The desire for change is so strong that it is pulling the UK apart. After these elections, all three parts of the UK with devolved governments will be led by politicians who want to break away from England. The polarisation and divisiveness means that not only have the two parties that have dominated national politics for 100 years been humiliated by the newcomers, Reform and the Greens, but Wales has gone nationalist for the first time.
Welsh Nationalism on the Rise
Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader formerly known as Ron Jones, is likely to be first minister. He will join John Swinney of the Scottish National Party in Edinburgh and Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Fein in Belfast as first ministers of devolved administrations who do not actually believe in devolution – except as a conveyor belt to leaving the UK. For those of us who love the whole of our country and want to keep it together, this is an alarming trend. It is as if devolving power, one of the least controversial assumptions of liberal democracy, really is a bad idea, as those strangely passionate mavericks warned in the 1970s.
Labour's Decline in Wales
Part of the trend is to do with the specifics of Welsh politics. Labour has not been a great success in government there, as those in Westminster could tell from the way the last Conservative government used Welsh Labour’s record on the NHS and schools to attack Labour nationally. Disaffection with Labour in Wales might have turned in the past to the Liberal Democrats and possibly to the Tories in the posher bits. Some of it had its head turned recently by Nigel Farage – so much so that Reform launched its manifesto for the 2024 election in Merthyr Tydfil. But Wales, like Scotland, likes to think of itself as more left-wing than England, and so when it came to the test case of the Caerphilly by-election for the Senedd last year, the anti-Labour protest vote went to Plaid instead. Now it has done so across the whole of Wales.
Devolution as a One-Way Ratchet
And devolution has turned out to be a one-way ratchet, just as its opponents argued all along. In Scotland, where the SNP has a much worse record in government than Welsh Labour, the party gets a free pass because it has switched seamlessly from being the vehicle for protesting against an unpopular Tory government in Westminster to being the vehicle for protesting against an unpopular Labour government.
Separatist Sentiment Muted but Persistent
Fortunately, in no part of the UK is separatist sentiment deep and wide enough to pose an imminent threat to the Union. Plaid’s pitch is very much about pride in Welsh identity rather than a push for a referendum on independence, which remains a notional and distant goal. In Scotland, it is beginning to sink in that the 2014 referendum was genuinely a once-in-a-generation decision and that another referendum is not possible on the basis of support for independence in opinion polls fluctuating around 50 per cent. Especially when, if the question is asked differently, using the wording of the Brexit referendum, “Should Scotland remain in the UK or leave the UK?”, “Remain” wins by about 60-40. I am told that people in focus groups in Scotland often seem nonplussed if it is suggested that by voting SNP they are indicating that they want independence soon or at all.
Even in Northern Ireland, where the Democratic Unionist Party has played a strong hand incredibly badly, support for a united Ireland remains muted, thanks partly to Catholic unionists, a neglected subgroup of the electorate.
Reform as a Unionist Party
But there is no doubt that the storm unleashed by the 2014 Scottish referendum cannot be put back in the bottle. It has now spread to Wales, and in both Scotland and Wales, Reform is now one of the leading unionist parties. This is a strange position for a party often characterised as English nationalist, and it makes maintaining a unionist alliance harder than ever. The breaking up of the old order of British politics is not just a matter of the two traditional parties being potentially eclipsed by new movements, but of a greater strain being imposed on the UK itself.
