Wales

Few appreciate how mischievous Welsh devolutionists are when it comes to embedding themselves in the national consciousness. Take the Welsh translation for ‘first minister’, prif weinidog, which means ‘prime minister’. What was once a linguistic trick has now become an informal touch point in Wales. Regardless of his title, Mark Drakeford behaves, looks and sounds like a powerful national leader rather than a devolved minister. Few politicians exude such confidence but it should be no surprise: in the last year, Drakeford guided Welsh Labour to two triumphant victories in national and, more recently, local elections. He lectures the British Prime Minister on the future of the Union and then calls

For some time now, Covid has been rising in Scotland – there are now more Scots in hospital with Covid than at any time throughout the winter. A freak, or a sign of what’s to come nationally? The ONS survey answers that question today, confirming that Covid cases are rising nationally: some 4 per cent of England’s population, it says, would test positive. In Northern Ireland it’s closer to 8 per cent and in Scotland 5.7 per cent. Have waning vaccines created space for another wave – and do we need to worry? Just as Gauteng and South Africa then Lambeth and London were the early warning signs for Omicron’s rise

Rowan Williams is no stranger to politics. As Archbishop of Canterbury he was as comfortable criticising Tony Blair over Iraq as passing stern judgment on David Cameron’s austerity measures. Even in these pages, at the height of the global crisis in 2008, Williams was arguing that Marx could teach us a thing or two about financial markets. Still, in recent weeks it just might be that he has embarked one of his most controversial projects yet: a commission to help define Wales’ constitutional future in the UK. As the spectre of Scottish independence haunts Westminster and Welsh nationalism gains momentum, it is a timely mission. In October, Williams was unveiled as head

One of the worst features of devolution is the tendency of devocrats to insist on doing their own thing in all circumstances and at whatever cost. The idea that decentralisation would lead to experimentation and the sharing of best practice now seems hopelessly naive. Instead, politicians in Edinburgh and Cardiff try to use nationalism to earth criticism, treating an attack on their records as an insult to the Scottish or Welsh people. Perhaps the most abject example was when a Welsh minister accused Michael Gove of harbouring ‘colonial attitudes’ when the then-education secretary penned an article comparing English and Welsh school outcomes. Even the evidence base that might have supported

Some of the most revealing detail from newly released 1997 government files relate to Welsh constitutional affairs. The Home Office advised against the Queen opening the new Welsh Assembly, for instance, judging the institution to be ‘wholly subordinate’ to Westminster even before the people of Wales had voted for it. Tony Blair and John Prescott even thought the leader of the Assembly should be known as ‘Chief Executive’, unlike the ‘First Minister’ title bestowed in Scotland. It has taken more than two decades, but attitudes to Welsh politics have finally changed, from both the public and politicians in Wales and Westminster. The Assembly-cum-Parliament now has primary law-making powers; our national

Wales has never embraced the notion of independence and perhaps never will. So it was unsurprising that YesCymru, a grassroots nationalist movement formed to support Scottish secession in 2014, was more or less irrelevant for the first five years of its existence. Its official launch in 2016 went without notice. Wales’ decision to follow England – not Scotland – in voting to leave the EU also complicated arguments for separation. And despite a march in 2019 through Merthyr Tydfil featuring celebrity guests, the group’s 2,000 members at the start of last year was a modest figure – signalling they had little hope, like Plaid Cymru, of winning popular support. Then

Mark Drakeford sits opposite me in a small conference room on the third floor of Cathays Park, the nucleus of Welsh government operations during Covid-19. The First Minister of Wales is in bullish mood. Last month, he almost single-handedly delivered a thumping election victory for Labour in Wales – securing 30 seats in the Senedd and extending Labour’s 22-year-grip over the devolved parliament. The party in Wales enjoys starkly different electoral fortunes to its comrades across the border, with Drakeford now Labour’s only leader with experience winning national elections across the UK. I meet him a few hours after the first devolved Covid summit, where he and other devolved leaders

It has been almost 45 years since Tam Dalyell first asked the West Lothian Question. It is a damning indictment of devolutionary unionists that they are still flailing for an answer. Dalyell, a Scottish Labour MP with the uncommon foresight and courage to oppose his party’s embrace of devolution, first posed it during the parliamentary debates that teed up the first referendums in 1979: ‘For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate … at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland,

Yesterday, Lord Dunlop – the author of the Dunlop Review into the British state and devolution – appeared before a joint meeting of four Select Committees. It was the first time the Public Accounts and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish committees had sat together, which was fitting given his remit. But the resultant Q&A only highlighted the ongoing tensions in the government’s approach to the Union. Dunlop is an advocate of what he calls a ‘cooperative Union’. His emphasis is on getting the various parts of the governments of the UK to work together, and building on the past two decades of devolution. He summarised his