The Labour ex-Parrot in Wales has been replaced by a new horror.
By Robert Buckland
It has finally happened. The dam of politics has burst, and the Labour Party in the Senedd has been swept away. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-parrot. As someone who grew up in South Wales under Labour’s political dominance and whose first venture into politics on a May election day thirty-three years ago as the first Conservative Councillor ever to have been elected in my home town of Llanelli, taking my seat from a startled Labour machine. Yes, I have skin in this game and can be forgiven for seeing this as a moment of personal satisfaction.
Welsh Labour’s collapse was neither sudden nor mysterious. It was the inevitable consequence of twenty-six years of presiding over a system of their very own creation without the imagination, intelligence or vision to ensure that devolution was the antidote to the dangerous siren song of separation, which some foolishly call independence. I was an active member of the 1997 “No” campaign, when we warned of the dangers of a Welsh one-party state. How right we were.
This isn’t just a question of mere politics. Thanks to Labour’s long misrule, communities and lives have suffered. Welsh education, for so long the ladder of opportunity, has become a dismal spiral of decline. Over successive international comparisons, Welsh attainment has slipped behind not only our global competitors but other parts of the UK.
Ministers and civil servants seemed perpetually fascinated by strategy, churning out new curricula, new assessment regimes, new pedagogical theories, while losing sight of an unfashionable but essential truth: it is the delivery of improved standards that matter.
Health tells a similar story. No one doubts the dedication of Welsh NHS staff, who have carried extraordinary burdens, but outcomes are dire. Waiting lists remain among the longest in Britain. Workforce shortages persist despite years of warning. From my own experience of the Welsh NHS during the last, difficult months of life for my late mother last year, I saw a system under grave pressure being led by politicians who seemed incapable of the honest leadership that was required.
Then there is the economy. Wales still suffers from low productivity, limited private-sector growth, and troubling levels of economic inactivity among the working-age population. Too many communities depend heavily on public employment without the parallel expansion of wealth-creating enterprise that sustains long-term prosperity.
Labour promised that devolution would unlock economic renewal. Instead, Wales too often settled for managing decline rather than driving growth. Redistribution replaced dynamism; administration replaced ambition.
And then, came the coup de grace, in the form of the mind-boggling decision by Labour to increase the number of Senedd members from 60 to 96 Members and introduce a closed-list electoral system. Not only was this tin-eared, but the very system they designed and endorsed was guaranteed to create chaos.
Closed party lists weaken the direct bond between voter and representative, a bond that has long been a strength of our parliamentary tradition. The result is a more distant democracy, with constituencies that make little sense. How does a Senedd member seriously seek to represent an area that stretches from Tenby to Aberystwyth? The real accountability will be to party leaderships rather than local communities.
And now Wales now awakens to a profoundly altered political landscape. Despite their soft-pedalling of late, Plaid Cymru still dream of Welsh independence, and will now have the machinery of government to assist them as they pull the ratchet towards separation. We can expect, for example, the wholly misconceived plan to devolve justice, actively supported by Welsh Labour, to accelerate, and for civil servants to be encouraged to pursue different approaches to those in England merely for their own sake, rather than because they will make a genuine improvement to lives in Wales.
And what of the new opposition in Wales? There is no doubt that Reform’s surge across also marks a new departure point. Labour was not just swept away on a tide of protest from Welsh nationalists, but on an inchoate roar of anger from communities that remain marginalised and who feel ignored. What I see, however, is the unscrupulous exploitation of fear and protest, rather than the careful creation of an alternative prospectus based on economic growth, supply side reform and a government that does less but does it better, which best comes from a centre-right alternative.
In so many ways, the politics of fear unites both the new main parties of the Senedd. Plaid’s constant refrain that Wales is the victim of the United Kingdom, rather than a country that benefits hugely from being part of Britain is more about fear and envy than genuine optimism for our future. Reform’s open wish to divide communities rather than to work to bring people together is also crystal clear.
This morning, my relief at the bursting of Labour’s bubble has been replaced by a new anxiety. Welsh voters may have resoundingly ended the Labour era in Wales but it is being replaced by a new horror. At a time when Wales needs political seriousness and delivery, we are in a world where, to quote Yeats: “the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity”.
Rt Hon Sir Robert Buckland KBE KC is former Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Wales.
