Noa Cohen is a Next Generation Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
It was the best of times (for Labour), it was the worst of times (for Welsh Labour).
Keir Starmer has watched the King outline his government’s agenda in the first Labour King’s Speech in 15 years. With the scale of his majority, he could safely assume that all bills laid out in the speech would pass. Not since 2001 has a Labour government had so strong a mandate or so significant a majority.
Amongst the slew of proposed legislation on the agenda, the King announced that his government would introduce an English Devolution Bill, making devolution ‘the default setting’. This would, as the document sets out, “deliver the Government’s manifesto promise to transfer power out of Westminster and into our local communities”.
Metro mayors and ‘local leaders’ will gain more powers in a range of areas, including skills, employment, and ‘local growth plans’. It intends to establish a legislative foundation upon which to ‘widen and deepen devolution’ across England. It is somewhat vague on the details but clear in its intention to hand over greater powers to regional governance.
Just a day earlier Vaughan Gething announced his resignation as First Minister of Wales, a position he had held for just four months. He became the third British national leader to lose his job this year, after Humaza Yousaf and Rishi Sunak.
The last few years of politics across Britain have been marked by significant turmoil and deep frustration amongst voters that politicians are not doing the jobs they have been elected to do. We need not rehash the Westminster chaos of the last few years. But the devolved nations have not fared much better. Wales is by no means alone in its political dysfunction. Stormont did not function at all for two years. The SNP’s house of cards has eventually come crashing down.
There is a crisis of competence in our political class and a crisis of confidence in our politicians. It is a widely held belief – both amongst politicians and the electorate – that standards in public life have slipped. And there is deeply felt frustration that governments have not done the jobs they are elected to do.
Beyond the toppling of national leaders and untold numbers of Education Secretaries over several months, there’s been an influx of national politicians who are not up for the job. Ultimately deep dissatisfaction took root amongst 2019 Conservative voters who feel that the party they elected never met the tasks they entrusted it with.
The last government spent the last 5 years arguing that they weren’t able to carry out their mandate because the powers that voters expected them to wield were not theirs to use. Over decades the strength of central government has been eroded through the offshoring of political power to arms-length bodies, judges, and devolved politicians.
And now, with a historic mandate and majority, the central government is further absolving itself of decisive and strong executive decision-making. People are not crying out for more pen-pushers to be added to the decision-making process, to further bureaucratise, or to add more politicians to our system.
To be clear, I am not fully opposed to devolution. There are elements of governance that are far more suited to the local than a national forum. However, overall, it is difficult to view the decentralisation experiment as a success. In many cases, it has led to a sclerotic system with inconsistent outcomes.
We have created new political classes with petty powers, who fill their time with minor laws that make citizens’ lives marginally worse, and their nations more bureaucratic and less dynamic. See the Welsh Government’s recent proposal to give specific, earmarked funding to ethnic minority candidates – undermining the democratic process – or the years-long consultations going on in Scotland as to what can be advertised on billboards.
In areas where significant powers have been devolved, like health and education, outcomes have nearly always been worse than in England, where decisions are still made in Westminster. Despite receiving a much higher payout per head from Westminster – English citizens essentially subsidise the other nations – they perform significantly worse than their English counterparts when it comes to key metrics like life expectancy or literacy.
We struggle enough to recruit high calibre politicians to the House of Commons, with each additional layer of decentralisation we create a new, worse political class, ill-equipped and ill-resourced to create good policy.
Quite frankly, most people do not want to have to care about politics as much as they have been forced to over the last few years. Turnout at the last general election was historically low, turnout at locals is almost always lower. People want to elect a government on a policy platform that they mostly agree with – and then see that government execute it.
In no world besides the stakeholder-NGO-consultation complex are more bureaucracy and politicians a desirable outcome. And yet once it’s established – once new bodies are set up and local despots get too used to wielding powers – it’s incredibly difficult to unpick.
The new Labour government has an unbelievably strong majority and mandate and yet seems to lack the boldness to use it effectively. A Conservative party fit for the future would do well to focus on recruiting the highest calibre of candidates at the top level and be prepared to face a serious – but necessary – struggle to slash the number of lower-level politicians and bureaucrats.
