‘Devolution has not been taken to heart by many in Westminster’
“DRIVE as far as you want”, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the entire UK at the start of May.
At the same time he told people to no longer “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” and to instead “stay alert” (for an invisible virus), the Prime Minister also said people they could now drive as far as they wanted.
He said: “You can drive as far as you want to, for example, to go and walk in a particular area that you are fond of, as long as you maintain the social distancing.”
As he made the announcement (in a pre-recorded speech with no scrutiny from the UK Parliament or journalists), police and health care workers in Wales gave a collective sigh.
Yes, Mr Johnson is the Prime Minister of the UK, but on that day he spoke only for England as none of the other devolved nations were making anywhere close to the same changes to their restrictions.
People in places like Conwy, Ceredigion, Powys and Pembrokeshire, who so far had seen mercifully few cases of Covid, were braced for an influx.
It wasn’t just people in England who would be confused. If you live, for example, in Merthyr, and you read a London-based newspaper and you watch the 10 o’clock news until it goes local about 10.30pm, then you would have been none the wiser that you were still not allowed to drive down to Tenby for the day.
Welsh politicians and senior police officers rushed to clarify that the PM’s announcement did not apply to Wales.
This fear was justified when Welsh holiday parks were suddenly inundated with calls as people attempted to make bookings.
But if someone in Wales had watched Boris Johnson’s announcement there was almost no reason to believe what he was saying didn’t apply to you.
After all, he is your Prime Minister. North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner Arfon Jones said the PM’s action had “made our work here in Wales so much harder and it is so unnecessary”.
At a time when police forces were stretched, enforcing the lockdown with officers having to self-isolate for the lack of tests, the Prime Minister made their jobs harder through a total lack of clarity.
There is a long list of reason why he may have been so vague. An accidental oversight? A deliberate attempt to steamroll over the devolution settlement?
I would suggest somewhere in the middle.
As is often the case with the UK Government, the most important thing is perception.
Some might see it as a weakness for a Prime Minister of a “united” kingdom to have to clarify that he was only speaking for a quarter of the nations in it.
The problem with pointing out others are doing it differently is that the people listening to you immediately realise there is another way, that some people see the situation differently.
This is all the more acute when all the respective decision-makers are working from a practically identical evidence base.
This gets to the very heart of the issues with our current devolution settlement.
It should not be seen as a weakness for a Prime Minister to operate within the restraints of the political system he’s in. It should just be how our governments operate.
But in defence of Boris Johnson he is working under a terrible constitutional set-up.
On many issues he is the decisionmaker for the whole of the UK, and on others he is just the leader of England.
This is the equivalent of the US President being both President on America and the governor of Oregon. It doesn’t work.
And it’s not just Wales, Scotland and NI that are failed under this settlement, but also England – perhaps to an even greater extent.
As someone who covers both UK and Welsh politics I can perfectly well understand why people in Wales believe Westminster considers them an afterthought (when they are thought of at all).
I spend half my time clarifying “x announcement does not apply to Wales”.
It is not just throwaway lines like Dominic Raab referring to the Welsh Parliament as the Welsh Executive or a seemingly unrelenting drive to describe every new policy as “across the length and breadth of Britain” when it actually ends at Offa’s and Hadrian’s respective barriers.
There are more serious issues like the recent disuse of ministerial implementation groups or not having devolved ministers in Cobra meetings.
Add to this the utter madness of the Chancellor of the Exchequer making an announcement and the administrations in Wales and Scotland waiting to see if any apply to them – simply learning about their budget at the same time as every other person.
This is to say nothing of the recent interventions of Welsh Secretary Simon Hart who urged MSs and heads of local councils to put pressure on the First Minister to set out a “roadmap” for tourism reopening – a deed no doubt intended to help the people of Wales, but also a lobbying effort into a competency where he had no jurisdiction.
It hardly reeks of cooperation between partners.
Devolution has not been taken to heart by many decision-makers in Westminster.
Much of our democracy is based on tradition, precedent and custom. But when something is new, it takes the collective desire of the operators to work, and at best many are totally apathetic to it.
This leaves us with the haphazard mess of a devolution settlement right now where the UK Government feels able to give less focus and attention to a place while simultaneously wielding and retaining an enormous amount of power over it.
Right now, in what we keep being told is the biggest crisis in generations, Mark Drakeford and Boris Johnson haven’t spoken directly for almost two months. It is madness.
Under the best of times the current settlement doesn’t work, but coronavirus has exposed the woeful shortcomings in our current constitutional setup.
Until all the Home Nations are given as much thought and investment as the Home Counties, calls and support for independence will only grow.