Last week, the new PM instructed his cabinet to “stop
assuming that decisions belong in Whitehall by default”, according to a
Downing Street source quoted in the Times
(paywall). The source went on to add, “Departments will now have to justify
why a power should stay at the centre rather than being transferred to a local
area”. Perhaps the new Secretary of State for Wales was asleep during that
part of the meeting, but his statement that he
is not yet "entirely convinced" of the case for giving more
powers to the Welsh government, although he remains "open to the
conversation" sounds an awful lot like an assumption that powers
should remain where they are unless a convincing case is made otherwise –
almost the exact opposite of his boss’s instruction.
It’s possible, of course, that Burnham never intended
that his new policy should apply to the national governments in Wales and Scotland
– for him devolution is all about the powers of local mayors; and his record to date of
understanding the difference between those national parliaments on the one hand
and regional mayors on the other is not good. It’s more likely, though, that we’re
just seeing two different versions of the Labour Party. There is the image that
they want us to believe: a party committed to localism, empowering communities
and their representatives to take the best decisions for their areas, and then there’s
the traditional version with which we are all too familiar in Wales: a
centralised and centralising party which wants to keep all power in its own
hands. Kinnock is simply presenting the well-established reality; those who
fall for the Burnham rhetoric will inevitably end up disappointed.
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