Undemocratic way to make vital decisions

THE leaders of Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru have sat down together in a smoke-free room and decided how our electoral system should work (to their advantage) from 2026.

Sixteen constituencies will elect six Senedd members each, and they will all be the same – none of them will be the member for a particular part of their Senedd constituency, which will be twice the size of a parliamentary constituency. The link between the people who live in a place and their elected representative will disappear.

Electors will vote for a Party List, not a candidate, with all the names on that list chosen and set in order by a small group of the party faithful. If you don’t like someone on the list you will still have to vote for them, unless you are prepared to abstain or vote for a different party.

By law half those elected will be men and half will be women – whether you like it or not, and irrespective of the particular qualities and abilities of individual candidates. No meritocracy for Wales!

Personally I would support an enlargement to 96 Senedd members under the existing Additional Member System, which would create lower thresholds for minority parties to get elected, and hence would improve the proportionality of the elections. But I wouldn’t support this naked attempt at gerrymandering, even if it is superficially similar.

Before AMS was introduced in Wales and Scotland, the Scots set up a Constitutional Convention allowing individuals and all sectors of civic society to participate in creating a blueprint for the changes. But such openness has rarely been the way in Welsh politics.

Maybe you thought the parties would put their constitutional ideas into their manifestos for the 2026 Senedd elections, and then we could vote on it? No chance – some version of the new arrangements will be in force by then, the Labour and Plaid leaders have agreed.

OK, so what did Labour’s 2021 Senedd manifesto promise? It said: “We will establish an independent standing commission to consider the constitutional future of Wales.” No sign of that yet, but it certainly would be more democratic than two party leaders deciding things in a smoke-free room.

Dave Bradney Llanrhystud, Ceredigion