Lewis Norton: Why the Welsh Conservatives are containing ‘devo-scepticism’ and is it sustainable?

Lewis Norton is a PhD Researcher at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University.

 Those familiar with recent events in Welsh politics will understand when I say that managing the Welsh Conservatives has become a particularly complex arrangement.

With the elections to the Senedd approaching in mere months, the party has had to address defections to Reform at both its public-facing level as well as its backroom staff, and polling is continuously showing the party to be stuck at around 12 per cent, which is a potentially dangerous level to be polling at given the intricacies of Wales’ new electoral system.

Chiefly among the issues the Welsh party has faced is the ongoing internal tensions around the party’s stance on devolution.

Darren Millar, the leader of the Conservatives’ Senedd Group, has been explicit in saying that abolishing the Senedd is off the table, and in seeking to ensure that the party’s candidates share this position, has come under frequent scrutiny from those within (or formerly within) the party who accuse the party leadership of a “war on the grassroots”

With a matter of weeks left until voting day, the potential cracks of this approach are beginning to reveal themselves. Despite Darren Millar’s insistence that anti-devolution candidates would not be able to stand, in the case of Calum Davies, there is a candidate topping the party list who has been vocal in his opposition to devolution, and candidates further down the lists have also made suggestions of a devo-sceptic position. Naturally, affirming this position also goes against the grain of the majority of the Welsh Conservative grassroots and voter base at large, of whom two-thirds desire the Senedd’s abolition.

Beyond the party’s grassroots, there is also an untapped and underappreciated market for devo-sceptic views amongst the wider Welsh electorate. In YouGov polling, support for abolition of the Senedd and a Senedd with reduced powers stood at 31 per cent and 23 per cent respectively (compared with 24 per cent supporting Welsh independence). While this is below the level of support for the status quo or more devolution, no option enjoys majority support amongst the Welsh electorate, and polls like this one show that clearly there is an undercurrent of devo-scepticism within the Welsh electorate.

The party’s platform on devolution is somewhat ambiguous, which is a common theme throughout the post-devolution era. While officially supportive of its existence, the party has dedicated a lot of its campaigning energy thus far against the expansion of the Senedd’s membership from 60 to 96. This may be somewhat ingrained in a level of devo-scepticism, but it has largely been argued on a cost and practicality basis as opposed to an ideological disagreement and has perhaps become a proxy to avoid addressing the “elephant in the room” of real devo-scepticism which has become such a divisive topic.

It would not be fair, however, to suggest that the party’s direction on this matter is without reason. In fact, it is heavily grounded in logical elite decision-making which those looking at party management would expect to observe.

Firstly, the Conservative Party, perhaps more than any party in the democratic world, sees itself as a natural party of government. This office-seeking logic of the Conservatives is deeply established, and the party has a long and sustained record of adaptation to political and societal change to achieve high office. This logic, seemingly, holds even in Welsh politics despite a long and deep-rooted history of Conservative support in Wales lagging far behind its support in England. As a result, since the birth of the (then) Welsh Assembly in 1999, the Welsh Conservatives have usually attempted to put forward a serious platform for the use of devolved powers in Welsh elections as opposed to dipping their toes into the constitutional questions of the existence of the devolved legislature.

Secondly, in a similar vein to the first reason, the Welsh Conservative aversion to committing to a devo-sceptic platform has become enshrined in a vote-winning logic. While, as mentioned earlier, there is clearly a market for these views amongst a minority of the electorate, targeting this group comes with risks which the party management likely deem unacceptable. The primary risk is that by focusing on the wishes of the grassroots and the devo-sceptic portion of the electorate, the party may alienate the majority of the Welsh electorate who find themselves on the outside of this cluster. Furthermore, those not aligned with the existence of the Senedd are less likely to turn out to vote in its elections. This has been observed throughout devolution, as many Conservative voters in Westminster elections simply don’t turn out at all in Senedd elections. From a vote-seeking perspective, why appeal to a section of the electorate who don’t vote?

If devo-sceptics want to increase their influence on the agenda-setting of the Senedd, then they need to turn out like they haven’t previously. This is somewhat of a double-edged sword, with the lack of a major outwardly devo-sceptic party likely contributing to the lesser turnout, but even where parties campaigning on an abolition platform have been present (namely the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party – who in 2021 were expected to achieve representation) they haven’t been able to mobilise this voter base to achieve anything substantial. Such cases likely reinforce the current Welsh Conservative antipathy toward adopting such a position.

The question here is whether this approach is tenable in the long term. Increasingly, there is a sense that the party needs to make a decision on this constitutional question which has been an ever-present issue for nearly three decades. Ultimately, the sustainability of this approach will depend largely on the result the party achieves in May. In particular, what the make-up of the potentially reduced in size Conservative Senedd group is, and its impact on the dominant faction of the group which currently accommodates devolution. If a smaller Conservative group is proportionately more populated with candidates who support an abolitionist position, we may quickly see a change in tact post-election.

Such a change may be further incentivised depending on how Reform’s Senedd cohort addresses devolution. Thus far, in the face of a similar dilemma as the Conservatives, Reform have also sought to accommodate devolution, and are insistent that they will be a constructive presence to “make devolution work”, going so far as to express excitement at the Senedd expansion which the Conservatives have been in steadfast opposition towards, although this excitement was likely more strategically based on the opportunities it provides for the party rather than an ideological delight towards an expanded Senedd.

Similarly to the Conservatives, whether this position holds for Reform will depend on the composition of its Senedd cohort. If the last time a Farage-led party achieved representation in the Senedd on the basis of working constructively within the institution is to be informative (in the case of UKIP in 2016), then Reform may bring with them an influx of very devo-sceptic Senedd members. But if they don’t, and a potentially small Conservative group coming out of the other side of the huge external shock of a poor election result observes the low-hanging fruit of differentiation through scepticism, then a change in tact may become much harder to resist, and potentially even necessary.