Devolution: How was it for you?
BACK in May 1999, I was suffering from a bout of imposter syndrome as I sat among the VIPS while 12,000 people enjoyed fireworks and song in Cardiff Bay. The event was described by the media at the time as “a fitting end to a day of celebrations to mark the opening of the new Welsh National Assembly”.
How I got to be located a few rows behind the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh and Prime Minister Tony Blair is another story for another time.
But what struck me was the amount of deference shown to 60 newlyminted Assembly Members who readily accepted their “big fish, small pond” status despite a dismissal of the newly founded institution by one local authority leader as “merely a county council on stilts”.
I’m fairly sure that the sentiment came from contempt based on overfamiliarity given that so many AMS were already national or local political figures who had seemingly sought an easier life in what would be an influential but relatively powerless body.
That mistaken perception diminished as successive referenda granted powers to Welsh Government and the Senedd. Partisan support similarly swelled and ebbed over the next five elections, as groupings entrenched or else grew and then self-destructed.
A fun fact, if you’re entertained by that sort of thing, is that Labour has never had the benefit of an outright majority.
A few experts reckon that the hybrid system of proportional representation used to elect Senedd members means there’s every likelihood that the situation will persist with the planned increase in numbers from 60 to 96.
Devolution was grasped as an opportunity to do things differently – a viable alternative to the Welsh Office trickle-down colonialism. Whether it was more effective, especially in terms of economic policy, has long been disputed.
No more so was this the case than with the so-called “bonfire of the quangos” where the decision to scrap the Welsh Development Agency was likened to beating the regional economy over the head with a blunt instrument. It wasn’t executed deftly either.
I remember chatting to agency chief Graham Hawker at a black-tie do at the Brangwyn Hall when he received a text message. “It seems I’ve been sacked,” he said, and headed for the bar.
What followed, in the opinion of many, was an misguided switch of focus from inward investment under the guidance of professional expertise to a notionally more accountable but inevitably ill-equipped form of political direction.
To make matters worse, seldom did a month go by without stories of officials rolling their eyeballs at ideological whimsies dictated by whoever was the latest partner in a succession of supply and confidence arrangements.
It finally took junior minister Lee Waters to vocalise what pretty much everyone else was thinking when in June 2019 he told a business lunch audience: “There’s a degree of disappointment among some people ... who feel that devolution hasn’t achieved its potential.
“For 20 years we’ve pretended we know what we’re doing on the economy – and the truth is we don’t really know what we’re doing on the economy.
“Nobody knows what they’re doing on the economy.
“Everybody is making it up as we go along – and let’s just be honest about that. We’ve thrown all the orthodox tools we can think of [into] growing the economy in the conventional
way, and we’ve achieved static GDP over 20 years.”
A colleague of mine who has never signed up to the principles, let alone the actual practices, of sustainable development, self-rule or artificial sweeteners, is convinced that the price of devolution is a “sub-strata of shape-shifting policy influencers”.
He may be right, but show me an administration on the planet where things happen differently.
Some argue that devolution in Wales has plateaued; that it’s even been a failure.
Yet the last Senedd election was arguably the first to have produced a verdict on government performance in Cardiff Bay rather than upon Westminster by proxy.
That’s an encouraging piece of recognition in my book.
Similarly it’s taken a quarter of a century to see the emergence of a new generation of Senedd members who hold perspectives moulded by a different political dynamic when it comes to social policy.
Former Secretary of State for Wales, Ron Davies, wrote: “Devolution is a process. It is not an event and neither is it a journey with a fixed end-point.
“The devolution process is enabling us to make our own decisions and set our own priorities, that is the important point. We test our constitution with experience and we do that in a pragmatic and not an ideologically driven way.”
I agree with the sentiment but I can’t help but feel how it’s that last sentence that gets forgotten too often.