mayors to whom he wishes to devolve more power. I’ve long supported the idea of a formal written constitution for the UK, and even more so for the independent Wales that I still hope to see one day. But the reasons for that support are precisely why I don’t think it can or will happen, at least until it’s time to write separate constitutions for England, Wales, and Scotland. There is a whole shop’s worth of cans of worms waiting to be opened once the suggestion gets serious debate.

Firstly, as the SNP have already pointed out, a constitution which defines and codifies the relationship between Westminster and English regional mayors will also need to define and codify the relationship between the constituent nations of the union. There are basically only two options as to how the UK can define itself – it is either a single unitary state, or else it is a voluntary union of nations. The former is likely to inflame Scotland in particular, whilst the latter must, by definition, specify the terms of that voluntary union, including how it can be ended. The opposition of devout unionists to formally documenting the nature of the relationship is based on more than tradition and inertia.

Then there is the question of sovereignty and who owns it. There are monarchies in the world which have written constitutions, of course, so it’s not impossible. But would it really be politically acceptable, in the twenty-first century, to write a formal document declaring that all power stems from god via the monarch, and parliament and the courts merely act as the monarch’s agent? The alternative view – that power belongs to the citizens and is delegated by them to parliament – would be a complete undermining of centuries of precedent and custom, to say nothing of a serious constraint on the royal prerogative on which much of the government’s activity depends.

Bigger than either of those, however, is the question of purpose. Defining what the state is for is no easy matter. The US Declaration of Independence talks about the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s a reasonable starting point, especially the bit about the pursuit of happiness, but it’s a bit wishy-washy: fine words which can be interpreted in different ways. A more comprehensive statement of purpose for a modern constitution might be something along the lines of ‘enabling all citizens to achieve their potential and lead fulfilling lives’. It is, though, the sort of aim which would have neoliberals (such as Andy Burnham) choking on their cornflakes.

I don’t seriously believe that a written constitution will happen under Andy Burnham or any currently conceivable successor. But we can perhaps hope that he will at least spark a discussion during which alternatives to the status quo can be seriously debated.

What sort of Wales?

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In a curiously contradictory article on Nation.Cymru yesterday, Labour MS Mike Hedges started off asserting very strongly that Wales is neither too small nor too poor to be independent before launching into a list of reasons why we can’t afford it. We're too poor and we can't afford it sound remarkably similar propositions to me. Those reasons are all based, naturally, on a set of assumptions that most independentistas would challenge, but his underlying point that those supporting independence should produce some sort of budget showing how independence would work is not entirely without merit. Working out what it actually means, though, is a lot more complex: as is usual from those making such a demand, it seems to start from an assumption that independence would happen tomorrow and people should understand the implications of that before voting.

In truth, of course, independence will not happen tomorrow. There will be no referendum on the question unless and until there is a majority in the Senedd in favour of holding one (and, as Scotland has shown, even that doesn’t guarantee one). None of the polls for next May’s Senedd election suggest such an outcome, and even if they did, the largest party in favour has, rather strangely, already ruled out holding one for at least four years. So, the earliest that a Welsh government will even start a process of trying to hold a referendum is 2030, and the earliest date for a referendum is perhaps a year or two after securing agreement – optimistically around 2032. Assuming a positive vote, there would then need to be a period during which negotiations on the details take place – not just with the government of the soon to be ex-UK, but also with international organisations. There would also need to be a period during which the organisations, institutions and processes of an independent Welsh government were created – tax collectors, for instance. Some will see this as unduly pessimistic on my part, but I can see that interim period lasting for perhaps 5 years, meaning that independence would be in or around 2037. But a vote for independence is a vote for a different future, and the reality is that change will take some time even after that. So, while Hedges has a point in saying that people voting (in say 2032) should know what they are voting for, what they need is not an independence budget for 2026, it’s a budget for an independent Wales in around 2042. And for the sake of a decent comparison of alternatives, they need to be able to compare that directly with a budget for continued participation in the UK in 2042.

The problems in providing that comparison are large and obvious; both sets of figures would be based on a huge range of assumptions, all of which would be challenged by the ‘other’ side. It is, of course, possible for any independentista to produce something of an indicative budget for a future independent Wales without specifying to which year it would apply. It would take an amount of work and would be subject to the same caveats around the assumptions made. It would not, though, be a budget for ‘independence’; it would be a budget for the sort of independence favoured by those drawing up the budget. As one obvious example, some independentistas favour continuing to use sterling; others favour a new Welsh currency. The difference between the two in terms of the implications for decisions by the Welsh government is enormous.

The point is that what makes the difference isn’t independence as such. Independence isn’t the magic bullet that some supporters would like it to be, nor is it the millstone which opponents claim it would be; it’s merely an enabler which can be used in a variety of ways. When looking at the finances of a future Wales, what matters is what sort of Wales we want to see. Instead of making impossible demands for clarity and precision from those who support independence, opponents should be setting out how the union will solve, rather than perpetuate, Wales poor economic performance. Given their abject failure to date, it’s easy to understand why they don’t do that.

Keeping 'them' at arms length is deliberate policy

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It turns out that Starmer’s much-vaunted ‘reset’ with the EU amounts to little more than changing the colour of the icing on the imaginary cake. Just like his predecessors, he believes that the UK is so important to everyone that it can have the advantages of membership of the EU without having to abide by the same rules, or make any concessions in return. Little Englander cakeism is alive and well in the English Labour Party; it’s just a little more polite and diplomatic in its language.

One of the issues surrounds the idea of some sort of youth mobility scheme, under which young people from the UK and young people from the EU would be given the right, for a limited period of time, to travel to each other’s countries and experience a little of life there. Getting to know and understand each other better is one of the aims of the whole European project, which began in the aftermath of a war in which a lack of common understanding led to millions of deaths. Youth mobility is one of those things which, taken in isolation, many would consider entirely unobjectionable. Not so the Home Secretary, who sees it as allowing ‘migration’ and is strongly opposing it in cabinet, even if the consequence is a lack of movement on the PM’s stated objective of smoothing trade between the EU and the UK. Given that it’s a mutual scheme – traffic is supposed to be two ways – what is the objection to such a reasonable proposal?

The Home Secretary clearly believes that there would be a large difference between the numbers coming here from the EU and the numbers travelling from the UK to the EU, which would show in the statistics as an increase in net migration. There are two reasons why she might be right.

The first is language. Whilst proficiency in two or more languages is common in most of Europe, with English being the second language of choice in most cases, modern foreign language teaching has largely been gutted in the UK. Other Europeans find it easier to adapt to the UK than young people from the UK do in the rest of Europe. That makes the UK a destination of choice for young Europeans (and, of course, part of the reason that the EU is pushing the idea so hard).

The second is to do with class and affluence. In the UK, the desire to allow young people to broaden their experiences and learn about other peoples and cultures is largely a middle-class obsession. Look at who supports it – the liberal and middle class elites. It just doesn’t have the same resonance and attraction for young working class people in the so-called ‘red wall’ or post-industrial areas. It’s not something that they see as relevant to them. The political opposition comes overwhelmingly from the Little Englanders who very much want those young people not to mingle with foreigners in case they do find a commonality of interest and understanding. And it’s that political opposition which is the real obstacle.

The fact that the Home Secretary might be right about the imbalance in numbers is not, however, a reason for simply dismissing the idea completely. The language problem could be overcome, in time, by investing more in the teaching of European languages, and the problem of relevance only to middle-class children could be overcome by a system of grants, scholarships, and encouragement for those not following a more academic path in life. But both of those things require political will and a consistent policy over many years; and that is the problem. If your political strategy depends on stoking hatred and fear of difference, to say nothing of an inherent belief in your own group’s natural superiority, the last thing you want is to encourage any mingling with ‘them’.

Sadly, such Little Englandism isn’t confined to the ranks of Reform and the Tories; it seems to have found a very comfortable home in the Labour Party as well. Worse, within the UK it isn’t even wholly confined to England either. In Wales, however, we do have a route to escape it if we choose. It wouldn’t take long for an independent Wales to understand that our longer term interests have more in common with those of a number of other small nations and regions on the mainland than with our large neighbour, stuck as it is in a distorted dream of past glory.

Revisiting the predictions

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A little over two years ago, I noted some comments on the Commission set up by the Welsh Government to consider the constitutional future of Wales, predicting the likely outcome. In the light of the report which the Commission has now produced, it’s worth reflecting how accurate or fair those predictions were. Some have stood the test of time rather better than others, and, on the whole, the report is rather better than I expected. Of the six points I noted at the time, points c, d, and e have been broadly reflected in the report. It’s (pleasantly) surprising to see such a clear rejection of the federal option, contrary to my expectation in point f. Federalism has always been a very silly idea, depending as it does on a completely absent desire for change within England, but it’s a dead horse that has been so well and truly flogged by some in the Labour Party that I assumed that a commission set up by Labour would give it more credibility than it ever deserved. Whilst the data presented certainly does reflect my prediction a, it’s impossible to argue with the data, and it isn’t used as an obstacle to independence in principle. Indeed, in declaring that independence is a viable option (depending on one’s values and priorities) the commission went much further than I expected it to. It is, though, point b of my original predictions (“Wales is, in any event, not strong enough economically to be an independent country”) on which I will concentrate.

It's definitely not what they said, although it’s strongly implied in the idea that there are more risks associated with independence than with other options. But the extent to which that is true is highly debateable. If Wales were to vote for independence tomorrow and become independent on Wednesday, then it is absolutely correct to argue that the risks would be very much higher than the risk of remaining in the status quo – and that would probably be true for some years to come. That isn’t, though, a realistic scenario. There will be no referendum on independence at least until there is a majority in the Senedd in favour of holding such a referendum – and that, sadly, is not looking at all likely for a minimum of two Senedd elections, taking us to an earliest date of 2031. There would probably be another year at least before holding a vote, giving us eight years for parties favouring independence to spell out more clearly the implications as they see them before we get to vote. Given the need to negotiate the details and set up a whole range of institutions and processes in Wales, the full transfer of powers wouldn’t happen for some time after the vote; to achieve a smooth transfer my own expectation would be a period of three to five years, making independence day sometime between 2035 and 2037 at the earliest. None of that does away with the risks of independence – of course there are risks – but it does mean that we need to compare those risks not with the status quo as it is today, but with wherever the status quo leaves us 11 or more years from today.

There is a natural human tendency to believe that the status quo will carry on for ever. It’s an implicit assumption that we all make on a daily basis in deciding what we’re going to do and when, even for planning some years ahead. But Newton’s First Law of Motion tells us that things will only stay the same for as long as no force acts on events, and that is a wholly unrealistic assumption. It’s not just pandemics and wars that change things; even on a more mundane level, who would seriously have predicted that government in the UK would degenerate into utter chaos and incompetence as quickly as it has since 2015, a mere eight years ago? Economic forecasts, like weather forecasts, are rarely correct very far in advance. My basic point is that the undoubted uncertainties and risks associated with independence may not be so quantitatively different from those associated with sticking to the status quo, even if they’re apparently easier to identify. I don’t doubt that opponents of independence will use the commission’s words about risks and uncertainties to justify their stance, but independentistas should not be afraid of highlighting the uncertainties and risks associated with not seeking independence. As the commission points out, ultimately it boils down to a question of values and priorities. And that’s a battlefield on which independentistas should feel very confident in fighting.

Could we really do any worse?

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Leaving aside the colourful language with which the English Education Secretary expressed herself in an unguarded moment yesterday, what came through was a belief that parents should be extremely grateful to the current government for acting after previous governments had done nothing about the issue. If you assume, as the English constitution does, that a new Prime Minister equals a new government, and that a new government cannot be held responsible for the actions of its predecessors, then she almost has half a point. In the real universe, the one most of us inhabit, it’s rather more clear that the problem has been building up for years, and that successive Tory governments have cut back school building and refurbishment. At the moment it’s perceived as being primarily an English problem, but that is at least partly down to the fact that the English government has been slow and reluctant to share information about its findings. And when it comes to putting things right, we will come up against the fact that English spending on rectification works directly impacts the amount available in Wales, through the application of the Barnett formula. It’s hard to believe that similar construction methods weren’t used as widely in Wales as in England, and that there aren’t more problems waiting to be exposed.

That rectification will be costly, on which note Sunak wants us to be grateful, apparently, that he only cut the rate of building new or replacement schools down to 50 a year when he was Chancellor, a level in line with what had happened under the previous (also Tory) administration, and despite the fact that he was being told that the government needed to plan to replace at least 400 a year. Even that higher figure is inadequate to meet the need. England, we are told, has 22,000 schools: assuming that the planned lifetime of each school is 40 years, then 550 need to be replaced every year just to stand still. A replacement rate of 50 every year implies a planned average building lifetime of 440 years. In Wales, there are around 1470 schools; if the replacement rate were to match that in England (<0.25% per annum), there would be a similar requirement for buildings to last hundreds of years.

Whilst this might appear an entirely normal expectation to Wykehamists like Sunak (where some buildings date back to 14^th Century) or Old Etonians (some date back to 1440), it really isn’t applicable to the schools most children attend. There certainly are many buildings more than a century old (indeed, my old primary school was built in 1908 and is still in use) and, arguably, there is no great rush to replace them all on grounds of imminent collapse (although I still remember the incident in the late 1950s when the ceiling in one of our classrooms fell down – we had some time off while they assessed the rest). They were built to last. But whether schools designed and built in an era when children sat at individual desks in neat rows in strictly delineated classes are still entirely suitable for delivering the modern curriculum is a more complex question, to say nothing of the number of them which have some classes in demountable buildings installed as a ‘temporary’ measure decades ago. The problems which have emerged over the past week are largely in the (comparatively) newest schools, built from the 1960s on, which were deliberately built not to last that long in order to save on building costs at the time (and, although the problem identified is with the concrete, it would be a mistake to blithely assume that that was the only lifetime-limiting factor with the materials and methods used). The extent to which building cheaply to last just a few decades makes sense depends largely on whether there is a long term plan in place for eventual replacement. And there isn’t, and never has been. That isn’t just a Tory problem; governments of all colours have just assumed that the quoted lifespan was some sort of guaranteed minimum, rather than an accurate assessment, and made no plans for a rolling programme of rebuilding. It makes the economic projections for government expenditure look ‘better’ (i.e. lower), although it does somewhat divorce them from reality when this sort of need arises.

It’s not entirely unfair of the Welsh government to say that their ability to deal with the problem is constrained by London, although that’s not something which the perpetually and professionally angry leader of the Welsh Tories is ever likely to admit. They have, perhaps, been too ready to do nothing until England suddenly announced the problem, but there is little that they can do about the funding issue until England acts. And Hunt’s statement that they will do whatever it takes as long as it doesn’t cost any more tells us already that English action will be inadequate. Both questions (waiting for England to lead on identifying the problem, and depending on English decisions for funding) underline the issue at the heart of ‘devolution’; real power remains elsewhere. There is, of course, no guarantee than an independent Welsh government would have done any better (although it couldn’t have done much worse). But we in Wales wouldn’t be able to blame anyone else, and would have to take responsibility both for the problem and fixing it. That would surely be an improvement on where we are now.

Thinking through the messaging

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According to the UK government, the main objective of the policy of sending migrants to Rwanda is to act as a deterrent. In this scenario, sending a couple of hundred people a year to central Africa will have the effect of deterring 40,000 other people each year from attempting the trip across the Channel from France. An unkind soul might point out that this effect depends firstly on desperate people being deterred by the prospect of being sent somewhere they consider undesirable, and secondly on them being unable to calculate that the mathematical probability of them actually being sent to Rwanda is, shall we say, on the low side, even if the policy is eventually ruled to be legal.

Faced with the possibility that it will be found to be illegal anyway, to say nothing of the probability of losing three by-elections this coming Thursday, the geniuses of the New Conservative group have resurrected a discarded old Priti Patel idea of sending migrants instead to remote Scottish islands. Their aim is to win or retain the votes of those who have been persuaded that migrants are responsible for all their woes, and should therefore be treated as inhumanely as possible, but is also, presumably, intended to have a deterrent effect: people will be so frightened of being sent to these so far unnamed remote islands that they will decide not even to attempt to enter the UK. I can’t help but wonder, however, whether these geniuses have thought through all the implications of their message. Taking such a decision without asking Scotland doesn’t seem to be treating Scotland as a valued partner in ‘this great union of ours’, and taking it as read that the prospect of living in parts of Scotland will put people off the idea of becoming UK citizens doesn’t exactly sound like extolling the virtues of Scotland remaining part of the UK. Whilst it’s obviously true that the policy is aimed at English voters rather than Scottish ones, admitting as much would merely compound the problem.

Who do we trust?

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A few days ago, the Western Mail published an article by Mike Hedges, the Labour MS for Swansea East, setting out why he thinks independence for Wales is a bad idea. It was based, as the unionist case almost invariably seems to be, on the idea that Wales ‘can’t afford’ to be independent, and backed up with some examples of problems experienced by other countries which attained independence to demonstrate his point. His selection of examples, and of particular statistics from those examples, was, of course, highly selective. Nothing wrong with that per se; it didn’t purport to be an objective academic analysis, and lots of politicians on all sides of all debates choose their examples and statistics in such a way as to back their case, whilst ignoring or dismissing those which don’t. Independentistas do the same.

There are other ways of looking at the same thing, however. For all the difficulties he identifies for the examples he has so carefully chosen, how many of those countries said, after achieving independence, that they’d rather like to give up their independence and go back to how things were before? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Or take another approach. In advance of achieving Welsh independence, the unionists regularly explain how their analysis of the economy ‘proves’ the impracticability of Welsh independence. But, to ask another rhetorical question, in how many cases of a country seeking independence has the state from which it seeks that independence NOT told them that economic analysis shows it to be impossible? The point is that any economic analysis which starts from the point of view of ‘what is’ will always show why the status quo is best – they’re hardly going to say it isn’t, are they?

We could try a little thought experiment here. Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Glyndwr’s rebellion had been a success, that English aggression had been subdued, and that a rather larger Wales and the two parts of England under the Tripartite Indenture had lived alongside each other in peace and harmony for the last six centuries. How would things be different, purely considering economics? It strikes me as being unlikely that Wales would have allowed its natural resources to be plundered and the benefit and wealth extracted from the country to anything like the extent which happened in practice. I somehow doubt that Welsh society would be dramatically more egalitarian than English society (I’m not convinced that we’re actually as naturally socialist as I and many others would rather like to believe), so from the time of the Industrial Revolution, we would probably have had Welsh capitalists instead of English ones. The wealth would have flowed to the Welsh capital (Machynlleth initially, or maybe Merthyr after the establishment of the coal and steel industries) instead of the English capital. It would, though, largely have remained in Wales, and Wales’ GDP per head would be higher than it is as a result – probably roughly equivalent to that in England, even if not shared any more fairly.

Those outcomes would not have been inevitable, however. History doesn’t work that way. Let us suppose that the Welsh in general really are as innately stupid and incompetent as so many unionists would have us believe, and really could not have managed our resources and wealth any better. It’s a scenario in which the relative wealth and prosperity of England and Wales end up roughly as they are today, six centuries of independence having made no difference at all. Does anybody really believe that there would then be a great clamour from Wales demanding union with England as the ‘solution’ to the problem of our own mass stupidity? To put the question another way: if the union had not previously been brought about by military conquest, would we really invent it voluntarily?

I deliberately simplify, of course, by reducing it to such a simple question. Other outcomes – some sort of ‘Common Market’, or even ‘Single Market’ between the countries of these islands – look likelier, but any such arrangement would have been based on equals choosing to co-operate rather than on one imposing its will on the others. The broader point is that, in considering the question of independence, we all – unionists and independentistas alike – do so from the perspective of our own political standpoint. And that standpoint is coloured by and filtered by our own analysis of actual rather than theoretical history. We’re not capable of producing an economic analysis of independence without basing the numbers on a set of assumptions – and those assumptions are not shared. So any economic arguments produced by Mike Hedges can and will support and validate his own standpoint (and that of those who think like him) on the question, just as arguments produced by independentistas will support and validate our alternative standpoint. Neither group will ever convince the other on that basis, no matter how hard they try or how rigorous their analysis. And the truth is that neither group will get it right anyway: an independent Wales following its own path would fairly quickly demonstrate, whether for external reasons or simply from following an unpredicted path in terms of policies, that neither set of assumptions was entirely correct.

We should start from an acceptance that there are three possible economic outcomes to independence: it makes us better off, it makes us worse off, or it makes no difference, and there can be no certainties, only previous examples to guide us. The difference between those outcomes owes more to the policies implemented by the independent government than it does to the fact of independence in itself. The question then comes down to a very simple one – who do we trust most to resolve the issues facing us, ourselves or someone else? It’s a question which mere economics can never answer. As I recall, the late Iain McLeod once said, as the British Empire was busily disintegrating, that people generally prefer self-government to good government (‘good’ obviously being a synonym for ‘colonial’ in this context, patronising soul that he was). But even a Tory can get something half right occasionally.

There is an alternative

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Sunakland is a strange, other-worldly sort of place, which adheres to a system of logic which is unique and impenetrable to outsiders. It is a world where an overwhelming rejection of the governing party in a series of elections is heard by the PM as a huge vote of confidence and a demand that he continue with a relentless pursuit of the same policies. Some of his acolytes think the result shows that people are giving Rishi Sunak a chance. I’d love to see what the results looked like if they weren’t. Not all of his followers agree with him, however. Some manage to see the voters’ reaction to the last three years of chaos as being a demand to return the chaos-creator in chief to the top job, apparently in the belief that the chaos was caused by, rather than the cause of, removing Johnson from office. Yet others see people turning away from the party of low taxes and poor services and turning instead to parties who want to provide better services by (according to incessant propaganda from the Tories) increasing taxes as a sign that voters are demanding more tax cuts and austerity.

In other news from that strange place, it seems that the governing party (it seems reasonable to assume that a deputy party chair appointed by the PM is promoting party policy) believes that a quarter of the entire UK population should be encouraged to emigrate. I suppose that might help to solve the housing shortage without upsetting Tory MPs by building houses in their constituencies, although I’m not sure that he’s thought through the implications for the NHS nor the widespread labour shortages which would result from such a dramatic population cut, let alone the impact on the government’s oft-stated ambition to be a world leader in research and innovation. It would also help to achieve his goal if they weren’t still congratulating themselves on removing the freedom of movement of those they now want to freely move. Still, I understand that the border control authorities have acquired a tidy stock of small boats – they could march all republicans down to Dover and launch them towards France. That’ll teach the French a lesson as well. Like the message on the wall in Animal Farm, the slogan will slowly morph from ‘Stop the boats’ to ‘Launch the boats’.

Fortunately, for Wales and Scotland at least, there is a way to leave Sunakland without going anywhere. It really is time to take it.

Teaching the Scots a lesson, Sunak-style

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For reasons best known to themselves, it is a regular theme of unionist politicians that the SNP, the party founded with the objective of obtaining independence for Scotland, should stop campaigning for independence for Scotland and give all its attention to other issues, such as making the union with England work. It’s a bit like telling the RSPB to stop banging on about birds, or the RNIB to stop promoting the interests of blind people, and to concentrate instead on what the government people are really interested in, such as being nasty to immigrants. Telling people committed to a particular idea that they should simply forget their original objective seems to be a particularly pointless and futile approach, although forgetting the original objective might appear normal to Sunak who has burned almost all the campaign pledges he made in his failed attempt to lead his party. Anyway, he’s taking his turn to play the game today in his speech to Scottish Conservatives. I’m sure that it will play well at the conference itself, and have just as much impact as it does when other unionists say the same thing. They take a similar line with Wales on the rare occasions when they can be bothered to think about us at all.

It is, for them, an article of faith that the SNP are unable to discuss any issue other than independence*, and that the campaign for independence is based entirely on a series of manufactured grievances. That faith is, in turn, based on the unshakeable exceptionalist belief that England is always best at everything, and if the facts and data don’t always support that contention they will invent other facts and data which do. They are genuinely unable to understand why anyone in Scotland (or Wales) could ever believe that they could do better than the most truly wonderful government in the whole of human history – hence it can only be based on hatred of all things English. He’ll get his round of applause and a headline or two, cross Scotland off his ‘to-do’ list for this week, and go back to pretending that he can stop small boats crossing from France by passing a law or two. That’ll teach those pesky Scots.

*There are obvious dangers in commenting on live investigations into potentially criminal matters, but, as an aside, I can’t help noticing that the people who are so keen to criticise the SNP for turning every issue into an argument for independence seem also to be keen to pile on their outrage at the idea that the SNP may have spent money raised to campaign for independence on something else. Perhaps that’s a different SNP.

Choosing our enemies

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From the outset, there have always been different ideas about what devolution was about. According to David Frost, in his demand earlier this week that devolution should be rolled back, it was supposed to be about simply running “an effective local administration”, and that was more or less the basis on which it was sold to many, including the most recalcitrant elements of the Labour Party. The implication was that the devolved parliaments would be largely restricted to implementing central government policy, rather than making policy themselves; and where they did make policy, they would be doing so within a UK framework. Over time, most of the Labour Party seems to have come round to the idea that it is about more than that, with one Labour MS complaining last week that the lack of powers granted to the Senedd “… relegates the Welsh Government to little more than ‘managing’ public services on behalf of the Westminster Tory Government”, Well, yes – but as Frost shows, whether that’s a virtue or a vice depends entirely on perspective.

(As an aside, it was interesting to note that part of Frost’s justification for his proposal is that many of the Scottish Parliament’s powers were theoretical prior to Brexit. In his words, “…devolution was designed in a different world – a world in which many powers theoretically devolved to Scotland were actually held at EU level and could not be exercised in practice”. So, membership of the EU was a good thing if it prevented the Scottish government from exercising its powers, but a bad thing if it stopped the English government from doing so. But, as he sees things, Brexit now means that the powers held by Scotland are real – a situation which, for him, needs to be reversed urgently.)

However devolution was presented at the time, the real underlying reason was more to do with Labour’s fear of losing Scottish seats at Westminster than recognising any demands for a degree of self-government; the commitment of Labour’s leadership to the idea of absolute sovereignty residing in Westminster and the Crown is as unshakeable as that of the Tories. They thought that setting up a parliament in Edinburgh, with an electoral system almost guaranteed to prevent any party getting an overall majority, would cement Labour’s position there. For Labour, Wales was always something of a ‘tag-along’ since the same political threat to Labour’s position didn’t apply.

Many – including, obviously, Frost and a goodly proportion of the English Conservative Party as well as more than a few Labour MPs – would argue that the dominance of the SNP in Scotland since 2007 proves that the argument was wrong, and that devolution strengthened the demand for independence rather than weakened it. Maybe, maybe not; we only get to live history once, despite Marx’s comments about tragedy and farce. When the time comes for a particular idea or proposition, that idea or proposition will generally find a way of expressing itself whatever the political circumstances and structures in existence at the time. The belief that that expression can be prevented by covering the ears and saying ‘no’ loudly and repeatedly is a strange one, and not one to which history gives a great deal of credence. That clearly doesn’t stop the Frosts of this world having an absolute blind faith in its efficacy. If independentistas could choose the opponents most likely to help us win by default, Frost has probably elevated himself to somewhere near the top of the list. Adding to the divisions in his own party in the process is just a bonus.

Red, white, and blue tinted spectacles

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The last couple of months haven’t exactly been a good time for the SNP. Between the resignation of a popular First Minister and an election to succeed her in which the party comrades proceeded to take great comradely lumps out of each other, ‘torrid’ would be a better description. The resignation and subsequent arrest of the party’s Chief Executive (and husband of Nicola Sturgeon) seems to be, for the unionist side in the constitutional debate, a bit like the icing on the cake. None of us knows, as yet, exactly what led to the arrest, and we may have to wait some time to find out. But the image which appeared in some newspapers of the police turning up with spades to excavate the garden added to the strangeness of it all. I suppose that Peter Murrell has a touch of the looks of a potential Bond villain for those who want to see such things, but the idea that the man universally credited with professionalising the SNP and turning it into a formidable election machine is running an evil empire based on a chest of treasure buried under a suburban lawn doesn’t immediately strike me as particularly credible. It’s possible that the police have simply adopted an over-literal interpretation of the phrase common among politicians that ‘he knows where the bodies are buried’; stranger things have happened. An alternative explanation is that they received a tip-off from the improbably-named source, Lirpa McLoof, last Saturday and the receiving officer instigated the search warrant process, and issued the spades, without looking at the office calendar.

Time will tell. In the meantime, the unionists are making hay in what may turn out to be a brief period of political sunshine for them in Scotland. Based on the extremely dubious assumptions that the independence debate was all about the personality of the outgoing First Minister, a set of made-up grievances, and a hatred of all things English, they seem to expect the tide to turn, and support for both independence and the SNP (which are not entirely the same thing) to turn and leave them triumphant. At least, that’s what they claim. If they really believed it to be true, I can’t think of a better time for the Prime Minister of England to turn around and say ‘OK, then. You can have your second referendum in the autumn’. They also know that demographics is against them: in simple terms, new voters coming on to the register as they reach voting age are massively more pro-independence than those leaving the voting register at the other end of the age scale. A newish English PM would find it easier to reverse the position of his four predecessors; he has, after all, changed just about every other policy they proposed. If the disarray amongst independentistas were as great as they wish to believe, this is truly their golden opportunity, given that a second defeat probably would kill the issue for a generation whereas delay allows the demographics to grind their way forward with that inevitability which is characteristic of the human life span.

They won’t do it, of course. They know that it would be a bigger gamble than they want the rest of us to believe. And neither are they capable of addressing the underlying reasons for the growth – with all its peaks and troughs – in support for independence, not least because they are incapable of seeing beyond their own interpretation that it’s all about the Scots’ imaginary grievances. After all, what can Scots really have to complain about when they’re part of ‘the greatest and most successful union of countries ever known in the whole course of human history’ (© some unionist or other)? It’s possible – likely, even – that the cause of independence may be suffering a bit of a setback in the short term, and perhaps even through to the next general election. But the unionists’ belief that they have seen off the threat with the departure of Nicola Sturgeon looks like the sort of optimism which only those who don’t understand the problem could possibly feel.

What are parties for?

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It’s rather more than half a century since I read Bob McKenzie’s tome on British Political Parties, so my memory of the detail is more than a little hazy. My main takeaway from the book was that the Conservative and Labour parties, despite starting from very different places, had ended up, organizationally at least, in a very similar place. The Conservative Party started in parliament as a grouping of members elected as individuals, and only later set up any organisation outside parliament in the form of local associations to support those individuals. Indeed, as I recall, despite the party having been founded almost two centuries ago, for most of that time, only MPs could join the ‘party’; mere plebs could only join their local association. Labour, on the other hand, was founded outside parliament, as a democratic movement, with the aim of achieving the policy objectives defined by its members. Both have ended up, with the brief aberration of the Corbyn years, as parties largely run by their elected MPs; both leaderships see their memberships as being there to serve them, rather than the other way around.

That which has happened in organisational terms has been reflected in policy terms as well. ‘Policy’ has become that which they say to win votes (and is most definitely not to be confused with what they will do if actually elected). It’s an exaggeration (to which I’ve sometimes been prone myself) to argue that there is ‘no’ difference between them, but the difference between vicious uncaring austerity on the one hand and austerity with a caring face and a few minor mitigations on the other is hardly a difference of ideological outlook. The point is that, on all the main points of neoliberal economics, the two parties are singing from the same hymn sheet, even if one is the tenor and the other the bass. For both of them, the only conceivable answer to the question ‘what are political parties for?’ has become ‘ensuring the election of this gang rather than that gang’ instead of presenting voters with any sort of real choice of futures.

It leads to articles like this one from the Guardian, where the author argues that the Labour Party leadership has a duty to restrict the influence of mere members on its policies and leaders. Far better to let MPs be the judge, apparently. There are similar murmurings within the Conservative Party about the dangers of allowing ordinary members any sort of role in selecting their leader. (Although, after the Truss debacle, it’s easy to see why people might think that.) It’s the sort of view of what political parties are about which leads to this sort of nonsense, advocating that the SNP should drop their demand for independence and choose some other mission in the light of their failure to win over a clear majority. It reminds me of Phil Williams’s old story about the man who came up to him and said, “If only you’d drop this nonsense about independence, Plaid Cymru would sweep the Valleys”. Well, yes. Or, perhaps, maybe. It's not something that’s ever been tried, although there have been periods where it seemed that some Plaid figures were at least flirting with the idea. There was another article by Martin Shipton in the Western Mail a week or so ago (unable to find it online) about Plaid’s launch of its new strategy. It contained a number of valid points and criticisms, but one of his points was that Plaid’s new platform looked remarkably similar to the previous one. Both that and the Telegraph miss the point: if a party believes that its proposals are the right ones for the country in which it operates, failure to persuade the populace at large doesn’t make them the wrong ones. Unless, of course, you start from the prevailing Labour-Tory belief that parties are just about getting elected, not about what they do afterwards.

Some argue that we are in a period of post-ideological politics, where minor differences of approach are all that there are. That is testimony to the success of capitalist ideology in convincing enough people that it isn’t an ideology at all. (Spoiler: it is.) And in the case of the UK, an electoral system which polarises people into two main parties, both of which believe that they are fighting for voters exclusively in the so-called ‘centre’, reinforces the expectation that the future will always be much like the past. Breaking through that is never going to be easy, but it’s an absolute certainty that accepting the basic premise is not the way of doing it.

Valuing outcomes over process

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One of the things I learned about running projects during my working life is that process is as important as outcome. And at the risk of being accused of a gross act of gender stereotyping, it also appeared to me that it was often (but not exclusively) men who fixated on outcomes, whilst women were often at least as interested in the process by which those outcomes were achieved. Success – at least in terms of carrying people with you – necessarily involves paying attention to both aspects. One of my great hopes for the Senedd (or Assembly as was) was always that achieving a gender balance might lead to a kinder form of politics in which the process of arriving at outcomes was given rather more importance than ever seemed to be the case in Westminster – that is to say that it would harness the best of both approaches. I haven’t been entirely disappointed, but then neither have things worked out quite as I would have hoped (especially, it has to be said, from the Conservative ranks).

At first sight, Rishi Sunak’s decision to use the Section 35 process to block the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Act might well look like a clever move. After all, there are elements of the Act which leave some SNP MSPs – to say nothing of party members or voters – very unhappy, and if you’re going to choose a battlefield, one where the enemy is divided is better than one where he is united. It is, though, a classic example of confusing outcomes with process. And probably deliberately so. The problem doesn’t start and end with Sunak and the Tories either. Labour’s parliamentary opposition to devolving the right to Wales to review gender recognition rules here (despite the views of Labour MSPs), and what looks like implicit support for Sunak on this issue, seems to be based on similar considerations. It’s not at all clear whether, or to what extent, the problems over this particular legislation played a part in the announcement this week of the Scottish First Minister’s resignation, nor whether her successor will do what she said she was going to do and challenge the UK government’s decision in the courts. Given the divisions within the SNP on the substantive issue, it’s a tough call; but leaving the decision unchallenged serves only to emphasise the reality of devolution: real power remains in London.

A few days ago, Simon Jenkins wrote a column for the Guardian in which he argued that there has always been another route to independence, via the infamous ‘devo-max’ referred to by Gordon Brown and others at the time of the last independence referendum. I suspect that he’s entirely right in his suggestion that had that third option been on the ballot paper in 2014, it would have secured an easy majority over both independence and the status quo. That’s partly, at least, because ‘devo-max’ is – and always has been – an ill-defined proposition which means different things to different people. The likelihood that legislation passed by either the Tories or Labour in London would have matched the expectations raised by the term must surely be close to zero, meaning that it would have resolved nothing. We have, after all, seen what they did with the famous ‘Vow’, which was effectively gutted by the parties who signed up to it. But, even supposing that ‘devo-max’ legislation had been written and passed, both Labour and the Tories would certainly have inserted the equivalent of Section 35 somewhere; at the end of the day, whatever the extent of devolution, however the legislation is framed, power devolved will always mean power retained.

There is one, and only one, way of bringing about anything remotely resembling a federal UK, and that is to start from a position where each of the member countries is assumed to be independent and they then come together as equals to agree which powers (if any) are better pooled and shared. Voluntary pooling of sovereignty on the one hand, and the centre ‘allowing’ specified powers to be exercised for the time being by devolved legislatures on the other, are two completely different animals. It’s not a distinction which the main UK parties are capable of making; for them, achieving their desired outcome (maintenance of a unified state) will always trump considerations of process and buy-in.

Tweedleleft and Tweedleright

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Leaving aside for a moment the not-inconsequential question of how meaningful terms like left wing or right-leaning are, a self-styled ‘right-leaning’ think tank produced a report last week claiming that Labour could secure a huge majority if only they shifted their social policies to the right. It’s a cunning plan – become indistinguishable from the Tories on policy in a range of areas, and Tory voters might vote for you. It’s hardly a new idea, though. It was, after all, Thatcher’s boast that her greatest achievement was New Labour, meaning that she had shifted the Overton window of political debate in the UK to the right in such a way that, to stay within that window, Labour also needed to move right. And if we assume that the prime function of any political party is to gain power, then pitching its appeal to the beliefs and prejudices of the electorate is one way of doing exactly that.

What it is not, however, is a programme for change or any sort of demonstration of leadership. Nor is it about setting out the possibility of an alternative future. It does seem, though, to be exactly what Keir Starmer is doing, with or without being nudged that way by Tory think tanks. And not only on ‘social’ policies. The think tank suggests that a more left wing approach to economics is acceptable to voters as long as social and cultural policies are right wing; but Starmer and his shadow Chancellor are wedded to right wing economic policy as well. They are hopelessly committed to the idea of avoiding new debt and repaying old debt, a policy which is not only unnecessary, but which also commits them, one way or another, to some variation on austerity.

Specifically, the report suggests that Labour needs to appeal more to ‘authoritarian’ voters. A choice between an authoritarian Tory government and an authoritarian Labour government, pursuing broadly similar economic policies, is not the most appealing prospect. It’s another argument, for those of us who believe that there is an alternative, for Wales to go its own way.

Misusing the arguments

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There is something fundamentally dishonest about the Tories demanding that the Welsh Government divert its resources in order to mitigate the problems caused by the Tory Government in London, but then ‘honesty’ is not a consideration which has often troubled them greatly. This week, it was a demand that the Welsh Government help out third sector organisations to provide additional help for their staff to deal with the cost of living crisis over which the UK government has presided. (In another example, last week, we had the Tory leader in the Senedd criticising Mark Drakeford for not ignoring UK government policy and simply paying NHS staff more: we can be reasonably certain that, had Drakeford done that from the outset, RT would have complained about him giving in to union bosses rather than standing firm.)

In response to the latest demand, Drakeford said that “…the Welsh Government cannot be the answer to every dilemma that every part of Welsh society faces.” He’s right, of course; but it isn’t the whole truth. In simplistic terms, “the … Government cannot be the answer to every dilemma that every part of … society faces” could be said to be true of almost any government at almost any time, but the missing part of that is that what’s also true is that the capacity of different governments at different times varies. And in the case of Wales, the fact that the Welsh government is able to do less than the UK government could do on the same problem (if it were to so choose) is a direct result of the fact that one government has fiscal independence whilst the other does not. The Tories’ demand that the Welsh Government do things which it does not have, and cannot obtain, the resources to do, and Drakeford’s response that he cannot do everything that he wants to do both sound to me like strong arguments for independence, or at the least for greater fiscal control. It’s a strange world in which constraints placed by London on Wales are used as an excuse for failure rather than a reason for removing those constraints, but it seems to be the inevitable result of a unionist mindset.

For Britain, see England

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The inability of some people to distinguish between the terms ‘England’, ‘Britain’, and ‘UK’ is well understood by most Welsh and Scottish people. And it isn’t about whether people do or do not support independence or even devolution; most unionists in Wales recognise that there is a difference of some sort between Wales and England even if they’re not always clear about what it is. Indeed, for many Welsh unionists, the idea that Wales can be a distinct nation whilst being part of a political union which confers greater strength to the parts as well as to the whole is a key element of their unionism, even if independentistas by and large consider them misguided. The problem they face though is that what looks obvious to them isn’t always as obvious to English politicians, let alone ordinary English voters. Whilst they don’t always express themselves in such blunt terms, ‘Britain’ (or even the UK) in England is really just Greater England; a monocultural, monolinguistic state, with an official religion of which the monarch is head. Subtleties such as Welsh disestablishment or the very existence of the Welsh language completely pass them by.

Some years ago, I spent some time working in Solihull, and during the course of a conversation with one of my colleagues there, he was surprised to learn that Welsh was the first language of many, was spoken daily, used in people’s homes, and the medium of education in many schools. He had always assumed that it was on a par with Latin – brought out for ceremonial use in Eisteddfodau, in the way Latin is brought out for ceremonial use by the Catholic Church or some universities. He was not a stupid man, by any means: he was apparently well-educated, knowledgeable and articulate, and was holding down a job at a fairly senior level in a large organisation. Whilst I’ve not often heard things expressed in the same way, his attitude is not untypical of many people in England, for whom Wales is those two geographically definable western peninsulas, but otherwise indistinguishable. There’s nothing malicious about the attitude, it’s just accepted ‘truth’. It crosses political dividing lines as well; one of the problems faced by people like Mark Drakeford who genuinely want to make the union work for Wales is that so many senior English Labour politicians share, deep down, the same sort of ignorance of difference.

Yesterday, it was PM Sunak who managed to clumsily express a similar view, with his statement that British is “…a shorthand that people use…” when they really mean English, clearly conveying that, in his mind, the two words are basically interchangeable. The ‘people’ who he says use this shorthand are, though, almost exclusively English; it’s not a shorthand that many in Wales or Scotland would ever use, where the difference between the two words is much more clearly understood. I’ve long believed that the eventual demise of the union between the nations of these islands will be down as much to the insouciance and carelessness of its supporters as to the efforts of its detractors. Sunak is just another piece of evidence of a problem of whose existence he remains blissfully unaware. And whilst his ignorance might irritate us, it's hardly unhelpful to the cause.

Silly assumptions and silly celebrations

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Unionists are celebrating their supposed ‘victory’ in the Supreme Court earlier this week, with a ruling which establishes very clearly that, under UK law, there is no legal route for Scotland (and the same would obviously apply to Wales) to determine its own future which does not involve being granted permission by the UK Government, and that there is no requirement for that government to give – or even have – any reason other than they don’t want a particular outcome. Scotland is, it seems, trapped in a curious version of Catch 22: the country has an absolute right to leave a ‘voluntary’ union of ‘partners’ if it chooses, there is just no legal way of exercising that right. Asked the question, specifically, one of the unionists in chief, ‘Keith’ Starmer said that it wasn’t for him to explain how Scotland could exercise that right, it was for those seeking independence to set out how they intend to proceed. They have, of course, done so, several times, even complying fulsomely with the route set out by Thatcher decades ago (who said that, if a majority of Scottish MPs were elected on an independence platform, Scotland would become independent). It’s just that, every time they set out a route, Labour-Tory politicians – backed up by the courts which are bound by the principle that absolute power stems from the Crown and resides in the UK parliament, whatever the acts of union might have said – conspire together to change the unwritten rules.

Whether their celebration is justified or not is another proposition entirely: it looks more like another example of the short-termism which dominates UK politics, and is based on the assumption that support for independence (and the SNP) is a temporary phenomenon which will go away if denied loudly enough for long enough. After all, every promise and policy they themselves put forward is regarded as nothing more than a short-term fix to get elected, and many do not survive election day, let alone detailed parliamentary scrutiny. Why would they expect the SNP to be any different? Perhaps they’re right; perhaps the desire for independence will fade away in the light of stubborn refusals to countenance it. The evidence to date suggests otherwise, though. And trying to present the whole debate as nothing more than some sort of personal campaign by Nicola Sturgeon contains more than a hint of traditional imperialist misogyny, to say nothing of contempt for the mass of the Scottish population.

They are right, of course, in legal terms (and in terms of normal English politics) to say that the SNP (and other pro-independence parties) cannot simply turn the next general election into a plebiscite on independence. But normal English politics has ceased applying in Scotland, where a different political reality rules. Have the unionists really thought through what happens if (and I’ll accept it’s a big ‘if’, although within the range of currently credible outcomes) 60% of the electorate votes for parties who have declared that their only policy for that election is independence, and every MP from Scotland belongs to a pro-independence party? They seem, instead (the Tories as much as Labour), to be putting their hands over their eyes and ears and clinging to the assumption that people will be so keen to get rid of the Tories and replace them with a Labour government in London that the SNP will be defeated electorally and replaced by Labour MPs. And they’re betting the house on that outcome.

There are those independentistas in Scotland who have been critical of Nicola Sturgeon, suggesting that she has been too slow, too cautious. It’s a difficult call, but I suspect that she’s as aware as anyone that moving too fast and losing would be the biggest setback of all. The issue really would be off the table for a generation. Indeed, one of the surprising things to me has been the unwillingness of the unionists to allow a referendum at the point at which they had their best chance of winning it. Looking at the support for independence across the age demographic, the simple fact is that young independentistas are entering the electorate and older unionists are leaving it. A Scottish parliament along with a Scottish contingent in Westminster, both filled with independentistas, and enjoying overwhelming electoral support (the only bit of the puzzle still missing) should be the unionists’ worst nightmare, yet they seem determined to bring it about. The unionists can and always will win the legal arguments, because the absolute sovereignty of the Crown trumps all else. But all the Supreme Court decision has really done is to emphasise that it’s a political issue, first and foremost – and it will ultimately be determined by the voters of Scotland. The assumption that a territory and its people can be held in a union indefinitely against the clear will of those people because the monarch's ancestors declared themselves absolute rulers is a very silly basis for celebration.

Sometimes, abandoning the ship is the only sensible course of action

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As they survey the wreckage of their party and watch the political death throes of this month’s outgoing PM, the minds of Tory MPs seem to be more than a little preoccupied by the question of who should become next month’s outgoing PM, and what the mechanism should be for choosing that next lame duck. It’s the sort of short-sighted perspective which is probably the inevitable outcome of their personal obsession with retaining their own job, but the more important questions for the rest of us are who should succeed next month’s outgoing PM, how, and when.

Whilst watching the implosion of successive Tory governments with ever increasing rapidity is a fun spectator sport, it’s not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, of the pain unless there is an alternative available which is not only credible (and without needing to move a muscle, the possibility of a Starmer government has come to look not only credible but unavoidable, as he watches the ratings of Labour’s traditional opponent reverse past him at incredible speed), but which also has a different plan, which escapes from the underlying beliefs which have led to the implosion. On that latter point, Starmer is looking a good deal less credible; and changing the personnel whilst keeping the mission largely intact will do little to help the lives of those being so badly damaged by the ideologues of the Tory Party.

There are, of course, a number of different reasons for the implosion, but the centrality of Brexit cannot be ignored. However, it isn’t Brexit itself which is the underlying problem so much as the delusions of grandeur which underpinned the whole exercise. The ill-fated budget was based on the same delusion as Brexit itself, which is that the UK is a major player in the world economy on a par with the US and China and can behave with the same disregard for rules and norms as those two countries can, unlike perceived ‘minor’ players such as Germany or France which should know their place, and be ever grateful for the UK having saved them during ‘the war’. The more evidence accumulates to support the alternative proposition – that the UK is, in fact, nothing more than a middle-ranking off-shore island of Europe – the more that evidence must be denounced as fake and irrelevant by politicians who simply double down on the notion that ‘we’ cannot be expected to accept such a lowly status and must be given whatever ‘we’ want.

How different, really, is Starmer’s position? Continued references to ‘making Brexit work’ without saying how suggest the answer is ‘not a lot, really’. In truth, Brexit doesn’t even need to be completely reversed in order to achieve a workable state of affairs; it just needs a willingness to move a great deal closer to (and preferably to join) the single market and the customs union. Without doing that, ‘making Brexit work’ is just a meaningless slogan, which there is no way of implementing. Yet the starting point of the probable next-but-one government (after both this month’s and next month’s outgoing PMs have duly outgone) appears to be that only minor changes in the tone of discussions are required and all will be well. It’s no less deluded than the current lot – and ultimately it’s pretty much the same delusion at work.

Escaping our current plight requires more than a change of the hand on the tiller; it requires the UK to develop a realistic understanding of its position and status in the world, a willingness to co-operate with others, particularly our closest neighbours, and an overhaul of political structures and processes which give outright total power to cultists on the basis of a minority of the votes. When I look at Starmer and Labour, I see none of that, only a lust to have their turn at pulling the levers. It would be comforting to think that, shorn of Scotland, Wales and the remainder of Ireland, English politicians would at last be forced to confront the reality they’ve been ignoring for decades, but it seems more likely they’ll just double down on the same delusions in their reduced territory. Remaining in an arcane union out of some sense of responsibility to help them (Welsh Labour’s favoured position, apparently) merely dooms us to be dragged along by the same delusion for the foreseeable future.

Never is a very long time

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The First Minister, Mark Drakeford, has been reported today as saying that he will never support independence, but believes that “decisions that affect only people in Wales [should be] taken only by people in Wales”. At first sight, it’s a neat turn of phrase which sounds like a commitment to a lot more devolution of powers to Wales. On closer analysis, however, it's far from being as clear as that, because there are few decisions currently taken by the Welsh government which meet a strict interpretation of his rule. Some health services, for instance, are accessed on a cross-border basis – decisions taken in Wales will affect some people in England, just as decisions taken in England will affect some people in Wales. In the field of education, many Welsh students choose to study at English universities, just as many English students choose to study in Wales – decisions taken in Wales won’t just affect people living in Wales. We could go through a whole host of devolved areas and find that there are few decisions which can be said to have ‘no’ impact on people living outside Wales: a statement by Drakeford which sounds like a call for more devolution could be interpreted as a justification for rolling back what has already been devolved.

Anyone seeking to use it that way would be well advised to exercise a little caution, however, because the same could be said for many decisions taken by the UK Government. Foreign policy, defence and overseas aid are obvious examples, but trade policy, immigration policy and many other areas of government also lead to decision-taking which does not ‘only’ affect people in the UK. Does that mean that UK independence is an impossibility? In a sense, yes it does. What Drakeford has touched on, perhaps inadvertently, is that we live in a world which is increasingly interdependent, and where any government which ever takes any decisions is likely to be impacting others outside its jurisdiction. It’s why, for many years, many independentistas preferred the term interdependence or ‘full national status’ to the word independence; either are a better description of the status any country seeking to be a good member of the international community would seek.

It turns out, though, that taking some decisions individually, some co-operatively through negotiation, and some by pooling sovereignty with others is precisely what ‘independence’ actually means to most states in the modern world; the issue is deciding which decisions are taken where. The UK, as a state trying to assert its own unique right to decide everything and to take back both pooled and devolved powers to itself, is very much an outlier, and the consequences are becoming clearer daily. If the First Minister was trying to say something along those lines, he may find that he is not as far away from many independentistas as his assertion that he will ‘never’ support independence suggests. It’s more a difference of opinion about the detail of what should be decided where and how Wales’ input is made. The biggest difference of perspective is probably about whether we start with the UK as a given and argue about why any powers should not remain at that level, which should be devolved and which should be pooled (with, for instance, the EU), or whether we start from the tabula rasa perspective that the continued existence of the UK and its exercise of power in particular areas needs to be justified on a case by case business. That’s no small difference in perspective, of course, but neither is it necessarily as great as Drakeford’s words suggest. And ‘never’ is a very long time – is he really telling us that in the event of Irish reunification and Scottish independence, his mind would remain closed to any suggestion that Wales should seek any status other than that of being subservient to Westminster, relying on powers which can only ever be ‘loaned’ to Wales?

Lexicographical crime

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Yesterday, the new empathy-challenged Home Secretary, chosen for the job on the basis that her predecessor, Priti Patel, was simply not nasty enough, claimed that those Tory MPs who had ‘forced’ the government to abandon part of its proposed largesse towards the richest, had staged some sort of ‘coup’ against the elected government of the UK. Her definition of a ‘coup’, which is that MPs had threatened not to vote for a policy which they did not support and which formed no part of their manifesto at the last election probably constitutes some sort of crime against lexicography, but using a different dictionary than the rest of us, and defining words to mean exactly what they want them to mean (well, perhaps not exactly; exactitude is another missing attribute amongst the current government) is far from being the biggest problem with her statement. Within the normal meaning of the word coup, the overthrow of one government and its replacement by another, there has indeed been a coup, but it’s the one which took place a few months ago under which the Tory Party deposed one clueless leader in order to give itself free rein to find someone even more clueless, which is, I suppose, at least one task they’ve managed to complete successfully.

The bigger problem is that, under the UK’s unwritten constitution, and despite the way the media cover and present elections, we do not elect (and never have elected) governments, parties, or Prime Ministers. The only thing we are allowed to elect is a member of parliament for the constituency in which we live; once elected, he or she is free to support whatever policies, parties, or leaders he or she might choose, regardless of any pledges which might have mistakenly appeared on his or her election material. The result is that we now have a government whose leader was chosen by a vanishingly small proportion of the electorate as a whole which is following a programme which is significantly different from what the same people promised in 2019. And it’s all entirely legal and above board. There may be a few deranged members of the governing party who inexplicably consider that they might have some sort of duty to stand by what they said only three years ago – the ones who Braverman accuses of being coupists – but seen from the bunker in Downing Street, these people are little better than traitors, reneging on the only responsibility they have, which is to do as they are told.

What the rest of us need to remember is that this ability to replace a government with a wholly different one, committed to a completely different political direction, isn’t a bug in the UK’s constitution, it’s a feature of it. There has been an entirely legal coup; this is the way things are supposed to work. The PM is appointed by the monarch, not elected by the people, and once appointed is free to do almost anything he or she wishes, subject only to having a sufficiently servile bunch of MPs for those changes which require legislation, which is far from being all of them. The ‘solution’ is not just to hold a new election. That might defer the problem until halfway through the next parliament, or the one after that, but it doesn’t solve it. And since the only solution for the UK as a whole involves persuading turkeys to vote for Christmas, the only way out is to escape from the turkey farm and ensure that independent states in Wales and Scotland start life with proper written constitutions, fair electoral systems, and a recognition that sovereignty belongs to the people not the monarch. We could call it something novel and exciting, like perhaps ‘democracy’.