The Devolution Generation - a lecture
The Devolution Generation - the birth and bedding in of the Senedd
Centre of Welsh Politics and Society's and WISERD's 2025 Annual Lecture
November 27th - Main Hall, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University
Diolch am y croeso, ac y cyfle i dod nol.
I don’t come back to Aber very often, so when I do I get the strange sensation of both continuity and change.
The prom, the grind of Penglais Hill, and the smell of the books in the Huw Owen Library, are just the same as I remember them.
They are fixed points. They have barely changed.
What has changed in 30 years is the context.
30 years ago this just wouldn’t be happening.
There were no annual lectures on Welsh politics, there were no conversations about Welsh politics.
In fact, in the mid 90’s, whilst there was undoubtedly plenty of politics in Wales, there was not what we can properly describe as ‘Welsh politics’.
What we had instead was neatly captured by the title of the HTV Wales weekly political programme of the time: Wales in Westminster.
A programme that didn’t even exist until the House of Commons began to be televised at the turn of that decade!
One of the few pundits on politics in Wales who popped up from time to time was based here at the Department, Dr Denis Balsom. He also produced one of the few sources of information about how Wales was run, the HTV Wales Yearbook.
I remember reading his annual summaries of the political trends at my school library in Ammanford Comprehensive, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to come here - to be taught by him.
But these were the days before the Institute of Welsh Politics - let alone the Centre of Welsh Politics and Society.
Denis Balsom taught British politics; there was no Welsh politics on the syllabus, until my second year when I took a course run by a Mr Richard Wyn Jones on Welsh political ideas.
They say the past is like a foreign country, well it's certainly true that they did things differently there.
Coming back here today, and revisiting the fixed points, forces me to remember how much we have managed to change the political facts on the ground within a single generation.
But it also reminds me how malleable the things are that we take for granted.
I am part of the first devolution generation. I am very proud to have played a role in the movement that has laid the groundwork of the first Welsh Parliament in 600 years.
But proud as I am of the Senedd, and as glad as I am that we have it, it frequently makes me want to scream.
We are living through really challenging times, and we are all frustrated.
As I come to the end of a decade as a Member of Senedd, half of that spent as a Minister in the Welsh Government, my own sense of frustration that we are not achieving our potential has, if anything, grown.
But that's why I've come back up Penglais Hill tonight to get a sense of perspective. To look out onto Cardigan Bay, take a deep breath, and remind myself how much our context has changed.
And to remind you that it hasn’t changed by accident.
I want to spend quite a bit of this lecture revisiting the period of politics when I was a student here, to recall how we ended up where we are today. And to consider what might happen next.
In the spring of my first year at Aber, 1995, the Labour Party’s Welsh conference agreed its policy on devolution. I had joined the party shortly before and was energised by the idea of changing the way Wales was run.
Labour’s policy proposal was called ‘Shaping the Vision’. And that vision was being moulded by Ron Davies.
He had become the Shadow Welsh Secretary a few years before and started framing an Assembly not simply in arid constitutional terms, but as a tool to respond to the economic and social challenges we faced.
In constitutional terms the policy was a modest compromise, and a bit of a mess; but in political terms, a miraculous reincarnation.
An Assembly for Wales, thought dead after a crushing 4:1 defeat in a referendum in 1979, was properly brought back to life.
For a self-imposed summer project at the end of my first year I wrote to him (Dear, Mr Davies…) asking for as much information as he could give me on the emerging policy, so that I could write an article for this department’s magazine, Interstate.
I remember receiving a large envelope full of press releases. The building blocks were all there, but the policy and politics were not yet settled, and a clear narrative was still emerging.
That was the beginning of my relationship with Ron.
I got to know him at the bar of party conferences, and caught his attention, with speeches I gave at Welsh Labour Party conferences.
One in particular where I took on his opposition to the gender balance policy of ‘twinning’ local parties, to get an equal number of male and female candidates.
There I was on the stage of a packaged Brangwyn Hall in Swansea (those were the days), full of self-righteousness, just turned 22:
“Our new Assembly, I said “must be a voice for Wales, not just another voice for males”.
He didn’t much like it, but he did offer me a job.
I’d won a scholarship to do a Masters at Essex University after graduating from Aber in 1998, but I couldn't turn down the chance to work for the Secretary of State for Wales as his Political Secretary, on the cusp of a new chapter in Welsh political history.
I think it's worth dwelling a little on the politics of that time, and the arguments that led to a National Assembly for Wales being successfully established.
For all the impatience there undoubtedly is at the performance of our devolved government and Parliament, it is worth remembering what it replaced - and what we could return to if populist feeling allows.
In the mid-90s there was no all-Wales democratic tier of politics, no representative voice.
Administrative devolution had developed steadily through the Century, accelerating from the mid-1960s onwards, to allow for some Wales specific policy frameworks. But they were modest.
The sense I get is that people in the under-powered Welsh Office, and beyond, who wanted to change and innovate, squeezed themselves into the space that was available. They made themselves small.
John Howells, a recently retired senior civil servant in the Welsh Government who began his career in the pre-devolution Welsh Office, described it to me as working in ‘some narrow, relatively limited area of operations’.
The political and constitutional structures constrained the ability to develop ‘Welsh solutions to Welsh problems’.
But there were signs of a growing flair in the civil service to move beyond the features of a colonial outpost to a modest laboratory of policy innovation.
He cites some distinctive approaches towards the funding of social housing back in the early 80s. A landmark policy launched in 1983, the so-called ‘All-Wales Mental Handicap Strategy’, to move care for people with learning disabilities out of long-stay institutions and into community-based settings - so beautifully captured in Hijink Theatre’s recent play ‘Housemates’.
And of course the 1993 Welsh Language Act, which established the principle of equality between the Welsh and English languages in public life in Wales.
As John Howells put it, “there was capacity to be engaged in certain areas of business, and people were making a difference in certain specified areas.
But the constitutional position was that unless you had a Secretary of State who was very anxious to make a noise in a particular area, you were very much operating in the shadow of the Whitehall machine”.
The ability to shape a distinctive policy agenda was heavily constrained by capability and capacity, and of course the constitution.
There were just three Welsh Office Ministers, and parliamentary scrutiny was confined to an annual Welsh Day debate in the House of Commons, occasional meetings of the Welsh Grand Committee of MPs, a Welsh Affairs Select Committee, and half an hour once a month in the House of Commons for a quick round of questions to Ministers at the bottom of the Westminster political ladder.
That was it.
No specific focus on health policy, for example.
No systematic ability to scrutinise public bodies in Wales.
No space to develop a Welsh school curriculum, or a different approach to buses and trains.
Nothing.
A Unitary State.
A single government.
And a largely administrative devolution settlement.
There was no Welsh politics.
And as for politics in Wales…It was simply dysfunctional.
There was no relationship between how Wales voted and who governed. “Never in the history of the secret ballot have the Conservatives won an election in Wales“ the historian Kenneth O Morgan reminded us in his 1995 BBC Wales annual radio lecture.
Not only did the governing party have no mandate in Wales, but between 1987 and 1997 not one Secretary of State who was charged with speaking for Wales at the Cabinet table represented a Welsh seat.
For a full decade we had a series of Conservative Welsh Secretaries who represented constituencies in England who were completely detached from the government of the country they ran.
Colwyn Philipps, who as Viscount St Davids was the Welsh Office spokesman in the House of Lords under John Major, and took part in the weekly Ministerial meetings - or Prayers as they were called. He referred to the post of Secretary of State for Wales as being the equivalent of a Gauleiter, the overbearing regional overlords that ran Nazi Germany.
The Tory Party governed Wales by proxy.
And ruled by political patronage.
As in the rest of the UK, the Thatcher and Major Governments weakened the role of local government.
Responsibilities were taken from elected Councils - and, under the premise of making the civil service more efficient, functions were shifted away from government departments - to arms-length bodies focused on delivery.
Executive Agencies were not a new invention, but these so-called Quangos more than doubled in number from 1979 as the Tories sought to inculcate an ‘enterprise culture’.
To this way of market-thinking accountability was best driven by customer need, not through democratic gatekeepers.
In Wales that trend took on an added characteristic because the democratic bodies that were having a lesser say over things like further education, housing or training provision, were ones where the Conservatives had next to no representation.
And the Quango’s that were growing in their place were run by people directly appointed by Conservative Ministers.
The Tories couldn’t get elected in Wales. At the 1991 Local Government elections they won fewer than 8% of Council seats. But in Welsh Quangoland they were flourishing.
That same year the Secretary of State for Wales made around 1,400 appointments to 80 quangos.
Their spending power was equivalent to the entire local authority revenue budget for Wales.
Dr Gwyn Jones, a Tory supporting businessman, was appointed to run the powerful Welsh Development Agency after meeting the Welsh Secretary at a Conservative Party fundraising lunch.
Conservative activist and farmer, Glyn Davies, was made head of the other economic agency, the Development Board for Rural Wales.
Former cricketer, and old-fashioned Tory, Tony Lewis, got a quick phone call from the Secretary of State and was made Chair of the Wales Tourist Board.
No application process. No competition. Just Good Chaps.
Ian Grist, the Conservative MP for Cardiff Central who lost his seat in the 1992 general election, quickly reappeared as head of the South Glamorgan health authority as a political appointee of the Tory Welsh secretary.
Rejected by the voters, but put in charge of their public services nonetheless - without any way of holding him directly to account.
It was “power without scrutiny and government without ballot” Ron Davies railed.
And it was this ‘democratic deficit’ that became the most vivid argument for democratising the devolution that already existed to Wales.
The case for an Assembly that fell flat in the 1970s was a dry - and often interminable - constitutional one.
The revival of the arguments 20 years later learnt from those mistakes, and grounded the case in a grievance.
Unlike his predecessors as Shadow Welsh Secretary Ron Davies put the case for a Welsh Assembly at the centre of his scrap with the Tory Government in a way that no other frontbencher had.
Davies was often referred to by some Westminster journalists as a political bruiser, a valleys streetfighter, which they meant as a condescending put-down. But a street fighter is exactly what the devolutionist case needed.
The Conservative Government in London had been in power for a long time and its radical programme of de-industrialisation was alien to the political consensus in Wales.
The discordance was personified in the figure of John Redwood - a leading right-wing intellectual, with little emotional intelligence or social skill.
He was nicknamed ‘The Vulcan’, which captured his otherworldliness.
Unlike other Tory Welsh secretaries who used the office to advance a watered-down version of the Thatcher medicine, Redwood lacked any political deftness, or empathy for the context he was operating in.
A radical Thatcherite, he was more at home in the Downing Street Policy Unit than as a tactician behind enemy lines.
As David Melding once quipped, it was wrong to compare him to Star Trek’s Vulcan Mr Spock - after all Mr Spock was half human!
Redwood used his pulpit in Whitehall’s Gwydr House to preach to an internal Tory audience: Single mothers on Cardiff council estates were identified as a source of moral decay; and underspend in the Welsh Office budget was gleefully returned to the Treasury to prove his credentials as a champion of small government.
He refused to sign-off letters in Welsh, was reluctant to stay overnight in Cardiff, and nodded his head side-to-side at the singing of the Welsh national anthem.
John Redwood, unwittingly, did more to sell the case for devolution than anyone else in the 1990s.
In fact the Labour Party were still using footage of him bobbing along to the anthem in their electioneering 20 years after his Llangollen massacre of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau took place.
It helps to have a common enemy, especially when you are divided.
The Labour Party, then and now - indeed since its birth - has been conflicted about the so-called ‘National Question’. It reflects a tension in socialist thought, and difference of view between the centralist and pluralist traditions.
It’s an honest intellectual disagreement - different strands of a common DNA. Nye Bevan and Jim Griffiths; Neil Kinnock and Ron Davies; Rhodri Morgan and Paul Murphy; Mark Drakeford and Jo Stevens. They just see it differently.
And it can be deeply felt. The intellectual, and the emotional, overlap.
Identity and tribalism combine to amplify the instinct.
Whereas Aneurin Bevan focused on the common economic interest of workers, famously observing in the first Welsh Day Debate in the House of Commons that he did “not know the difference between a Welsh sheep, a Westmorland sheep and a Scottish sheep”; we can point to others with more visceral attitudes.
Rhondda West MP, Iorrie Thomas, thought that creating a separate Welsh Office with its own Secretary of State was an attempt at ‘soothing national vanity’.
The former trade union leader was staunchly opposed. For him Wales was no more than an economic region.
In the National Library there sits a memo he wrote in 1957 to the Regional Council of Labour - what we now call the Welsh Labour Executive Committee - which dismisses arguments for devolution as the chants of a ‘tribal calypso’ - part of what he called “the mental neurosis associated with the virus of Nationalism”.
While it's tempting to dismiss this as old fashioned thinking I recall interviewing the then Pontypridd MP, Kim Howells, when I was a student here in 1998 and his opening gambit to me was “I’m never very sure that nationalism has got anything to do with socialism. I keep putting the words together and coming up with Hitler”.
The language these days is more tempered, but you don’t need to be a Kreminoligist to decipher where the current Welsh Secretary, Jo Stevens, is coming from when she dismisses further devolution as "fiddling around with structures and systems when there are urgent things to be done to fix things, which is what our people's priorities are in Wales."
There are differences.
They existed then, they exist today.
And so you can well imagine that in the years following the bitter 1979 referendum, when advocates of devolution started bringing the subject back up, there was not much enthusiasm to go there.
Not least since one of the leaders of the No campaign was now the Leader of the Labour Party.
Neil Kinnock hadn’t changed his view about devolution, but he had bigger battles on his hands, and so was broadly willing to let the momentum build in the background.
Despite the 1984 Miners Strike breaking down some of the tribal barriers on ‘The Left’ in Wales, there was a residual hostility to ‘The Nats’, as they were invariably called. And so arguments for an Assembly that focused on the constitutional claims of Wales, or heaven-forbid ‘Nation Building’, were sure signs of wrong-headedness.
Even progressive trade unionists such as Wales TUC General Secretary David Jenkins, were only willing to talk about embracing ‘devolution all around’. An Assembly for Wales as part of a general decentralisation of government in all parts of the UK was as much as could be stomached.
But debates around reforming local government kept coming back to the need for a strategic co-ordinating tier, and so the logic of revisiting the case for a Welsh Assembly reasserted itself on the party’s wish-list.
But it was all rather bloodless.
It was the Thatcher Revolution that really brought some colour to the cheeks of devolutionsists.
Labour always performed better in Wales than it did in the UK as a whole, but remained in Opposition. Graffiti daubed on a bridge near Nelson in the Rhymney valley summed it up: ‘We voted Labour but got Thatcher’.
Support for devolution began to build after the 1987 General Election saw a second landslide Tory victory send a chill through the labour movement in Wales.
A new intake of Welsh Labour MPs felt powerless to protect their constituents from what one of their number, Rhodri Morgan, described as “the ravages of a Tory Government”.
The Poll Tax. Privatisation of large industries - steel, electricity, water - one followed the other, in a blast of momentum that Welsh MPs were powerless to stop.
Tory Ministers were reshaping the role of local authorities, especially in education and housing, and launching assaults on employment rights, which discombobulated the Labour Party and the trade unions.
We were, in the historian Gwyn Alf Williams’ chilling phrase, “standing naked under an acid rain”.
Maybe, just maybe, devolution would offer us some protections.
By the late 80s the attack on the post-war political consensus was generating such discomfort that the opponents of devolution in the Labour Party were forced to prioritise.
Just as Nye Bevan had eventually given in to Jim Griffiths on the commitment to create a Welsh Secretary, not because he’d changed his mind, but because he had bigger fish to fry; so Neil Kinnock went quiet, as devolution hesitantly crept back onto the party’s policy platform.
And so under sufferance, an Assembly for Wales found its way back into Labour’s 1992 manifesto.
But as Neil Kinnock later told me, had Labour won he would have done his best to kill it off in Government. He’d have insisted on a referendum, and with the Prime Minister against, it would surely have failed again.
After Labour's fourth successive defeat (and, critically, the removal of Neil Kinnock as Party leader), thinking shifted. By the time Ron Davies was made the party’s lead in Wales at the end of that year Labour had a new leader in John Smith who was a strong believer in devolution for Scotland.
As people openly wondered whether Labour could win in England ever again, support for a Plan B for Wales was growing.
“To put it very crudely” Kim Howells told me, “in a lot of people’s minds they said ‘look, if we can never ever win Britain, then we have got to change the rules’”.
With John Smith’s strong support Ron Davies - unlike his predecessors as Shadow Secretary of State for Wales - decided to place the case for an Assembly at the heart of the Labour’s message for change.
There was a good deal of ambivalence amongst Welsh Labour MPs, and a fair degree of opposition. But after 18 years in the wilderness, and a General Election pending, there was a premium on loyalty - so doubters kept their own counsel.
But they weren’t prepared to let Ron Davies have it all his own way.
The model of devolution that was eventually agreed was not the one he pushed for. He and Rhodri Morgan wanted Wales to get a similar set-up to Scotland. But in an internal battle they lost.
What was agreed instead was a more modest blueprint closer in character to a large Council than a Parliament.
It was similar to what had been put forward in 1979 - an Assembly, not a Parliament; with powers akin to those of the Welsh Office, and without full law-making or tax varying levers.
And crucially it would be elected using the Labour-friendly First Past the Post voting system.
This was another battle that Ron Davies had lost.
He wanted to use proportional representation to show that an Assembly would be different to Labour dominated local government in Wales - so loathed by the other opposition parties.
What the Liberal leader in the 1970s, Jeremy Thorpe, warned would be ‘South Glamorgan County Council on stilts’.
Davies’ advocacy drew great suspicion from his own party’s apparatchik class in Westminster, who briefed journalists that he had ‘gone native’.
But the bit of pushback that the devolutionists really feared was the prospect of another devolution referendum.
The official line was firmly against putting the plans to another plebiscite.
It was the wrecking tactic Neil Kinnock forced onto the Labour Government in the 70s that killed-off an Assembly once before.
So when Labour Leader Tony Blair told Ron Davies he’d decided after all to make Scottish devolution conditional on a referendum, but it was up to Davies what to do in Wales - his heart sank.
To follow the Scots risked defeat, but to accept Blair’s opt-out would confirm the Welsh Assembly’s status as a poor relation of the real Parliaments.
This is the point at which I believe Ron Davies deserves proper recognition. He showed greater tactical flair than that of a mere streetfighter.
He opted for a referendum, but in return secured Blair’s support to reopen the question of the voting system.
Blair would face down Davies’ critics in the party for him.
A referendum could only be won with the backing of Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats, Davies persuaded Blair. And they would not line-up behind a voting system that would lock in Labour’s dominance.
It was a deft bit of politics on his part. He knew Blair himself was ambivalent about devolution, and about PR, but was anxious to limit the amount of political capital a new Government would have to spend in Parliament to get devolution through.
As Blair admitted years later, he inherited the commitment from John Smith. “So frankly” he said “it would have been hard to change it even if I had wanted to, but I had become convinced myself that it was basically the right thing to do…
…particularly in Scotland”.
For Davies then, and for Welsh devolution, it was now a case of shit or bust.
A compromise form a PR was agreed to combine 40 First Past the Post constituencies, with ‘an element of proportionality’ used in a ‘top-up’ of 20 seats using closed regional lists.
It kept the constituency link beloved of supporters of First Past the Post, but ensured a level of fairness for the other parties whose support was spread unevenly across Wales.
Crucially it allowed Davies to push back against the one-party culture, and have a chance at nurturing the inclusive politics he wished to see.
Blair might have been a fair-weather devolutionist, but it is undeniable that without his full-throated public backing of a Yes vote - as Prime Minister in his honeymoon period after the 1997 landslide victory - the referendum would never have passed.
Ron Davies’ gamble paid off.
I revisit this period just to remind us of the circumstances that saw the Assembly come into being.
It is easy to forget just how it used to be, and how far we’ve come; and what we could go back to if populist voices succeed in looking for another scapegoat for the frustrations of our times.
There was nothing inevitable about the creation of the Senedd.
And there’s nothing inevitable about it remaining.
I do worry about its future.
As things stand May’s elections to the Senedd are on course to reorder Welsh politics.
The two parties who have until now formed the government and opposition are being elbowed aside. And a new more proportional voting system for a larger Senedd all add to the sense of change.
One of the intended consequences of using PR in 1999 was to remove the dis-proportionality of the House of Commons system - where a party could win a landslide of seats on a minority of the vote.
When he talked about a new politics, an inclusive politics, what Ron Davies meant was that he designed the devolution settlement to favour co-operation.
Not a winner-takes-all approach to politics, but a give and take approach. Compromise.
Since 1999 no party has ever had more than half the seats in Cardiff Bay. After every election there has had to be a search for shared ground. And that will have to continue.
But it's tough stuff. It assumes there is a majority of people who are prepared to compromise. As politics gets more polarised, that assumption could be tested like never before after the next elections.
And the problems facing an incoming Welsh Government in May will be as hard as ever. There just isn’t enough money to do the things the majority of people want to do.
And after a decade and a half of austerity cuts, where local authorities have lost 40% of their workforce, there isn’t the machinery of government in place to respond with alacrity to the age of the Polycrisis.
Multiple, distinct crises are occurring simultaneously, and amplifying each other. A crisis greater than the sum of its parts.
And add to the mix a potential political crisis too:
Will there be the numbers to form a Government - and keep it together?
Will there be the numbers to pass a budget every year?
That is going to be harder than ever to pull off.
The question then arises: In the event of paralysis and chaos, will the residual forces who have never supported devolution grow?
Will those MPs who resent and belittle the Government in Cardiff, grow in confidence and accelerate the clawing back of powers that has already begun?
If there is a Reform-led Government, which is not implausible, how coherent will it be?
Will it have the internal discipline to withstand the pressures of governing?
Will it take its orders direct from party HQ and take us back to the era of the Gauliter?
These are the known unknowns?
I think we are in for a bumpy ride.
But as Ron Davies used to say to me, with deadpan gallows humour, when things went wrong: “Nobody said devolution was going to be easy”.
It was never a panacea. It is simply a mechanism to give Wales a voice, and bring decision-making closer.
What decisions are subsequently made are political choices. That’s what elections are for.
Devolution is just a process.
But its biggest achievement in its first three decades is to have put down roots for a new set of institutions, and to have created a firewall against policies that did not command Welsh political consensus - policies that otherwise would have been imposed.
And that’s not to be dismissed.
Just remember in the 20 years before devolution Wales was run by a government it didn’t vote for.
When a manifesto pledge to create a Welsh language TV channel was broken, there was no parliamentary way of reversing it. Wales had no mechanism to challenge it; it took a hunger strike, and the threat of martyrdom, to change minds.
When Wales’ economy was hit by 25,000 job losses through the systematic closure of coal mines, there was no democratic forum to respond to that, to express a response, or galvanise an economic alternative.
For all our shortcomings, when a pandemic hit, and it was clear that the Government in London’s response was based on a different set of values to the majority of people in Wales, we did have a means of doing something about it. We were able to take a different approach, even if at the margins.
The voice that spoke to people in Wales to offer guidance and reassurance, to offer protection, was that of a First Minister from Wales, of Wales, and responsible to the people in Wales.
You may have disagreed with the decisions made, but you got to vote for a Senedd that could put a different government in place if enough people agreed with you.
And it may be that next spring people will vote for a different government. That’s the way democracy is meant to work.
But it will be a decision for people in Wales to make, to decide how laws that only affect people in Wales are made.
That sounds like a statement of the obvious, but in 1997 that was a highly contested proposition.
We now have a generation of people who consider it the normal state of affairs that we have a Senedd and a Government of our own.
But I don’t take its future for granted.
We saw what complacency did for Britain’s membership of the European Union, and that should be a lesson from history.
Like the European Movement, the devolution project has been a vanguard one.
What retracing the history here has reminded me is that the push for devolution was not a ground-up movement for change. It was a top-down project.
Just like the European quest for ‘ever closer Union’; The momentum for a strong Senedd was a political project supported by an elite - one of disparate progressives at that.
It was not backed up by a grassroots movement, or a consensus on the type of settlement we wanted.
That was one of the reasons it was such a pig's ear constitutionally, and soon proved unstable. It hadn’t been properly thought through or stress-tested.
One of the key features of the model that the Labour Party put to the referendum - decision making by Council-style committees, rather than a Westminster-style Cabinet - was dropped before the Government of Wales Act had even passed through Parliament.
Another, the insistence in not having a split between the Parliament and Government, but instead having a local authority style Corporate Body, was dismantled within the Assembly’s first term.
As a building project it was a botch-job, but by then the architect was out of the picture - and the plans were ones he wasn’t given a free-hand to draw-up in the first place.
The contrast to the campaign for a Scottish Parliament is stark.
The design of their Parliament has proven much more stable, even if Labour’s political objective of using devolution to ‘kill off’ independence hasn’t worked.
The point is that the plans that emerged north of the English border were based on stronger foundations.
A movement which united churches, trade unions, voluntary bodies, academics and political parties, spent years agreeing the outlines of a devolution settlement that could command broad support.
Scottish campaigners who had felt cheated by their referendum result in 79, re-dedicated themselves through the 1980s and 90s to galvanise support in order to try again.
Meanwhile, as we’ve discussed, the debate in Wales was in a very different place.
While the Scottish model had been crowdsourced, the Welsh settlement had been cobbled together in a backroom by a divided committee.
Not only was there no political consensus behind the Welsh blueprint - not even within the Labour Party.
But, critically, there was no equivalent civil society space in which to try and forge one. And all attempts to create one were blocked by the Labour Party.
Some of that can be accounted for by history - Wales doesn’t have the separate legal and educational system the Scots held on to when they joined the Union.
And some of it can be accounted for by the different political cultures that subsequently developed.
In the referendum in Scotland on 11th September 1997 - a week before ours - 74% of voters supported devolution.
It was a consensus for a Parliament that had been forged in civil society.
Meanwhile Wales didn’t really have one - a consensus, nor a civil society.
Where the Scottish Parliament was able to start its work knowing it stood on top of strong foundations, the Welsh Assembly had to set about creating its own foundations.
It was a rocky start.
The referendum result of September 18th 1997 was hauntingly narrow. An endorsement of 50.3% on the question of whether there should be a Welsh Assembly didn’t do much to give a new institution a confidence boost at its inception.
There’s no doubt it was a ‘stunning turnaround’ from the result in 1979, as Ron Davies said on the night, but it highlighted the fragility of this new Welsh politics.
And so much of the effort - and indeed the success - of the first decade of the Welsh Assembly was consumed with building an institution, and a consensus, from the ground up.
Much of this wasn’t terribly eye-catching. And arguably it diverted efforts from meeting the expectations created in the referendum campaign that what we were creating was ‘an economic powerhouse’. The Assembly, nor the Government, certainly was not that.
But what was achieved was akin to the success achieved by the Scottish Constitutional Convention, in the inter-referendum years, of harnessing a shared sense of purpose in a nascent civil society.
It was institution-building, and in-turn nation-building.
Innovations like creating formal mechanisms for the government to form Partnership Councils with the voluntary sector, local government, and the business and trade union communities, were novel.
Boring. But incrementally they added layers to the foundations.
Politically, the creation of a full-time democratic body elected, using a semi-proportional voting system, created capacity in all political parties. Politicians and full-time staff created a country-wide infrastructure for the first time.
Ironically it was the Conservatives in particular who benefited the most. From being wiped out in the 1997 General Election, losing all their Welsh seats, they were brought back to life by the Assembly they fiercely opposed. They got 9 of the 60 seats in the first Assembly elections, roughly reflecting their share of the vote.
The opening decade of devolution also saw the first systematic efforts to develop policy analysis and debate in every devolved field.
An expectation quickly developed that the Welsh Assembly Government would have policy ambitions in all areas of its responsibility.
The civil service was under pressure to quickly shift from a largely administrative branch office, into a responsive government, serving a full set of Ministers with their own mandate.
Comparing it to institutions in Whitehall and Westminster with vastly greater resources and capacity, and hundreds of years of tradition and institutional memory to draw on, was unfair - but inevitable.
But by the end of the decade there was a suite of Welsh Government policies and strategies in almost every area. And a network of bodies with capacity working at a Welsh level.
Most UK organisations had some kind of Welsh off-shoot.
It was uneven: Universities, and ironically enough trade unions, stand out as the bodies slowest to respond to the new devolution realities. But even the business sector, not a supporter of devolution in either 1979 nor 1997, upped its engagement.
By the time of the next devolution referendum in 2011, on strengthening the Assembly’s law-making powers, the outlines of a civil society had taken shape.
On St David’s Day that year 63% of people voted to strengthen the powers of the Assembly.
The result reflected the consensus that had developed over the previous decade.
The foundations had been laid.
But they are still shallow foundations.
We are only a quarter of a century into growing a new political culture after all. These things are a multi-generational effort.
Our institutions are still new, and have been slow to develop. At times they have been operating in advance of public opinion and the political culture. And that opens up a danger spot that is vulnerable to exploitation.
Civil society in Wales remains fragile. Critics have fairly described the so-called Third Sector in Wales as a ‘client state’. In fact there aren’t many corners of Welsh life where the actors feel free of obligations to the State in some form.
Like any animal bred in captivity there are limitations. A smaller gene pool, and weaker survival skills, leads to a fragility that isn’t always robust enough to survive contact with the outside world.
The space outside Government for independent thinking and scrutiny is critical to the health of a democratic society. But it remains small, and weak.
Knowing where the shoe is pinching is critical political intelligence for Ministers. They can't possibly see into the detail of every area, so a responsive democracy relies on an open feedback loop. Effective scrutiny is essential to that.
After all you can only apply a correction mechanism if you know if you are going off course.
But the feedback processes are not always well calibrated. And that’s a problem.
Welsh civil society self-censors.
And in recent years has withered further.
Since 2011 austerity has shrunk civil society - organisations relying on public funding have grown smaller, and in some cases disappeared altogether, and the private sector has retrenched, with senior roles at a Welsh level shrinking.
And of course digital disruption has weakened the already inadequate media landscape as a source of debate and scrutiny. This remains not just a problem, but a threat to Welsh democracy.
But, let's bring ourselves back up Penglais Hill again.
Breathe.
Take in the views of Cardigan Bay.
And remember that instability and shocks are not new. Our devolved political settlement has already weathered multiple storms.
In fact it started with a storm!
I was at the count in Caramarthen on the night of the referendum in 1997 when all looked lost. I was contemplating having to leave Wales.
And suddenly the mood shifted when our pile of votes was added to the national tally, and the Yes campaign stumbled over the winning line with a majority of just 6,721 votes across Wales.
Now that was bumpy!
Just over a year later, at the end of October 1998, just three months after I started working for the man already being described as ‘the architect of devolution’, Ron Davies handed over his wallet and keys at knifepoint to a stranger he’d met on Clapham Common. He described it as a ‘moment of madness’.
His resignation as Welsh Secretary and Labour’s leader for the very first Assembly elections at such a formative moment, created a moment of serious peril even before devolution had fully begun.
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux". That was what Tony Blair said a month after New York’s Twin Towers were struck in September 2001. I have a clear memory of being in that hall in Brighton too as he said it, as a political reporter at the Labour conference.
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux".
It’s a phrase that has kept coming back to me to describe the times we have been living through.
Soon after leaving journalism for the charitable sector I became familiar with two names that sounded like comic book characters: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But they soon wiped the smile off everyone's faces as the kaleidoscope was shaken again.
In 2008 the entire global financial system was in flux. A banking crisis on the other side of the world shifted our economy and society into new positions.
Since the financial crash annual growth in the economy has halved. People are poorer than they were, and they feel it.
Public services have worsened, and costs have increased.
People are having a hard time, and they are angry.
We’ve been here before. And just as then there are populists who have a list of people to offer up for blame.
I don’t think we recognise how profound the impact of the 2008 crash has been on our economy and society.
The kaleidoscope was reset, and new patterns formed.
One came into view six weeks after I was elected to the Senedd in 2016 - the UK, and the majority of people in Wales, voted for Brexit.
The path of austerity chosen by the coalition government in the wake of the financial crash was a decisive factor in the result.
Three years later, I was a Minister in the Welsh Government and we were deep in preparations for a ‘Hard Brexit’ when a global pandemic shook our world. And the impact is still being felt, as I hardly need to remind a generation of students whose education and socialisation were profoundly reshaped.
And the final shake of the kaleidoscope I experienced took place in 2024, when the election of Vaughan Gething, my friend from the Aber Labour Club, exposed a deep division in the Welsh Labour Party that remains. And it posed a moral and ethical test that too many failed.
The kaleidoscope was shaken.
The pieces remain in flux.
But in spite of these shocks to the system, in the middle of all this period of great challenge and change, our nascent political institutions have grown in size and scope, and a Welsh political culture has begun to emerge.
One that simply didn’t exist when I first walked into the Llandinam building 31 years ago.
The first quarter of a century of Wales’ Parliament has been against a turbulent backdrop.
External shocks have underlined not just Wales’ vulnerability, but the ‘thin veneer’ of civilization that the ancient Greeks warned us that marked human affairs.
As we head into the seventh Senedd the signs of social tension and economic stagnation are clearly manifesting themselves in the politics of today.
The rise of Reform is a tale as old as time.
They didn’t teach Classics at Ammanford Comp, nor was the Peloponnesian War on the courses I studied in Inter Pol - at least not that I remember.
But the ancient Greeks knew full well how catastrophes can upend societies. How the social contract can start to fracture under the pressure. How citizens can quickly turn on each other when there is scarcity.
In the last ten years alone we’ve faced the equivalent of plague, war and an economic slump.
We are still standing.
But the danger has not passed. Neither to our society or our constitutional fabric.
The veneer of civilization that the Greeks were all too conscious of is very thin. I fear that the pressure on our social contract is far from over.
I’ve had a first-hand glimpse of anger and division from protests outside asylum hotels, and from angry motorists, and it’s not nice.
And that’s nothing compared to what climate breakdown could bring.
The kaleidoscope is not done with being shaken.
What we’ve created in last 30 years has demonstrated its resilience to shocks. But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent.
As Tony Benn put it. ‘Every generation has to fight the same battles as their ancestors had to fight, again and again’.
It is for us to remember that the fight isn’t over.
After all devolution is a process, not an event.
Centre of Welsh Politics and Society's and WISERD's 2025 Annual Lecture
November 27th - Main Hall, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University
Diolch am y croeso, ac y cyfle i dod nol.
I don’t come back to Aber very often, so when I do I get the strange sensation of both continuity and change.
The prom, the grind of Penglais Hill, and the smell of the books in the Huw Owen Library, are just the same as I remember them.
They are fixed points. They have barely changed.
What has changed in 30 years is the context.
30 years ago this just wouldn’t be happening.
There were no annual lectures on Welsh politics, there were no conversations about Welsh politics.
In fact, in the mid 90’s, whilst there was undoubtedly plenty of politics in Wales, there was not what we can properly describe as ‘Welsh politics’.
What we had instead was neatly captured by the title of the HTV Wales weekly political programme of the time: Wales in Westminster.
A programme that didn’t even exist until the House of Commons began to be televised at the turn of that decade!
One of the few pundits on politics in Wales who popped up from time to time was based here at the Department, Dr Denis Balsom. He also produced one of the few sources of information about how Wales was run, the HTV Wales Yearbook.
I remember reading his annual summaries of the political trends at my school library in Ammanford Comprehensive, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to come here - to be taught by him.
But these were the days before the Institute of Welsh Politics - let alone the Centre of Welsh Politics and Society.
Denis Balsom taught British politics; there was no Welsh politics on the syllabus, until my second year when I took a course run by a Mr Richard Wyn Jones on Welsh political ideas.
They say the past is like a foreign country, well it's certainly true that they did things differently there.
Coming back here today, and revisiting the fixed points, forces me to remember how much we have managed to change the political facts on the ground within a single generation.
But it also reminds me how malleable the things are that we take for granted.
I am part of the first devolution generation. I am very proud to have played a role in the movement that has laid the groundwork of the first Welsh Parliament in 600 years.
But proud as I am of the Senedd, and as glad as I am that we have it, it frequently makes me want to scream.
We are living through really challenging times, and we are all frustrated.
As I come to the end of a decade as a Member of Senedd, half of that spent as a Minister in the Welsh Government, my own sense of frustration that we are not achieving our potential has, if anything, grown.
But that's why I've come back up Penglais Hill tonight to get a sense of perspective. To look out onto Cardigan Bay, take a deep breath, and remind myself how much our context has changed.
And to remind you that it hasn’t changed by accident.
I want to spend quite a bit of this lecture revisiting the period of politics when I was a student here, to recall how we ended up where we are today. And to consider what might happen next.
In the spring of my first year at Aber, 1995, the Labour Party’s Welsh conference agreed its policy on devolution. I had joined the party shortly before and was energised by the idea of changing the way Wales was run.
Labour’s policy proposal was called ‘Shaping the Vision’. And that vision was being moulded by Ron Davies.
He had become the Shadow Welsh Secretary a few years before and started framing an Assembly not simply in arid constitutional terms, but as a tool to respond to the economic and social challenges we faced.
In constitutional terms the policy was a modest compromise, and a bit of a mess; but in political terms, a miraculous reincarnation.
An Assembly for Wales, thought dead after a crushing 4:1 defeat in a referendum in 1979, was properly brought back to life.
For a self-imposed summer project at the end of my first year I wrote to him (Dear, Mr Davies…) asking for as much information as he could give me on the emerging policy, so that I could write an article for this department’s magazine, Interstate.
I remember receiving a large envelope full of press releases. The building blocks were all there, but the policy and politics were not yet settled, and a clear narrative was still emerging.
That was the beginning of my relationship with Ron.
I got to know him at the bar of party conferences, and caught his attention, with speeches I gave at Welsh Labour Party conferences.
One in particular where I took on his opposition to the gender balance policy of ‘twinning’ local parties, to get an equal number of male and female candidates.
There I was on the stage of a packaged Brangwyn Hall in Swansea (those were the days), full of self-righteousness, just turned 22:
“Our new Assembly, I said “must be a voice for Wales, not just another voice for males”.
He didn’t much like it, but he did offer me a job.
I’d won a scholarship to do a Masters at Essex University after graduating from Aber in 1998, but I couldn't turn down the chance to work for the Secretary of State for Wales as his Political Secretary, on the cusp of a new chapter in Welsh political history.
I think it's worth dwelling a little on the politics of that time, and the arguments that led to a National Assembly for Wales being successfully established.
For all the impatience there undoubtedly is at the performance of our devolved government and Parliament, it is worth remembering what it replaced - and what we could return to if populist feeling allows.
In the mid-90s there was no all-Wales democratic tier of politics, no representative voice.
Administrative devolution had developed steadily through the Century, accelerating from the mid-1960s onwards, to allow for some Wales specific policy frameworks. But they were modest.
The sense I get is that people in the under-powered Welsh Office, and beyond, who wanted to change and innovate, squeezed themselves into the space that was available. They made themselves small.
John Howells, a recently retired senior civil servant in the Welsh Government who began his career in the pre-devolution Welsh Office, described it to me as working in ‘some narrow, relatively limited area of operations’.
The political and constitutional structures constrained the ability to develop ‘Welsh solutions to Welsh problems’.
But there were signs of a growing flair in the civil service to move beyond the features of a colonial outpost to a modest laboratory of policy innovation.
He cites some distinctive approaches towards the funding of social housing back in the early 80s. A landmark policy launched in 1983, the so-called ‘All-Wales Mental Handicap Strategy’, to move care for people with learning disabilities out of long-stay institutions and into community-based settings - so beautifully captured in Hijink Theatre’s recent play ‘Housemates’.
And of course the 1993 Welsh Language Act, which established the principle of equality between the Welsh and English languages in public life in Wales.
As John Howells put it, “there was capacity to be engaged in certain areas of business, and people were making a difference in certain specified areas.
But the constitutional position was that unless you had a Secretary of State who was very anxious to make a noise in a particular area, you were very much operating in the shadow of the Whitehall machine”.
The ability to shape a distinctive policy agenda was heavily constrained by capability and capacity, and of course the constitution.
There were just three Welsh Office Ministers, and parliamentary scrutiny was confined to an annual Welsh Day debate in the House of Commons, occasional meetings of the Welsh Grand Committee of MPs, a Welsh Affairs Select Committee, and half an hour once a month in the House of Commons for a quick round of questions to Ministers at the bottom of the Westminster political ladder.
That was it.
No specific focus on health policy, for example.
No systematic ability to scrutinise public bodies in Wales.
No space to develop a Welsh school curriculum, or a different approach to buses and trains.
Nothing.
A Unitary State.
A single government.
And a largely administrative devolution settlement.
There was no Welsh politics.
And as for politics in Wales…It was simply dysfunctional.
There was no relationship between how Wales voted and who governed. “Never in the history of the secret ballot have the Conservatives won an election in Wales“ the historian Kenneth O Morgan reminded us in his 1995 BBC Wales annual radio lecture.
Not only did the governing party have no mandate in Wales, but between 1987 and 1997 not one Secretary of State who was charged with speaking for Wales at the Cabinet table represented a Welsh seat.
For a full decade we had a series of Conservative Welsh Secretaries who represented constituencies in England who were completely detached from the government of the country they ran.
Colwyn Philipps, who as Viscount St Davids was the Welsh Office spokesman in the House of Lords under John Major, and took part in the weekly Ministerial meetings - or Prayers as they were called. He referred to the post of Secretary of State for Wales as being the equivalent of a Gauleiter, the overbearing regional overlords that ran Nazi Germany.
The Tory Party governed Wales by proxy.
And ruled by political patronage.
As in the rest of the UK, the Thatcher and Major Governments weakened the role of local government.
Responsibilities were taken from elected Councils - and, under the premise of making the civil service more efficient, functions were shifted away from government departments - to arms-length bodies focused on delivery.
Executive Agencies were not a new invention, but these so-called Quangos more than doubled in number from 1979 as the Tories sought to inculcate an ‘enterprise culture’.
To this way of market-thinking accountability was best driven by customer need, not through democratic gatekeepers.
In Wales that trend took on an added characteristic because the democratic bodies that were having a lesser say over things like further education, housing or training provision, were ones where the Conservatives had next to no representation.
And the Quango’s that were growing in their place were run by people directly appointed by Conservative Ministers.
The Tories couldn’t get elected in Wales. At the 1991 Local Government elections they won fewer than 8% of Council seats. But in Welsh Quangoland they were flourishing.
That same year the Secretary of State for Wales made around 1,400 appointments to 80 quangos.
Their spending power was equivalent to the entire local authority revenue budget for Wales.
Dr Gwyn Jones, a Tory supporting businessman, was appointed to run the powerful Welsh Development Agency after meeting the Welsh Secretary at a Conservative Party fundraising lunch.
Conservative activist and farmer, Glyn Davies, was made head of the other economic agency, the Development Board for Rural Wales.
Former cricketer, and old-fashioned Tory, Tony Lewis, got a quick phone call from the Secretary of State and was made Chair of the Wales Tourist Board.
No application process. No competition. Just Good Chaps.
Ian Grist, the Conservative MP for Cardiff Central who lost his seat in the 1992 general election, quickly reappeared as head of the South Glamorgan health authority as a political appointee of the Tory Welsh secretary.
Rejected by the voters, but put in charge of their public services nonetheless - without any way of holding him directly to account.
It was “power without scrutiny and government without ballot” Ron Davies railed.
And it was this ‘democratic deficit’ that became the most vivid argument for democratising the devolution that already existed to Wales.
The case for an Assembly that fell flat in the 1970s was a dry - and often interminable - constitutional one.
The revival of the arguments 20 years later learnt from those mistakes, and grounded the case in a grievance.
Unlike his predecessors as Shadow Welsh Secretary Ron Davies put the case for a Welsh Assembly at the centre of his scrap with the Tory Government in a way that no other frontbencher had.
Davies was often referred to by some Westminster journalists as a political bruiser, a valleys streetfighter, which they meant as a condescending put-down. But a street fighter is exactly what the devolutionist case needed.
The Conservative Government in London had been in power for a long time and its radical programme of de-industrialisation was alien to the political consensus in Wales.
The discordance was personified in the figure of John Redwood - a leading right-wing intellectual, with little emotional intelligence or social skill.
He was nicknamed ‘The Vulcan’, which captured his otherworldliness.
Unlike other Tory Welsh secretaries who used the office to advance a watered-down version of the Thatcher medicine, Redwood lacked any political deftness, or empathy for the context he was operating in.
A radical Thatcherite, he was more at home in the Downing Street Policy Unit than as a tactician behind enemy lines.
As David Melding once quipped, it was wrong to compare him to Star Trek’s Vulcan Mr Spock - after all Mr Spock was half human!
Redwood used his pulpit in Whitehall’s Gwydr House to preach to an internal Tory audience: Single mothers on Cardiff council estates were identified as a source of moral decay; and underspend in the Welsh Office budget was gleefully returned to the Treasury to prove his credentials as a champion of small government.
He refused to sign-off letters in Welsh, was reluctant to stay overnight in Cardiff, and nodded his head side-to-side at the singing of the Welsh national anthem.
John Redwood, unwittingly, did more to sell the case for devolution than anyone else in the 1990s.
In fact the Labour Party were still using footage of him bobbing along to the anthem in their electioneering 20 years after his Llangollen massacre of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau took place.
It helps to have a common enemy, especially when you are divided.
The Labour Party, then and now - indeed since its birth - has been conflicted about the so-called ‘National Question’. It reflects a tension in socialist thought, and difference of view between the centralist and pluralist traditions.
It’s an honest intellectual disagreement - different strands of a common DNA. Nye Bevan and Jim Griffiths; Neil Kinnock and Ron Davies; Rhodri Morgan and Paul Murphy; Mark Drakeford and Jo Stevens. They just see it differently.
And it can be deeply felt. The intellectual, and the emotional, overlap.
Identity and tribalism combine to amplify the instinct.
Whereas Aneurin Bevan focused on the common economic interest of workers, famously observing in the first Welsh Day Debate in the House of Commons that he did “not know the difference between a Welsh sheep, a Westmorland sheep and a Scottish sheep”; we can point to others with more visceral attitudes.
Rhondda West MP, Iorrie Thomas, thought that creating a separate Welsh Office with its own Secretary of State was an attempt at ‘soothing national vanity’.
The former trade union leader was staunchly opposed. For him Wales was no more than an economic region.
In the National Library there sits a memo he wrote in 1957 to the Regional Council of Labour - what we now call the Welsh Labour Executive Committee - which dismisses arguments for devolution as the chants of a ‘tribal calypso’ - part of what he called “the mental neurosis associated with the virus of Nationalism”.
While it's tempting to dismiss this as old fashioned thinking I recall interviewing the then Pontypridd MP, Kim Howells, when I was a student here in 1998 and his opening gambit to me was “I’m never very sure that nationalism has got anything to do with socialism. I keep putting the words together and coming up with Hitler”.
The language these days is more tempered, but you don’t need to be a Kreminoligist to decipher where the current Welsh Secretary, Jo Stevens, is coming from when she dismisses further devolution as "fiddling around with structures and systems when there are urgent things to be done to fix things, which is what our people's priorities are in Wales."
There are differences.
They existed then, they exist today.
And so you can well imagine that in the years following the bitter 1979 referendum, when advocates of devolution started bringing the subject back up, there was not much enthusiasm to go there.
Not least since one of the leaders of the No campaign was now the Leader of the Labour Party.
Neil Kinnock hadn’t changed his view about devolution, but he had bigger battles on his hands, and so was broadly willing to let the momentum build in the background.
Despite the 1984 Miners Strike breaking down some of the tribal barriers on ‘The Left’ in Wales, there was a residual hostility to ‘The Nats’, as they were invariably called. And so arguments for an Assembly that focused on the constitutional claims of Wales, or heaven-forbid ‘Nation Building’, were sure signs of wrong-headedness.
Even progressive trade unionists such as Wales TUC General Secretary David Jenkins, were only willing to talk about embracing ‘devolution all around’. An Assembly for Wales as part of a general decentralisation of government in all parts of the UK was as much as could be stomached.
But debates around reforming local government kept coming back to the need for a strategic co-ordinating tier, and so the logic of revisiting the case for a Welsh Assembly reasserted itself on the party’s wish-list.
But it was all rather bloodless.
It was the Thatcher Revolution that really brought some colour to the cheeks of devolutionsists.
Labour always performed better in Wales than it did in the UK as a whole, but remained in Opposition. Graffiti daubed on a bridge near Nelson in the Rhymney valley summed it up: ‘We voted Labour but got Thatcher’.
Support for devolution began to build after the 1987 General Election saw a second landslide Tory victory send a chill through the labour movement in Wales.
A new intake of Welsh Labour MPs felt powerless to protect their constituents from what one of their number, Rhodri Morgan, described as “the ravages of a Tory Government”.
The Poll Tax. Privatisation of large industries - steel, electricity, water - one followed the other, in a blast of momentum that Welsh MPs were powerless to stop.
Tory Ministers were reshaping the role of local authorities, especially in education and housing, and launching assaults on employment rights, which discombobulated the Labour Party and the trade unions.
We were, in the historian Gwyn Alf Williams’ chilling phrase, “standing naked under an acid rain”.
Maybe, just maybe, devolution would offer us some protections.
By the late 80s the attack on the post-war political consensus was generating such discomfort that the opponents of devolution in the Labour Party were forced to prioritise.
Just as Nye Bevan had eventually given in to Jim Griffiths on the commitment to create a Welsh Secretary, not because he’d changed his mind, but because he had bigger fish to fry; so Neil Kinnock went quiet, as devolution hesitantly crept back onto the party’s policy platform.
And so under sufferance, an Assembly for Wales found its way back into Labour’s 1992 manifesto.
But as Neil Kinnock later told me, had Labour won he would have done his best to kill it off in Government. He’d have insisted on a referendum, and with the Prime Minister against, it would surely have failed again.
After Labour's fourth successive defeat (and, critically, the removal of Neil Kinnock as Party leader), thinking shifted. By the time Ron Davies was made the party’s lead in Wales at the end of that year Labour had a new leader in John Smith who was a strong believer in devolution for Scotland.
As people openly wondered whether Labour could win in England ever again, support for a Plan B for Wales was growing.
“To put it very crudely” Kim Howells told me, “in a lot of people’s minds they said ‘look, if we can never ever win Britain, then we have got to change the rules’”.
With John Smith’s strong support Ron Davies - unlike his predecessors as Shadow Secretary of State for Wales - decided to place the case for an Assembly at the heart of the Labour’s message for change.
There was a good deal of ambivalence amongst Welsh Labour MPs, and a fair degree of opposition. But after 18 years in the wilderness, and a General Election pending, there was a premium on loyalty - so doubters kept their own counsel.
But they weren’t prepared to let Ron Davies have it all his own way.
The model of devolution that was eventually agreed was not the one he pushed for. He and Rhodri Morgan wanted Wales to get a similar set-up to Scotland. But in an internal battle they lost.
What was agreed instead was a more modest blueprint closer in character to a large Council than a Parliament.
It was similar to what had been put forward in 1979 - an Assembly, not a Parliament; with powers akin to those of the Welsh Office, and without full law-making or tax varying levers.
And crucially it would be elected using the Labour-friendly First Past the Post voting system.
This was another battle that Ron Davies had lost.
He wanted to use proportional representation to show that an Assembly would be different to Labour dominated local government in Wales - so loathed by the other opposition parties.
What the Liberal leader in the 1970s, Jeremy Thorpe, warned would be ‘South Glamorgan County Council on stilts’.
Davies’ advocacy drew great suspicion from his own party’s apparatchik class in Westminster, who briefed journalists that he had ‘gone native’.
But the bit of pushback that the devolutionists really feared was the prospect of another devolution referendum.
The official line was firmly against putting the plans to another plebiscite.
It was the wrecking tactic Neil Kinnock forced onto the Labour Government in the 70s that killed-off an Assembly once before.
So when Labour Leader Tony Blair told Ron Davies he’d decided after all to make Scottish devolution conditional on a referendum, but it was up to Davies what to do in Wales - his heart sank.
To follow the Scots risked defeat, but to accept Blair’s opt-out would confirm the Welsh Assembly’s status as a poor relation of the real Parliaments.
This is the point at which I believe Ron Davies deserves proper recognition. He showed greater tactical flair than that of a mere streetfighter.
He opted for a referendum, but in return secured Blair’s support to reopen the question of the voting system.
Blair would face down Davies’ critics in the party for him.
A referendum could only be won with the backing of Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats, Davies persuaded Blair. And they would not line-up behind a voting system that would lock in Labour’s dominance.
It was a deft bit of politics on his part. He knew Blair himself was ambivalent about devolution, and about PR, but was anxious to limit the amount of political capital a new Government would have to spend in Parliament to get devolution through.
As Blair admitted years later, he inherited the commitment from John Smith. “So frankly” he said “it would have been hard to change it even if I had wanted to, but I had become convinced myself that it was basically the right thing to do…
…particularly in Scotland”.
For Davies then, and for Welsh devolution, it was now a case of shit or bust.
A compromise form a PR was agreed to combine 40 First Past the Post constituencies, with ‘an element of proportionality’ used in a ‘top-up’ of 20 seats using closed regional lists.
It kept the constituency link beloved of supporters of First Past the Post, but ensured a level of fairness for the other parties whose support was spread unevenly across Wales.
Crucially it allowed Davies to push back against the one-party culture, and have a chance at nurturing the inclusive politics he wished to see.
Blair might have been a fair-weather devolutionist, but it is undeniable that without his full-throated public backing of a Yes vote - as Prime Minister in his honeymoon period after the 1997 landslide victory - the referendum would never have passed.
Ron Davies’ gamble paid off.
I revisit this period just to remind us of the circumstances that saw the Assembly come into being.
It is easy to forget just how it used to be, and how far we’ve come; and what we could go back to if populist voices succeed in looking for another scapegoat for the frustrations of our times.
There was nothing inevitable about the creation of the Senedd.
And there’s nothing inevitable about it remaining.
I do worry about its future.
As things stand May’s elections to the Senedd are on course to reorder Welsh politics.
The two parties who have until now formed the government and opposition are being elbowed aside. And a new more proportional voting system for a larger Senedd all add to the sense of change.
One of the intended consequences of using PR in 1999 was to remove the dis-proportionality of the House of Commons system - where a party could win a landslide of seats on a minority of the vote.
When he talked about a new politics, an inclusive politics, what Ron Davies meant was that he designed the devolution settlement to favour co-operation.
Not a winner-takes-all approach to politics, but a give and take approach. Compromise.
Since 1999 no party has ever had more than half the seats in Cardiff Bay. After every election there has had to be a search for shared ground. And that will have to continue.
But it's tough stuff. It assumes there is a majority of people who are prepared to compromise. As politics gets more polarised, that assumption could be tested like never before after the next elections.
And the problems facing an incoming Welsh Government in May will be as hard as ever. There just isn’t enough money to do the things the majority of people want to do.
And after a decade and a half of austerity cuts, where local authorities have lost 40% of their workforce, there isn’t the machinery of government in place to respond with alacrity to the age of the Polycrisis.
Multiple, distinct crises are occurring simultaneously, and amplifying each other. A crisis greater than the sum of its parts.
And add to the mix a potential political crisis too:
Will there be the numbers to form a Government - and keep it together?
Will there be the numbers to pass a budget every year?
That is going to be harder than ever to pull off.
The question then arises: In the event of paralysis and chaos, will the residual forces who have never supported devolution grow?
Will those MPs who resent and belittle the Government in Cardiff, grow in confidence and accelerate the clawing back of powers that has already begun?
If there is a Reform-led Government, which is not implausible, how coherent will it be?
Will it have the internal discipline to withstand the pressures of governing?
Will it take its orders direct from party HQ and take us back to the era of the Gauliter?
These are the known unknowns?
I think we are in for a bumpy ride.
But as Ron Davies used to say to me, with deadpan gallows humour, when things went wrong: “Nobody said devolution was going to be easy”.
It was never a panacea. It is simply a mechanism to give Wales a voice, and bring decision-making closer.
What decisions are subsequently made are political choices. That’s what elections are for.
Devolution is just a process.
But its biggest achievement in its first three decades is to have put down roots for a new set of institutions, and to have created a firewall against policies that did not command Welsh political consensus - policies that otherwise would have been imposed.
And that’s not to be dismissed.
Just remember in the 20 years before devolution Wales was run by a government it didn’t vote for.
When a manifesto pledge to create a Welsh language TV channel was broken, there was no parliamentary way of reversing it. Wales had no mechanism to challenge it; it took a hunger strike, and the threat of martyrdom, to change minds.
When Wales’ economy was hit by 25,000 job losses through the systematic closure of coal mines, there was no democratic forum to respond to that, to express a response, or galvanise an economic alternative.
For all our shortcomings, when a pandemic hit, and it was clear that the Government in London’s response was based on a different set of values to the majority of people in Wales, we did have a means of doing something about it. We were able to take a different approach, even if at the margins.
The voice that spoke to people in Wales to offer guidance and reassurance, to offer protection, was that of a First Minister from Wales, of Wales, and responsible to the people in Wales.
You may have disagreed with the decisions made, but you got to vote for a Senedd that could put a different government in place if enough people agreed with you.
And it may be that next spring people will vote for a different government. That’s the way democracy is meant to work.
But it will be a decision for people in Wales to make, to decide how laws that only affect people in Wales are made.
That sounds like a statement of the obvious, but in 1997 that was a highly contested proposition.
We now have a generation of people who consider it the normal state of affairs that we have a Senedd and a Government of our own.
But I don’t take its future for granted.
We saw what complacency did for Britain’s membership of the European Union, and that should be a lesson from history.
Like the European Movement, the devolution project has been a vanguard one.
What retracing the history here has reminded me is that the push for devolution was not a ground-up movement for change. It was a top-down project.
Just like the European quest for ‘ever closer Union’; The momentum for a strong Senedd was a political project supported by an elite - one of disparate progressives at that.
It was not backed up by a grassroots movement, or a consensus on the type of settlement we wanted.
That was one of the reasons it was such a pig's ear constitutionally, and soon proved unstable. It hadn’t been properly thought through or stress-tested.
One of the key features of the model that the Labour Party put to the referendum - decision making by Council-style committees, rather than a Westminster-style Cabinet - was dropped before the Government of Wales Act had even passed through Parliament.
Another, the insistence in not having a split between the Parliament and Government, but instead having a local authority style Corporate Body, was dismantled within the Assembly’s first term.
As a building project it was a botch-job, but by then the architect was out of the picture - and the plans were ones he wasn’t given a free-hand to draw-up in the first place.
The contrast to the campaign for a Scottish Parliament is stark.
The design of their Parliament has proven much more stable, even if Labour’s political objective of using devolution to ‘kill off’ independence hasn’t worked.
The point is that the plans that emerged north of the English border were based on stronger foundations.
A movement which united churches, trade unions, voluntary bodies, academics and political parties, spent years agreeing the outlines of a devolution settlement that could command broad support.
Scottish campaigners who had felt cheated by their referendum result in 79, re-dedicated themselves through the 1980s and 90s to galvanise support in order to try again.
Meanwhile, as we’ve discussed, the debate in Wales was in a very different place.
While the Scottish model had been crowdsourced, the Welsh settlement had been cobbled together in a backroom by a divided committee.
Not only was there no political consensus behind the Welsh blueprint - not even within the Labour Party.
But, critically, there was no equivalent civil society space in which to try and forge one. And all attempts to create one were blocked by the Labour Party.
Some of that can be accounted for by history - Wales doesn’t have the separate legal and educational system the Scots held on to when they joined the Union.
And some of it can be accounted for by the different political cultures that subsequently developed.
In the referendum in Scotland on 11th September 1997 - a week before ours - 74% of voters supported devolution.
It was a consensus for a Parliament that had been forged in civil society.
Meanwhile Wales didn’t really have one - a consensus, nor a civil society.
Where the Scottish Parliament was able to start its work knowing it stood on top of strong foundations, the Welsh Assembly had to set about creating its own foundations.
It was a rocky start.
The referendum result of September 18th 1997 was hauntingly narrow. An endorsement of 50.3% on the question of whether there should be a Welsh Assembly didn’t do much to give a new institution a confidence boost at its inception.
There’s no doubt it was a ‘stunning turnaround’ from the result in 1979, as Ron Davies said on the night, but it highlighted the fragility of this new Welsh politics.
And so much of the effort - and indeed the success - of the first decade of the Welsh Assembly was consumed with building an institution, and a consensus, from the ground up.
Much of this wasn’t terribly eye-catching. And arguably it diverted efforts from meeting the expectations created in the referendum campaign that what we were creating was ‘an economic powerhouse’. The Assembly, nor the Government, certainly was not that.
But what was achieved was akin to the success achieved by the Scottish Constitutional Convention, in the inter-referendum years, of harnessing a shared sense of purpose in a nascent civil society.
It was institution-building, and in-turn nation-building.
Innovations like creating formal mechanisms for the government to form Partnership Councils with the voluntary sector, local government, and the business and trade union communities, were novel.
Boring. But incrementally they added layers to the foundations.
Politically, the creation of a full-time democratic body elected, using a semi-proportional voting system, created capacity in all political parties. Politicians and full-time staff created a country-wide infrastructure for the first time.
Ironically it was the Conservatives in particular who benefited the most. From being wiped out in the 1997 General Election, losing all their Welsh seats, they were brought back to life by the Assembly they fiercely opposed. They got 9 of the 60 seats in the first Assembly elections, roughly reflecting their share of the vote.
The opening decade of devolution also saw the first systematic efforts to develop policy analysis and debate in every devolved field.
An expectation quickly developed that the Welsh Assembly Government would have policy ambitions in all areas of its responsibility.
The civil service was under pressure to quickly shift from a largely administrative branch office, into a responsive government, serving a full set of Ministers with their own mandate.
Comparing it to institutions in Whitehall and Westminster with vastly greater resources and capacity, and hundreds of years of tradition and institutional memory to draw on, was unfair - but inevitable.
But by the end of the decade there was a suite of Welsh Government policies and strategies in almost every area. And a network of bodies with capacity working at a Welsh level.
Most UK organisations had some kind of Welsh off-shoot.
It was uneven: Universities, and ironically enough trade unions, stand out as the bodies slowest to respond to the new devolution realities. But even the business sector, not a supporter of devolution in either 1979 nor 1997, upped its engagement.
By the time of the next devolution referendum in 2011, on strengthening the Assembly’s law-making powers, the outlines of a civil society had taken shape.
On St David’s Day that year 63% of people voted to strengthen the powers of the Assembly.
The result reflected the consensus that had developed over the previous decade.
The foundations had been laid.
But they are still shallow foundations.
We are only a quarter of a century into growing a new political culture after all. These things are a multi-generational effort.
Our institutions are still new, and have been slow to develop. At times they have been operating in advance of public opinion and the political culture. And that opens up a danger spot that is vulnerable to exploitation.
Civil society in Wales remains fragile. Critics have fairly described the so-called Third Sector in Wales as a ‘client state’. In fact there aren’t many corners of Welsh life where the actors feel free of obligations to the State in some form.
Like any animal bred in captivity there are limitations. A smaller gene pool, and weaker survival skills, leads to a fragility that isn’t always robust enough to survive contact with the outside world.
The space outside Government for independent thinking and scrutiny is critical to the health of a democratic society. But it remains small, and weak.
Knowing where the shoe is pinching is critical political intelligence for Ministers. They can't possibly see into the detail of every area, so a responsive democracy relies on an open feedback loop. Effective scrutiny is essential to that.
After all you can only apply a correction mechanism if you know if you are going off course.
But the feedback processes are not always well calibrated. And that’s a problem.
Welsh civil society self-censors.
And in recent years has withered further.
Since 2011 austerity has shrunk civil society - organisations relying on public funding have grown smaller, and in some cases disappeared altogether, and the private sector has retrenched, with senior roles at a Welsh level shrinking.
And of course digital disruption has weakened the already inadequate media landscape as a source of debate and scrutiny. This remains not just a problem, but a threat to Welsh democracy.
But, let's bring ourselves back up Penglais Hill again.
Breathe.
Take in the views of Cardigan Bay.
And remember that instability and shocks are not new. Our devolved political settlement has already weathered multiple storms.
In fact it started with a storm!
I was at the count in Caramarthen on the night of the referendum in 1997 when all looked lost. I was contemplating having to leave Wales.
And suddenly the mood shifted when our pile of votes was added to the national tally, and the Yes campaign stumbled over the winning line with a majority of just 6,721 votes across Wales.
Now that was bumpy!
Just over a year later, at the end of October 1998, just three months after I started working for the man already being described as ‘the architect of devolution’, Ron Davies handed over his wallet and keys at knifepoint to a stranger he’d met on Clapham Common. He described it as a ‘moment of madness’.
His resignation as Welsh Secretary and Labour’s leader for the very first Assembly elections at such a formative moment, created a moment of serious peril even before devolution had fully begun.
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux". That was what Tony Blair said a month after New York’s Twin Towers were struck in September 2001. I have a clear memory of being in that hall in Brighton too as he said it, as a political reporter at the Labour conference.
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux".
It’s a phrase that has kept coming back to me to describe the times we have been living through.
Soon after leaving journalism for the charitable sector I became familiar with two names that sounded like comic book characters: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But they soon wiped the smile off everyone's faces as the kaleidoscope was shaken again.
In 2008 the entire global financial system was in flux. A banking crisis on the other side of the world shifted our economy and society into new positions.
Since the financial crash annual growth in the economy has halved. People are poorer than they were, and they feel it.
Public services have worsened, and costs have increased.
People are having a hard time, and they are angry.
We’ve been here before. And just as then there are populists who have a list of people to offer up for blame.
I don’t think we recognise how profound the impact of the 2008 crash has been on our economy and society.
The kaleidoscope was reset, and new patterns formed.
One came into view six weeks after I was elected to the Senedd in 2016 - the UK, and the majority of people in Wales, voted for Brexit.
The path of austerity chosen by the coalition government in the wake of the financial crash was a decisive factor in the result.
Three years later, I was a Minister in the Welsh Government and we were deep in preparations for a ‘Hard Brexit’ when a global pandemic shook our world. And the impact is still being felt, as I hardly need to remind a generation of students whose education and socialisation were profoundly reshaped.
And the final shake of the kaleidoscope I experienced took place in 2024, when the election of Vaughan Gething, my friend from the Aber Labour Club, exposed a deep division in the Welsh Labour Party that remains. And it posed a moral and ethical test that too many failed.
The kaleidoscope was shaken.
The pieces remain in flux.
But in spite of these shocks to the system, in the middle of all this period of great challenge and change, our nascent political institutions have grown in size and scope, and a Welsh political culture has begun to emerge.
One that simply didn’t exist when I first walked into the Llandinam building 31 years ago.
The first quarter of a century of Wales’ Parliament has been against a turbulent backdrop.
External shocks have underlined not just Wales’ vulnerability, but the ‘thin veneer’ of civilization that the ancient Greeks warned us that marked human affairs.
As we head into the seventh Senedd the signs of social tension and economic stagnation are clearly manifesting themselves in the politics of today.
The rise of Reform is a tale as old as time.
They didn’t teach Classics at Ammanford Comp, nor was the Peloponnesian War on the courses I studied in Inter Pol - at least not that I remember.
But the ancient Greeks knew full well how catastrophes can upend societies. How the social contract can start to fracture under the pressure. How citizens can quickly turn on each other when there is scarcity.
In the last ten years alone we’ve faced the equivalent of plague, war and an economic slump.
We are still standing.
But the danger has not passed. Neither to our society or our constitutional fabric.
The veneer of civilization that the Greeks were all too conscious of is very thin. I fear that the pressure on our social contract is far from over.
I’ve had a first-hand glimpse of anger and division from protests outside asylum hotels, and from angry motorists, and it’s not nice.
And that’s nothing compared to what climate breakdown could bring.
The kaleidoscope is not done with being shaken.
What we’ve created in last 30 years has demonstrated its resilience to shocks. But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent.
As Tony Benn put it. ‘Every generation has to fight the same battles as their ancestors had to fight, again and again’.
It is for us to remember that the fight isn’t over.
After all devolution is a process, not an event.
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