This isn’t a Union. It’s a monologue

Owen Williams

On a recent episode of The News Agents, Lewis Goodall dismissed the idea that Westminster politics is too adversarial.

“The essence of politics is division,” he said. “Especially in our system.” He went on to praise the combative nature of Prime Minister’s Questions, contrasting it with what he described as “more continental” systems, those that rely on consensus and coalition rather than confrontation.

It’s a revealing moment, not because of what it says about Goodall’s personal politics, but because of what it reveals about the dominant mindset in British political commentary: that Westminster is politics.

That the UK has one system. That collaboration is foreign. That division is somehow native to this island archipelago.

In reality, the state Goodall describes as “ours” contains four legislatures: the UK Parliament, the Senedd, the Scottish Parliament, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

These are not regional talking shops, they are national parliaments and assemblies with law-making powers, democratic mandates, and distinct political cultures.

Anglocentric

To refer to the Westminster model as “our” system is to erase not only devolution but the very idea that this is a union of nations. It’s an Anglocentric framing in which the UK Parliament is default, and all else is deviation.

Take Goodall’s assertion that consensual, coalition-based politics is “continental.” That may be true of Belgium or Germany, but it’s equally true of Cardiff Bay.

Since the advent of devolution in 1999, Wales has seen more years of minority government than majority rule.

For much of the past Senedd term, Labour governed with support from Plaid Cymru through a Co-operation Agreement that formalised certain areas of shared policy. That agreement ended last year, a politically charged move, but one that underlines the maturity and independence of the Welsh political sphere.

Even outside of formal agreements, the political culture of the Senedd remains markedly more collaborative than Westminster.

Committees are cross-party by design. Social partnership with trade unions and the third sector is embedded in legislation. Policy development often involves consensus-building over confrontation.

None of this is “continental.” It’s Welsh. And it challenges the notion that adversarialism is either inevitable or desirable.

Consensus

To be clear, disagreement is a vital part of democracy. No one is arguing for bland uniformity. But to claim that division is the “essence” of politics, and that consensus is somehow unnatural, is to misunderstand both history and the nature of the UK state itself.

When politics becomes permanently adversarial, the result isn’t healthy democracy, it’s institutionalised tribalism. It creates winners and losers, rather than partners in progress. It leads to binary referenda, paralysed parliaments, and policies designed to provoke rather than solve.

We’ve seen this play out with Brexit, with immigration, and with culture war issues designed to rile rather than resolve. In contrast, devolved governments, for all their flaws, have often shown a different way.

In Wales, long-term policy agendas like the Well-being of Future Generations Act, the Social Partnership and Public Procurement Act, and the roll-out of universal primary free school meals have been built not on rivalry, but on consultation and compromise.

These aren’t acts of weakness. They’re acts of institutional maturity. By denying that these political cultures exist, or by casting them as something external, “continental,” or somehow less real, commentators like Goodall feed a narrative of constitutional ignorance that dominates British media and political coverage.

It’s the same narrative that sees UK-wide newspapers treat devolved policy as a footnote. The same narrative that leads flagship news and current affairs programming to discuss “the NHS” or “schools” without ever acknowledging that these are devolved matters.

This isn’t just sloppy language. It has consequences. When the public are fed a steady diet of Westminster-centric framing, they become less aware of where power lies and how to influence it.

They turn away from devolved elections. They vote for Westminster parties in Senedd contests and wonder why things don’t change. And they begin to believe, however unconsciously, that politics happens to them, not with them.

Egregious

Goodall isn’t the only journalist guilty of this framing, but his position as a supposedly progressive voice makes the error more egregious.

At a time when the three smaller nations of the UK are renegotiating their place within the state, when support for independence is growing in both Scotland and Wales, it’s not enough to keep talking about “our” system as if there’s only one. There are multiple systems. Multiple mandates. Multiple democratic and cultural traditions across these islands.

And if Westminster, and the Westminster commentariat, really wants to understand why its politics feels so broken, it might start by looking not to the continent, but to Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast.

Politics through division might be deeply rooted in Westminster. But that doesn’t make it inevitable, and it certainly doesn’t make it universal.