Principalities and Powers

From time to time, I receive a good number of emails from people in Wales who want to convey their delight that anyone in the wider United Kingdom has noticed their plight at the hands of that very particular oligarchy which has long existed in some form, but which has been given the run of the place by devolution.

Based in English-speaking areas, but using the Welsh language as its cordon sanitaire, that oligarchy is equally hostile and damaging to the general populations of English-speaking and Welsh-speaking areas alike. From some of the latter, I have actually had communications from people who, apparently based on my prose style, have assumed that I could read Welsh, a deficiency which is of course on my part, and which one day, together with the want of my ancestors' Gaelic, I may remedy.

But now, that oligarchy is embarked upon yet another power grab, aided and abetted by the express indifference of a Prime Minister whose attitude is inexplicable on many levels. A classic posh Scot in that his country house there is matched by a grand London townhouse, an English public school education, an Oxbridge degree, and a safe Conservative seat in the South East of England, he would never dream of adopting such an approach to Scotland. Yet his party has long done better in Wales, where it has mostly been a victim of First Past The Post, than in Scotland, and it has lately done very well indeed there.

With no economic mythology based around a single natural resource, Wales has no separatists worth speaking of, and never has had, not even when this island had the sense to dig the coal on which it largely stands. For the sheer lack of anything else, such people as do exist vote Plaid Cymru, a party not without more admirable features as an embodiment, both of the rural Radicalism that largely died of neglect in England after the First World War, and of the Welsh peace tradition such that that party has from the outset opposed the war in Afghanistan. However, resurgent Welsh Toryism does face a serious threat from UKIP, which, unlike the Liberal Democrats, is strong enough in Wales to have returned an MEP there.

One could go on.

Yet Cameron is determined to hold a referendum on further Welsh devolution, wanted by no one except the members of the Assembly and of their entourages. Created with the support of fully twenty-six per cent of eligible voters, the Assembly has already given the land of Bevan, as staunch a Unionist as it is possible to imagine, longer waits than in England for elective surgery, a forty-six per cent (in some areas, a seventeen per cent) ambulance response time to Category A emergencies compared with England's seventy-seven per cent, the worst stroke services in the United Kingdom, and the endangerment of cross-border services because of a refusal to work with English Health Trusts.

More broadly, investment per pupil is now 9.5% lower than in England, there is a worsening lack of local access to A-level courses, seventy million pounds recently had to be sent back to Brussels because it had not been spent on time, there is a sixty million pound shortfall in university funding, and even Professor Kevin Morgan, who chaired the Yes campaign in 1997, now speaks of devolution as "devolving our way to relative economic decline".

None of this would be helped by primary legislative powers for the body that has created the mess. Still less by taxing and borrowing powers for that same body, necessarily as part of a funding reorganisation that would leave it with £9.1 billion to find by one or both of those means. Unless, that is, it intended to abolish the whole of health spending and local government. There is a proposal for a Welsh Stock Market, but, as much as anything else, why would anywhere want such a thing these days? A Welsh Honours List is a faintly charming, and reassuringly monarchist, idea, but the main argument against it is that it seeks to solve a problem which does not exist: Wales, with about five per cent of the United Kingdom's population, already receives about six per cent of honours. Good on the Welsh.

That leaves the rumbling about a separate judicial system. Lots of extra money, largely public money, for lawyers, mostly or entirely South Wales-based but bilingual lawyers deliberately as detached from the life of an English-speaking former pit village as from the life of a Welsh-speaking agricultural community. Extreme inconvenience in securing justice from the higher courts if one happened to live in North, Mid or West Wales and had to make the time-consuming journey to Cardiff, via exactly the English cities where one's case could previously have been heard.

But very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid if the Welsh Assembly is given primary legislative powers, even with a safeguard such as the need for approval by both Houses of Parliament, following a recommendation as to expediency or otherwise by the Welsh Affairs Select Committee, before proceeding to Royal Assent, in the same way that Measures passed by the General Synod of the Church of England require such approval, following a recommendation as to expediency or otherwise by the Ecclesiastical Committee, before proceeding to Royal Assent.

Furthermore, the majority of those MPs voting in favour should have to include the majority of those sitting for Welsh seats; they, along with the (often very Old Labour) Welsh Peers who could be relied upon to turn out in force on these occasions and to exercise that great sway which is the manner of the House of Lords when true experts speak, would spare both English-speaking and Welsh-speaking Wales many a monstrosity that would doubtless be imposed without such checks and balances.

Why is David Cameron indulging this clamour for one moment? Why? And how does he regard it as remotely consistent with his position, even if not a single person in Wales voted for his party, to be indifferent as to the answer or the outcome?