Wales Said Yes 20 years since the Welsh devolution referendum
18th September 2017 Wales Millennium Centre
‘What has the devolution dividend for Wales been over the last twenty years?’ This question, posed by Auriol Miller, Director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs, in her opening address, proved in many ways the organising thought, and recurrent problem, that the day’s panels and speeches attempted to address.
The event, held on 18th September in partnership with the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University, was at once an opportunity to mark the renewed political vigour and self-confidence that has developed in Wales following the 1997 devolution referendum – something of which the event itself is surely symptomatic – and an opportunity to take stock of the devolved administration as it has taken root in Cardiff Bay and in the country’s collective imagination. Auriol Miller reminded the room that devolution had promised a new politics, a different way of doing government and, crucially, a ‘distinctly Welsh approach to policy and law-making’. These criteria were revisited throughout the day by all panels in appraising the progress made in the last two decades.
Introducing the first session, Auriol Miller explained that despite efforts to secure a speaker, unfortunately there weren’t any representatives of the No campaign available to participate in the panel discussion. So Leighton Andrews – co-founder of the Yes for Wales campaign in 1997 and AM for Rhondda between 2003 and 2016 – and BBC Wales Cymru reporter Bethan Lewis, who at the time was a researcher at the University of Aberystwyth, contextualised the day’s discussions by providing an account of the dynamics of the 1997 campaign. Noting that many in the room would have been too young to have been aware of the referendum, Andrews described a Yes campaign that was cash-strapped and haunted by the failure of the referendum of 1979, where Wales voted 80–20 against establishing a devolved assembly.
Yes for Wales had to wait until after the 1997 General Election to launch their campaign, and the national discussion therefore started relatively late in the process. Responding, Bethan Lewis noted that ‘if the Yes campaign was late in the day in terms of setting up, the no campaign was even later’. However, despite this the vote was extraordinarily close and the No campaign were for that reason clearly underestimated. This was partly due to the lack of a public forum comparable to the Constitutional Convention organised in Scotland before its own devolution referendum. Agreeing, Andrews noted that where Labour considered devolution the ‘settled will of the Scottish people’ (to use John Smith’s words), Wales was a ‘marginal seat’ and perhaps the Yes for Wales campaign had in that respect been naive: it was ‘the last analogue campaign’.
Andrews and Lewis developed several themes that would also prove recurrent throughout the day: the frustrations of the constantly evolving and frequently limited devolution settlement, the continued lack of a mature and lively public sphere in Wales, and the issues of identity that run parallel with the pragmatics of government. In particular, Andrews revisited his diaries, noting a
1 telephone call on the night of the referendum from ‘one of our most reliable activists’ in Bridgend – a young Carwyn Jones.
The First Minister provided his own reminisces as a local councillor and secretary of Bridgend and Ogmore Say Yes in the day’s keynote speech. He said It had been a difficult campaign. No question about that. The closeness of the result wasn’t a surprise to many of us. It’s difficult to overturn the status quo, we know that. There were huge challenges in explaining to people what an Assembly actually was. I distinctly remember one conversation on the doorstep where one person said to me ‘this Assembly, is it like a school assembly except in Welsh?’ But the First Minister also illustrated the gravity of the vote for the country’s future, arguing that ‘we could not pretend to be a nation if on two occasions we had refused to take some degree of responsibility for our affairs’. In a major policy announcement, Jones illustrated what he envisioned would be the next step for Welsh devolution, announcing a Justice in Wales commission, led by Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, to examine establishing a separate legal jurisdiction for the country, following recommendations of the Silk Commission that were not included in the Wales Act 2017.
The First Minister finished by describing Wales as a ‘nation transformed’, populated by a ‘generation of young people who are fearless, educated and grounded in Wales’. However, Huw Edwards, in examining ‘Why Scrutiny Matters’, was careful to add qualification to any collective celebration that the day’s proceedings might have constituted. Whilst adamantly arguing that we mustn’t conflate the question of whether the devolved government performs as we want it to with whether we want one at all, he described the misgivings, caveats and disappointments he saw in people across Wales whilst producing the BBC retrospective ‘20 Years of Power’, which airs this week. Edwards questioned the First Minister’s description of scrutiny ‘as though it’s something which is there’. Instead he insisted that the ability of the Welsh media to scrutinise the activities of the Assembly and Government is far weaker now than it was twenty years ago. As more powers are devolved to Cardiff Bay, it becomes harder and harder to effectively keep account of all activity. Edwards also described a history, albeit diminishing, of reticence on the part of Welsh Government officials to give interviews, even where stretched BBC resources enabled such scrutiny.
In a fast-paced presentation, Roger Scully – ‘Wales’s favourite psephologist’, as Auriol Miller put it – took the room through the changing public reaction to devolution since the referendum. Public attitudes to devolution are favourable now, and the Assembly was accepted quite quickly after the referendum. However, Scully argued that contrary to the hopes of the Yes campaigners
2 that support for devolution would improve once people felt tangible benefits, instead support for devolution has improved despite it having questionable impact on the lives of the majority of people. Pointing to a graph charting favourability towards devolution against views on how far the devolution settlement has gone, Scully claimed that it would appear that people tend to think devolution has proceeded to roughly the level they want it to be at, and that public attitudes are driven to a significant extent by what they want to see, possibly a result of the deficit of scrutiny that Huw Edwards had described earlier.
However, the day did not dwell solely upon the originary moment of devolution. Jo Foster closed the morning session chairing a panel of campaigners that consisted of Cathy Owens, Director of Deryn, Professor Roy Thomas, Chair of Kidney Wales Foundation, and Jack Gillum, Director of the Campaign for a Children and Young People's Assembly for Wales (CYPAW), who each shared their experience of influencing policy in the Assembly and lobbying the Government. The panel agreed that devolution offered a better opportunity to involve stakeholders in the democratic process than the previous system of haphazard consideration of Welsh matters in Westminster. Cathy Owens said that power and process have indeed been brought closer to the people by devolution, and Jack Gillum argued that the successful integration of the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child into law and ministerial conduct was testament to the healthy relationship between campaigning organisations and the executive.
However, frustrations still remained. Civil servants are often too unfamiliar with their briefs and overstretched, and as a result lack of expertise on the part of ministers is all too often not met with the necessary support. In addition, UK-wide organisations are often unfamiliar with the specificities of Welsh politics. Roy Thomas recalled the difficulties in engaging the Welsh Affairs Select Committee during the campaign he led to introduce soft opt-out for organ donation and the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ with Westminster inherent in the old system of Legislative Competence Orders which slowed down Welsh law-making, now a thing of the past. ‘Invisibility from within the M25 is inevitable’, Owens said, and the challenge is simply to work with that fact.
Elin Jones AM, the Llywydd, illustrated how this invisibility could be tackled by her role in her address opening the afternoon session. For instance 1.4 million people have visited the Senedd since its opening in 2006. ‘Every child should be able to say they have visited the Senedd’, Jones said, and the ‘devolution generation’ will prove vital in cementing the place of the Assembly. Jones noted that twenty year anniversaries traditionally involve the exchanging of china: like china the devolution settlement is still fragile, but it is something nobody wants to break. Dafydd Elis-Thomas, joining Jones for discussion afterwards, decried the calibre of the UK Government, condemned Leanne Wood’s bid for First Minister following the 2016 elections, and argued for the end of party politics and a move to open constituency primaries in a somewhat combative
3 exchange with Jones and Martin Shipton, Chief Reporter for the Western Mail, who chaired the discussion.
Elin Jones ended the panel by warning that as Brexit returns powers to the UK governments, future Assemblies will have much more work to do. With this in mind, the final panel attempted to reflect on the proceedings, providing a discussion of the promises of the 1997 referendum and what challenges lie ahead for Welsh democracy. Kevin Morgan, who chaired the Yes for Wales campaign, said that devolution had ‘aspired to render Wales a more democratic nation’. ‘It is difficult to recall the ignominious situation Wales was in before’, Morgan argued, where Wales was a ‘quango nation’. However, establishing a common theme for the panel, Morgan identified economic performance as the biggest disappointment of the post-devolution period (quite contrary to Carwyn Jones’s claims made earlier in the day). The panel agreed that the devolved administration has been remarkably good at innovating; as Laura McAllister, Professor of Public Policy and the Governance of Wales at Cardiff University, put it, we’ve seen no lack of ideas, ‘but more a lack of joining up of good intention with the ability to deliver’. Similarly, Axel Kaehne, Reader in Health Service Research at Edge Hill University, questioned whether devolution really had brought government closer to the people – ‘for people in Llandudno, is Cardiff really closer than London?’ – and highlighted areas, such as transport, where greater change should certainly have occurred. Helen Mary Jones, Deputy Director of the Morgan Academy, suggested that this lay in a lack of willingness somewhere in the psyche of the Welsh Government to drive through ‘what really works’.
In a day of qualified statements and cautious appraisals of the last twenty years, it might have been easy to forget what could have happened had things gone the other way. In his closing notes, Roger Scully reminded us that had 3,400 people changed their minds, that would have been the end of the matter. After two referendums over two generations, Whitehall would have assumed that Welsh people didn’t desire governmental distinctiveness for their nation. Quite easily, the country would have been subsumed beneath the force of its larger neighbour and become little more than another English region. However, that did not happen. We still have no devolution settlement in Wales, Scully noted (indeed, by some measures we are now on our seventh ‘settlement’); however, reading the room as symptomatic of the nation, Scully ended by arguing that there is certainly now widespread acceptance of devolution, if not widespread celebration. But perhaps that’s as it should be: many countries have an independence day, very few, if any, celebrate a ‘partial autonomy’ day such as Wales is now marking.
Merlin Gable, September 2017
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