Here’s a fun one: a North Wales businessman – who happens to also be a former chair of the Alyn and Deeside Labour association – has launched a campaign calling for a devolution deal for North Wales.
Askar Sheibani, now leader of the Deeside Business Forum, has said that a Metro Mayor for the region is the only way to prevent it getting short-changed time and again by the Welsh Government, comfortably ensconced at the other end of the country in Cardiff Bay.
His campaign was prompted by Cardiff’s decision to scrap all planned major road projects in North Wales. In a letter to members and supporters, seen by ConservativeHome, Sheibani savages not just the decision, but the manner in which it was made and announced:
“The announcement by the Deputy Minister for Transport to scrap the road building in North Wales, without any consultation with the communities and the businesses, was very disturbing. The Deputy Minister didn’t even consult the local councillors, MPs or MSs. He only relied on a handful of specially picked consultants and academics.”
He then goes on to summarise the case for North Wales having its own devolution arrangements:
“North Wales’s economy is totally different from the rest of Wales. We have access to two tax-free Freeports in Liverpool and Holyhead. Deeside and Wrexham are one of Europe’s largest manufacturing regions. We are close to two large cities; Liverpool and Manchester and international airports connecting us to the rest of the globe.
“We have one of the most attractive regions in the UK for tourism. North Wales has one of the most suitable geographies for the construction of a Tidal Lagoon and renewable energy. Our Region has massive potential to become a world-beating economy if the Welsh Government allow us to have our own decision-making locally based leadership.”
There is now a petition on the Senedd website, which may be of interest to ConHome readers in North Wales.
On the facts of the argument, Sheibani has a point. Right from the start, one of the strongest cases against Welsh devolution was that an all-Wales arrangement wouldn’t – and indeed, doesn’t – map onto the economic geography beneath it. South Wales is highly economically interconnected with Bristol and neighbouring regions of England, just as is North Wales with the areas listed in Sheibani’s message.
It isn’t that the small-n nationalists in Cardiff Bay are ruthless about South Welsh interests, by any means; when the Government scrapped tolls on the Severn Bridge, they were accused of trying to undermine the integrity of Wales as an economic unit.
But the flow of decision-making does tend to run that way, as when during the pandemic people in North Wales were forced to make a round trip of several hours to the Principality’s single testing centre in the south.
What is perhaps surprising is that it has fallen to someone who was active in Welsh Labour to take this case public. Sheibani’s concerns have long been shared by Conservative MPs, of which North Wales currently sports a healthy crop.
Given the Tories’ forlorn prospects of ever taking power in Cardiff Bay, then running against Cardiff Bay – and in a less alienating way than the full-sugar devoscepticism of Abolish the Welsh Assembly – seems a promising torch for the party to pick up.
But even if they don’t, this should be an opening for the British Government. A petition to the Welsh Parliament to reduce its power is unlikely to go anywhere (there is “already a Minister for North Wales”, splutters the Welsh Government; there was already a Welsh Office in 1997).
But that doesn’t mean nothing can come of Sheibani’s campaign.
In Scotland, Westminster has for some years been negotiating City Deals with places such as Aberdeen, and could presumably find similar ways to increase direct cooperation with local government in North Wales.
Likewise, the various road schemes could also be centrally-supported, perhaps under the aegis of the Union Connectivity Review (remember that?). Indeed Gwynedd Council, which is run by Plaid Cymru, has already appealed to Westminster to revive the Llanbedr bypass.
But if ministers were feeling really bold – and this point in the political cycle is the time for boldness – why not go further, and offer North Wales an independent vote on a proper, comprehensive devolution settlement?
That could be a Metro Mayor, as called for by Sheibani. But it could also include a full-fat option for a North Wales Assembly, exercising all the powers currently exercised by the Senedd in Cardiff.
Naturally, the nationalists and devocrats would shout their heads off. It was Mark Drakeford, after all, who opened Welsh Labour’s 2021 manifesto with the false description of the UK as “a voluntary association of four nations with sovereignty shared among its four democratic legislatures”.
But there is no reason, if you’re not a Welsh nationalist, for Wales to be immune to the democratic logic that delivered the Welsh Parliament in the first place; if the people of North Wales were prepared to vote for their own legislature, why should their government in London not empower them to do so?
Remember that for all that it now positions itself as the voice of Wales, the Senedd was only endorsed by the barest of margins back in 1998. Since then, turnout for a Welsh election has yet to top 50 per cent: in 2021 it was just 46.6 per cent, exactly a full 20 points lower than at the 2019 general election.
It should not be the position of the British Government that the United Kingdom is a political unit of second-order legitimacy vis-à-vis its constituent parts; that it can be divided when popular sentiment demands it, but not they – especially when so many more of then turn out to elect representatives to our united Parliament. As Andrew Bonar Law wrote over a century ago in The Case for the Union:
“Every argument which can be adduced in favour of separate treatment for the Irish Nationalist minority as against the majority of the United Kingdom, applies with far greater force in favour of separate treatment for the Unionists of Ulster as against the majority of Ireland.”
As the woes of the SNP have amply demonstrated, there is much more scope for standing up to those undermining the UK than orthodox devolutionary thinking supposed. But it would be criminal folly to squander that by merely standing still, rather than using the new political space to pro-actively build a stronger British state.
Such passivity was how the Thatcher Government’s ended up squandering the annus mirabilis of 1979. The Conservatives should not make the same again.