Devolution: what do we have to show for it?

Cllr Rhys Mills

We were promised something better. That was the deal with devolution. Bring power home. Make it local. Make it honest.

A government that looked like us, sounded like us, and fought for towns the rest of the world had written off. But a quarter of a century in, what do we have to show for it?

Managed decline. Packaged as maturity.

The services are still disappearing. The budgets are still shrinking. The difference is now we get strategy documents to soften the blow. A new font on the press release. A carefully focus grouped explanation of why your library has been turned into a Weatherspoons. Progress, apparently.

And that is the problem. The parties in charge of building the new Wales are more focused on managing the failure than preventing it.

Extravagances

In my community, youth clubs have been closed, play schemes scrapped, and vital public spaces left to teeter until locals stepped in. Libraries, once warm spaces of dignity and access, are shut down as if they were extravagances. The justification is always the same. No one uses them. They cost too much. They are outdated.

But what they really are is inconvenient. Not to the public. To the people making decisions about them. A library lets people exist without spending money. And that kind of freedom is apparently unaffordable.

Meanwhile, politicians talk endlessly about engagement. About fairness. About new beginnings. The voting system has changed. More proportional. More democratic. More voices. On paper. But people do not live on paper. They live in places where their services are gone and their voices are only welcome if they are saying thank you.

And if you want to understand why trust is broken, look not at the policies, but at the mindset behind them.

Managed performance

Because while communities are stretched to breaking point, party machines are focused on control. Internal democracy has become a managed performance. Who gets picked. Who gets heard. Who gets boxed out. It is not always illegal. But it is often illegitimate.

Parties that cannot run a fair meeting have no business asking for public trust. If you cannot respect your own members, you are never going to respect the public. And that disrespect trickles down. Into how funding decisions are made. Into how communities are consulted. Into how services are cut.

And it is in that vacuum between vanished public services and hollowed out party structures that a particular class has taken centre stage. Not the workers. Not the elite. Something in between. Propped up by credit. Dragged down by cost.

Freelancers. Landlords. Sole traders. Self employed grafters who see themselves as self made but live one invoice away from collapse. They are culturally loud. Economically fragile. Politically volatile.

They do not hold power directly, but they shape the mood. They influence the tone. They dominate the narrative even as they teeter on the edge of it. They are not the footnotes. They are the engine room of the politics we have now.

They are not a problem. They are a signal. A sign that the old binaries are collapsing. That if Welsh politics keeps offering managed decline with a progressive accent, this group will drift. Left. Right. Or out of politics altogether.

Trust

The question now is not what policies get announced. It is who gets to shape them.

Real trust comes from power shared, not just power branded. And that starts inside the room. Who speaks. Who listens. Who decides. The basics.

Because this is not about structure. It is about imagination. About who we think Wales belongs to.

In my community, we still have an institute because local people refused to let it close quietly. We still have a youth club. Not because it was protected. Because volunteers stepped in and reopened the doors. We still have a playgroup.

Not thanks to funding, but because parents refused to accept that children in their area should have nowhere to go. And we still have libraries. Just about. Because people showed up when the spreadsheets said they should not bother.

That is the real Welsh Government. Not the one with the crest and the webcast. The one held together with community WhatsApp groups, last minute fundraisers and people too stubborn to give up.

So let us stop asking.

If the politics is not working, we build something that does. Start from where we are. Use what we have. Bring who we know.

The next Wales will not be handed down. It will be built, piece by piece, by people who have already started.

And the moment it shows promise, the same people who tried to stop it will turn up smiling for the photo…

Rhys Mills is a Plaid Cymru town councillor for Blackwood South.