The Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales – the latest installment in the Welsh Constitutional Universe franchise – recently published its final report (Cymraeg – pdf; English – pdf).
There’s also an easy-to-read version (Cymraeg – pdf; English – pdf).
The Commission was a 2021 Labour Senedd election manifesto commitment and was taken forward under the co-operation agreement with Plaid Cymru. The entire exercise cost just over £1.5million.
The Commission was tasked with considering options for strengthening Welsh democracy and devolution, as well as options for Wales’ long-term constitutional future.
This was going to be a piece about post-politics in Wales – why we don’t “do” politics anymore. Ironically, I couldn’t be bothered. That’ll be touched on in a separate mini-series on independence and democracy starting in March.
As a primer to that, this piece looks at the Commission’s findings and the chances of anything being delivered (lol).
The Commission deserves the most credit for their genuine attempt to gather views from as broad a selection of people as possible.
That’s despite the face-to-face sessions – which likely formed most of the evidence base – hearing mainly from the usual suspects in academia, politics and various representative bodies. It also seems to lean quite heavily on the Wales Governance Centre/Edinburgh University’s 2023 “State of the Union“ research. For all the joking about federalism being as dead as disco, the Commission could’ve provided a clearer vision of how it would work in practice.
The report itself is more readable than some of its predecessors. As a piece of work and as an exercise it was well done. No complaints.
As for the findings, conclusions and response to it – if I couldn’t laugh about it I’d cry.
TL;DR version: “Wales should have the same powers as Scotland (….again)”
Barring the inclusion of independence as a half-serious proposition, there’s not a lot that’s new.
The report isn’t particularly radical or groundbreaking. You can even make a strong argument that it was overly cautious (for example, there was no call for immediate full devolution of criminal justice, and they kicked devolution of broadcasting and welfare administration down the road). That’s presumably for the sake of compromise amongst commission members coming from very different political backgrounds.
It’s a bit like taking the content of previous commissions (that covered similar ground), changing the names and faces (while bringing back a few old favourites), and then putting it together in a slightly different arrangement that’s easier to digest and is a bit more modern.
That arrangement however always boils down to the same central tenet: “Wales should have the same powers as Scotland.”
It’s worth questioning the point of this exercise when it seems to have done nothing other than to tell the same people the same things they’ve been told for the last 20 years or so. What’s even more hilarious is an informal recommendation that local government needs to be looked at again!
I swear some people at the top of Welsh civic society wouldn’t sneeze unless a task & finish group or expert committee said it was OK for them to do so.
So it’s a rather unsatisfying “soft reboot” or “legacy sequel”. If the Kilbrandon Commission was The Terminator, the Richard Commission Terminator 2: Judgement Day and the Silk Commission The Sarah Connor Chronicles, then this Constitutional Commission is Terminator: Dark Fate.
Lapping the constitutional drive-thru
Not long after the Commission was announced I posted “Dusty Shelves: A Short History of Welsh Constitutional Commissions” which underlines the poor track record of turning recommendations from various constitutional reform reports into reality.
“….you should probably keep any ideas floating around your head on what the latest commission can achieve well in check. Although I always hope to be pleasantly surprised, expecting that with anything concerning Welsh politics is just setting yourself up for disappointment. So keep those expectations low.
“Labour will be able to put a tick next to its 2021 manifesto commitment to hold a ‘national civic conversation about our constitutional future’ and there’s a nice space for the report on the dusty shelf next to the rest of them.
“The Tories can stop wetting themselves over the Union (again). Plaid Cymru can look as though they’re doing something meaningful to move Wales closer to independence while being as far away from delivering it as ever before. So it goes.”
I’m wrong about a lot of things, but you’ll have to work hard convince me I was wrong about this.
In spite of the cross-party consensus – and relatively modest, middle-of-the-road, recommendations – it only took a few days for Labour and Tory MPs (the people who can deliver most of the recommendations) to put the report through a shredder.
Has £1.5million – and some of our best constitutional expertise – been pissed up a wall? All so the great and the good of Welsh politics can lap the constitutional fast food drive-thru for the umpteenth (borderline torturous) time, only for MPs to turn around from the front seats and say, “We have food at home”. So it goes.
