Welsh Conservatives are risking irrelevance with an anti-devolution stance

Ioan Phillips

I appreciate that what I’m about to say may constitute political blasphemy to readers of this esteemed organ.

But, after working closely with several Conservatives of Welsh extraction during my stint as a ministerial aide, I’ve residual sympathy for those ploughing the Tory furrow in Wales.

It’s not exactly fertile soil, yet they continue doggedly making their case. Against flatlining polling and an impending Senedd election, certain figures within the Welsh Conservatives are, however, arguing that the party should stop ploughing and, instead, commit to salting the earth via an anti-devolution agenda.

These anti-devolution advocates typically rely on three main propositions. The first is that education,healthcare, and economic outcomes are poor because of devolution.

The second is that this situation only serves to embed needless policy divergence and drive nationalism, weakening the UK.

The third is that opposing self-government is the best way of maintaining the Union (and, helpfully, the Conservative vote share).

Even the staunchest critic of Conservative anti-devolutionists would concede that there’s logical consistency to their arguments.

There’s no denying, either, that the genetic makeup of the Conservatives in Wales has always contained a latent anti-devolution gene. As late as 2005, Conservative Party policy was to offer a referendum on abolition.

With a noughties-style wipeout looming into view, you can, on one level, understand why certain Conservative factions are yearning for an anti-devolution pivot to capture the quarter or so of Welsh voters opposed to devolution.

Reverting to an anti-devolution stance would be strategically myopic, though. For a start, it’s based on some questionable assumptions about voter behaviour. The anti-devolutionists conveniently overlook how nearly three-quarters of Welsh voters have no desire to ditch devolution.

Nor is there any guarantee that those Welsh voters who do want to bid devolution hwyl fawr would be sufficiently motivated to turn out and vote in a Senedd election or, if they did, cast their ballots in the same way.

The spectacular flop of the single-issue Abolish the Assembly Party in the 2021 Senedd election should be a cautionary tale for anti-devolution proponents who pose the stance as an electoral silver bullet.

One can’t help but feel that the opposition to devolution amongst certain parts of the Welsh party is, in part, motivated by an underlying fear of Reform.

As things stand, Reform looks set to gain significant Senedd representation next year – largely at Tory expense.

While Reform’s Welsh campaign materials contain typical anti-devolution dog whistles, the party hasn’t stated that it would abolish devolution, with its leader, Nigel Farage, even committing to “work with any other Welsh party”.

This isn’t to deny that many Reform supporters in Wales don’t like devolution. It’s more that constitutional technics aren’t necessarily what’s motivating their support.

Among those Welsh voters planning to vote for Reform in 2026, more than half say immigration is their number one issue.

An anti-devolution platform would likely be the nail in the coffin for any Welsh Conservative hopes of post-election cooperation with opposition counterparts.

The party’s top brass recognises the potential need for an arrangement to oust Labour. Obtaining grassroots acquiescence in (if not support for) this feels like an incredibly hard sell.

Moreover, such a dynamic hardly presents the Conservatives as a reliable would-be coalition partner in any event.

The tensions between the Welsh Conservatives’ leadership and activists underscore the wider (and unresolved) internal debate about the purpose of the Conservative Party in Wales.

Should the party’s priority be acting as a unionist outpost, or removing a Labour government from office and implementing Conservative policies?

The problem with the former approach is that it smacks of what’s colloquially dubbed “rage quitting”, a gaming term used to denote abandoning a video game out of frustration when losing. Or, to put things more formally, it’d be rejecting traditional conservative concepts such as localism and institutionalism (tellingly, opponents of Welsh devolution don’t have much of a problem accepting these concepts in an English context).

Ultimately, anti-devolutionists are stuck fighting the battles of yesterday. It’s richly ironic that, with the Welsh Conservatives’ opponents focusing on bread-and-butter issues, some Tories think the answer is campaigning on perceived constitutional wrongs accumulated over the last three decades (a reflex they’re happy enough criticising nationalists for).

Scratching the anti-devolution itch might provide some short-lived relief for the Conservative base. It’s not, however, a prescription for continued relevance in a country where self-government is taken as the established order of things.

Ioan Phillips is a former Whitehall civil servant who worked as private secretary to three Conservative Transport Secretaries