In the coming general election, the parties and the commentators will fan out across Britain as never before. This general election will not be won and lost at the national level, as such contests normally were in the second half of the 20th century, when there was a standard Conservative-Labour battle in most constituencies, and when a broadly uniform national swing between the big two parties shaped the final verdict.
Instead, as Prof Vernon Bogdanor puts it in his new pamphlet for the Constitution Society, the 2015 election will be fought within regional enclaves – the nations and regions, cities and countryside of Britain – that reflect the country’s ever-growing fragmentation. The result, too, seems likely to reflect this fragmented Britain, with the new government – whether single party or coalition – having to rely on a network of regional mandates rather than on a national mandate of the kind that marked the postwar era. Whereas past governments relied broadly on nationwide social class for a mandate, the next one may represent one group of geographical regions.
Some of these regional enclaves are familiar. British elections have long been accustomed to the fact that contests in Northern Ireland march to an altogether different drum. The south-west of England has long been a battleground between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Now these familiarly distinctive political regions will be joined by the battle in the east between the Tories and Ukip, and in Scotland between Labour and the Scottish National party, as well as a patchwork of others. As Bogdanor rightly points out, this makes it ever more difficult for any party to embody the “one nation” approach to which they all pay lip service.
Because of the incredible dynamism of its post-referendum politics, Scotland is likely to be more closely fought and watched than any other regional battleground, its polls currently pointing to large SNP gains from Labour and the Lib Dems. As a result, it has now become the new orthodoxy to say that the 2015 election may well be settled in Scotland, because the SNP’s gains (or lack of them) may decide whether Labour emerges on 7 May as the largest single party in the new parliament. It is hard to disagree.
In this election, Scotland’s 59 seats will not be knowingly under-reported. The same, though, cannot be said of Wales’s 40. Few parts of the UK election are more likely to be overlooked and taken for granted as those in Wales. The reasons for that may seem glumly obvious. Wales is smaller than Scotland, its nationalist movement is less potent, its politics are lower profile, and it supplies few of Westminster’s big beasts. In a parliament of 650, Wales’s 40 seats provide its voters with little of the leverage that Scotland now enjoys.
Wales’s lack of clout is also enhanced by the fact that its politics seem to be both more traditional and less volatile than those of the rest of the UK. The most recent poll in Wales, by YouGov for ITV Wales and Cardiff University at the end of January 2015, shows this very clearly. Labour leads on 37%, trailed by the Conservatives on 23%, Ukip 16%, Plaid Cymru 10%, Greens 8% and Liberal Democrats 6%. On a uniform swing across Wales, that would leave Labour with 28 seats (up 2 – Cardiff North and Cardiff Central – from 2010), Tories 8 (no change – a loss in Cardiff North to Labour but a gain in Brecon and Radnor from the Lib Dems), Plaid 3 (no change) and the Lib Dems 1 (down 2). In a general election, where the result still seems impossibly hard to predict at the UK level, the result in Wales looks on course to be all too familiar.
Why should this be? Why, at a time when nationalism is turning Scottish politics on its head and disenchantment with the established parties is making English politics so hard to call, should Wales apparently be relatively unaffected by such destabilising forces? Does it mean, as Welsh nationalists presumably hope, that Wales is simply the last bastion of the old politics, clinging limpet-like to the habits and solidarities of the past? Or does it perhaps mean, as intelligent Labour optimists argue, that Wales offers a template for a new kind of confederal British politics, combining progressivism, patriotism and a new approach to unionism?
The answer, inevitably, is a combination of the two. The more minor key of Welsh nationalism compared with that of the Scots undoubtedly reflects Plaid’s distinctively cultural and linguistic roots. Welsh opinion also took longer to embrace devolution — heavily rejecting Jim Callaghan’s version in 1979 before narrowly endorsing Tony Blair’s in 1997, and then emphatically approving further powers in 2011. Yet the accelerating trajectory in favour of devolution is wholly unmatched by any appetite for independence – which languished at just 3% support in the wake of the Scottish no vote last year.
Compared with Scotland, Plaid and Welsh independence seem beached. Meanwhile, Labour, governing devolved Wales uninterruptedly since 1999, less touched politically by the traumas of New Labour than the Scottish Labour party, and led successively by Welsh speakers Rhodri Morgan and Carwyn Jones, has successfully wrapped itself in the red dragon flag without challenging the union with England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Romantic it isn’t. And all the better for it. It is also the key to why the politics of Wales matter much more widely. Post-industrial Wales is not one of the boom parts of Britain. The recession bit very deep. But its dynamism nevertheless exceeds its dependence. David Marquand recently called Cardiff the most politically interesting city in Europe.
Wales has a claim to be the one part of the UK in which the three principles of progressivism in public policy, patriotism about the nation and its culture, and a real constructive readiness to make a reformed union work better, all still co-exist. The same, alarmingly, cannot be said of England or Scotland. As such, Wales could be the petri dish for a reformed Britain’s future, a subject also addressed in an important new report from the Institute for Government thinktank on Friday.
The Welsh solution should command the general attention and proper respect, not least because after May the choice facing Britain will be between reforming the union or watching it slowly break apart. Similar lessons apply to the European Union too. The outcome of the election may be settled in Scotland. But it is the voice of Wales that we need to listen to after May.
