Plaid Cymru vs Reform: The Question of Domination

Leon Noakes

The emerging contest between Plaid Cymru and Reform at the Senedd election is not simply a clash of policies. It points to something deeper — an uncertainty about the terms on which Wales is governed, and by what standard those terms should be judged.

Plaid, if it is to meet the moment, needs to introduce a clearer criterion by which it evaluates Reform’s programme in relation to Wales.

At present, independence risks remaining more an instinct than a defined condition: a direction of travel without a shared language capable of distinguishing between forms of freedom and forms of dependence. What is missing, in short, is a way of measuring political reality.

Here, I want to introduce into Welsh political discourse a concept drawn from contemporary neo-republican thought: non-domination.

Associated with thinkers such as Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, this tradition revives an older understanding of freedom — that a people are unfree not only when they are actively coerced, but when they live under a power capable of interfering arbitrarily, whether or not that power is exercised in practice.

Under this framework, the question for Wales is not simply whether it is governed well or badly within the United Kingdom, but whether it exists in a condition where its political life can be overridden without meaningful consent.

The issue is structural rather than sentimental; constitutional rather than rhetorical.

This distinct criterion allows us to highlight a core contradiction in Reform’s position. Farage has defined himself against external domination — against Brussels, against EU bureaucracy — yet his party appears content to sustain or even deepen Wales’ exposure to domination from within the UK itself.

Reform UK’s opposition to distant authority is paired with acceptance of nearer authority, even where that authority rests on overwhelming demographic and institutional asymmetry. This is not simply a disagreement about emphasis, but a structural hypocrisy.

Plaid’s task, therefore, is surely not just to outbid Reform in acceptability of tone, but to outmatch it in clarity. The Party of Wales must insist upon a consistent principle: if domination is objectionable in one context, it is objectionable in all. The same standard applied to Brussels must also be applied to London.

From this position, Plaid could begin to articulate a more grounded challenge to London: offer Wales the clearest possible condition of non-domination within a reformed constitutional settlement. This would mean more than rhetorical respect or symbolic parity. It would require institutional guarantees — arrangements that ensure Welsh political consent cannot be bypassed or overridden at will. Vague verbal reassurances would not suffice.

Without such a framework, the political terrain risks hardening in ways that are difficult to manage. If questions of power and subordination remain unspoken, they do not disappear; they return in more volatile forms. The danger is not immediate rupture, but a gradual coarsening of political life — grievances accumulating without resolution, positions hardening without mediation.

Balkanisation

At its worst, this risks a kind of internal balkanisation: English-speaking Wales becoming a furnace of competing constitutional visions, the conditions for mutual suspicion replacing a golden opportunity for mutual recognition and cross-border respect.

The alternative remains available. It lies in a reconfiguration of these islands based on reciprocity rather than hierarchy: a settlement in which Wales, England and Scotland cooperate closely, but none possesses the structural capacity to arbitrarily dominate the others. Such an arrangement would place our common ties and mutual interests on a more durable footing.

Crucially, this does not require Wales to define itself against England, nor to deny the legitimacy of English nationhood. On the contrary, a republican approach grounded in non-domination begins from mutual recognition.

The English, like the Welsh, possess their own right to self-government. The problem is not English nationhood itself, but the constitutional imbalance through which it is currently expressed.

If Plaid were to make this explicit, it could shift the terrain entirely — away from a perceived Wales-versus-England antagonism, and towards a shared question of how multiple nations can coexist without one overwhelming the others.

It would also undercut Reform’s more strident unionism, which depends on presenting British unity as something that must be asserted rather than negotiated.

A politics of mutual recognition is not a retreat, but arguably a more stable foundation.

This vision also aligns more closely with the actual temperament of Welsh political life than either its critics or its advocates often admit.

Patriots

Wales has not historically produced a highly strident, romantic nationalism. Our most committed patriots tend to eschew the kinds of fatalistic intensity seen abroad. The prevailing impulse has been protective rather than assertive: to sustain language, culture and community rather than to impose them outwardly.

This helps explain a long-standing tension within Plaid itself. Founded to protect the Welsh language and national life, the party has often resisted the kind of mass emotional mobilisation seen in other nationalist movements. For some, this has been a source of frustration — a sense that Plaid has lacked urgency or force.

For others, it reflects a deeper instinct within Welsh political culture: a preference for civility over rupture, for persuasion over imposition. The new composition in the Senedd poses new existential demands upon that tradition.

Recent televised remarks by Rhun ap Iorwerth, questioning the legitimacy of national borders in the contemporary world and distancing himself from overtly flag-based patriotism, are intelligible within this tradition.

They position Plaid as open, humane and outward-looking, particularly in its bid to attract disillusioned Labour voters. But they also sharpen an underlying difficulty: if borders are treated as contingent, on what basis does Wales assert the authority to govern itself?

If patriotism is rendered purely ethical or cultural, what anchors the demand for political autonomy when faced with a more assertive and self-confident unionism elsewhere in Britain?

Keystone

The concept of non-domination supplies the missing keystone. It allows Plaid to avoid both abstraction and excess — neither retreating into narrow nationalism nor dissolving the question of self-government into a vague cosmopolitanism.

Instead, it provides a clear standard: Wales should not exist in a condition where its political future can be determined elsewhere without its consent. From that starting point, both independence and a transformed union become intelligible — not as articles of faith, but as institutional arrangements to be judged on their merits.

The difficulty for Plaid is that this requires a shift in how it speaks — from implication to definition, from sentiment to structure, from suggestion to criteria.

If it can make that shift, it will not only sharpen its response to Reform; it will give Welsh voters something that has often been missing from constitutional debate: a clear account of what political freedom would actually consist of.

If it cannot, the terms of debate will be set elsewhere — by those more willing to speak in absolutes, even where those absolutes rest on unexamined contradictions. That is the more likely outcome if Plaid continues to gesture towards clarity without quite achieving it.