Ken Skates – Destroyer of Worlds

Ben Wildsmith

I wrote here, the morning after the election, that Labour would be wise to take a while absorbing the magnitude of its defeat.

Having made the front of the New York Times for all the wrong reasons, the party needed to recognise that the mandate its nine MSs stood on was dwarfed by an overwhelming rejection of its governance in recent times.

The message from the electorate was not, ‘We’ll give someone else a go, after all Labour will be there to hold the balance of power.’ The party’s outsized influence over a minority government is incongruous with its current standing with the electorate.

I wrote then that humility would be the key to a revival in Labour’s fortunes. If it offered the new government the benefit of experience in a broadly supportive manner, whilst standing by its unionist principles, the electorate would have evidence that lessons had been learned.

When Ken Skates, Destroyer of Worlds, decided to go nuclear at the very first opportunity by sinking the supplementary budget, he set a very different course which might have far-reaching consequences.

We are going to hear a lot about devolution from Labour’s 2.0 Westminster government.

It is Andy Burnham’s USP. ‘Manchesterism’, his bafflingly vague credo, is supposed to involve an unprecedented redistribution of power away from the centre. His early messaging, which betrayed ignorance over matters already devolved to Wales and Scotland, suggested that Cardiff and Edinburgh might be bypassed in a process that saw funds and decision-making parcelled out to local authorities.

The party that instituted the Senedd and Holyrood seems to have developed buyers’ remorse now that it controls neither.

Labour’s ambivalence towards devolution in Wales, particularly amongst the Welsh PLP, is nothing new.

The eye-rolling disdain on show from outgoing Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens towards anything originating in Cardiff left Eluned Morgan shipwrecked at the election, defending a Welsh government that had been actively hampered by its own party in London.

That so many opponents of independence went on to vote for Plaid Cymru is a measure of how badly that attitude went down with left-of-centre voters.

At the heart of Labour’s conundrum is a conflict between regionalism, which it understands in an English context, and national self-determination in Wales and Scotland, which it does not.

The crux of this week’s argument was that additional funds passing through the Barnett Formula to Wales should be spent on the same thing as whichever English expenditure triggered the consequential.

So, because Westminster decided to address spiralling interest payments by clearing debts accrued by English councils in their Additional Learning Needs budgets, the funds released to Wales should also primarily be used for ALN.

The granular details of that debate are substantive and emotive. Spending on ALN is of crucial importance to many people, and Labour has every right to champion that cause. In capsizing the government’s wider programme, however, it revealed a fundamental disengagement with the devolutionary process that was once one of its proudest achievements.

Put simply, our system of devolution restricts funding options for the Welsh government so tightly that local authorities have more scope. Ironically, it was this leeway to borrow by English councils that caused extra funds for Wales to be under debate this week.

So, the funding of our government is almost entirely dependent on political choices made in Westminster. For devolution to have any meaning at all, the funds which do arrive here cannot have strings attached.

There is no moral imperative to spend them on anything related to the English spending that resulted in their disbursal. If that principle is eroded, no matter how emotive the particular spending in question, our votes in Senedd elections become nothing more than symbolic tokens of nationhood.

In times past, this row could have been dismissed as the normal back and forth of parliamentary procedure – after all a democracy is nothing without disagreement.

The current context, however, includes an official opposition, in Reform UK, that has pledged to vote against everything the government proposes, and which is overtly hostile to the Senedd’s existence.

Indeed, Reform messaging more frequently criticises ‘the Senedd’ as the source of Wales’s ills than it does the government.

In these circumstances, it is hasty of Labour’s tiny cohort to paralyse government spending over an issue of scale and timing that has been inflated into one of principle. To do so at the very first opportunity is reckless and suggests an antipathy towards Welsh self-determination that is not supported by the party’s standing in the nation.

There is a lesson here for Plaid too. Andy Burnham will soon find out that politicians and officials are more comfortable with power and resources being devolved to them than they are with the same being devolved from them.

For Plaid to have authority in arguing for enhanced powers and funding from Westminster, it must make devolution within Wales an urgent and visible feature of its governance.

Devolution itself should be a driver of government policy so that any suggestion of hoarding powers in Cardiff can be countered. In the same way that legislation must take account of environmental policy, it should be designed to maximise local powers and accountability.

Building robustness and permanence into Welsh government is an urgent matter. Any diminishing of the executive now could set a precedent that would be exploited by an incoming anti-devolutionary Westminster government.

The prospect of a Farage-led government seems to be retreating but that strand of politics remains buoyant and the Senedd is what stands between us and such a regime deciding to fund local authorities that vote for it and punish those that don’t.

Rumours have emerged that Carwyn Jones is being considered to take over as Welsh Secretary. If that transpires, it is to be hoped that politicians in Cardiff Bay will be reminding him of his longstanding calls for enhanced powers for Wales.

In the absence of such prompts from his own party, perhaps it might be appropriate for him to remind them.

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