3 days ago
The most pointless role in UK politics? The secretary of state for Wales
In the space of one week, Labour-run Wales has been short-changed by Labour-run Westminster on projects from rail funding to national insurance contributions. The poorest nation in the UK is being let down. Repeatedly. But what is to be done?
What we need is a hero. Someone whose job is to speak up for Wales in cabinet, to be Cymru's voice in Westminster's corridors of power. Luckily for Wales, there is such a person – the secretary of state for Wales. Unluckily for Wales, this role has long been utterly obsolete. Rather than being the voice of Wales in cabinet, it far more often represents the voice of the cabinet in Wales. It needs to go.
Wales didn't have its own secretary of state until 1964. The Scots, meanwhile, were given that voice more than 250 years before in 1707, though it was subsequently abolished three decades later and then recreated in 1926. When Wales did finally get one, it was a real cause for celebration and the culmination of much campaigning.
The first two people in the post were Jim Griffiths and Cledwyn Hughes, who were highly respected and had great credentials within the Labour movement. The new role paid dividends and within the space of three years the Welsh Language Act was passed, giving Welsh legal status in Wales (amazing what happens when you give people a voice).
But in the following decades there were some absolute stinkers in the job. The next one was George Thomas, who was anti Welsh language and described the setting up of the Welsh Office as the 'greatest mistake'. The low point of his tenure came after the Aberfan disaster, in which a coal tip collapsed on to a school killing 116 children and 28 adults. Subsequent inquiries found that the National Coal Board was squarely responsible for these deaths after refusing to pay for the removal of the tips. After the disaster, 88,000 individual contributions were received for the victim fund but the Labour UK government decided to take money from that fund and use it to clear the remaining tips. Thomas put pressure on the fund to give in.
Over the subsequent decades, many of the people holding the role were not even Welsh or in a Welsh constituency. (Imagine if they had tried to do that to the Scots.) The worst of these was the Conservative John Redwood, who was born in Kent and was MP for Wokingham in Berkshire. (If you want a treat, dig out the video of him failing to mime the Welsh national anthem.) Redwood refused to sign documents that were written in Welsh, and didn't like to stay overnight in Wales, instead driving back to his constituency in England. But perhaps most damning was that, in a country with significant levels of poverty, he took great pride in returning £100m of the Welsh Office's budget to the Treasury unspent. What an effective voice for Wales in cabinet.
More recently, Wales has been blessed with some equally diligent secretaries of state. One was Alun Cairns, who resigned from the post after it emerged that one of his staff was accused by a judge of deliberately sabotaging a rape trial. His best-known contribution was a supreme act of brown nosing when he got the Severn Bridge renamed the 'Prince of Wales Bridge' – a decision that only 17% of people in Wales supported. Another was Simon Hart, who admits in his just-published diaries that, at the official opening of the new Welsh parliament in 2020: 'I skip the Senedd bit – partly in protest, and partly to have lunch with Adam.' He doesn't say what he was protesting about. Another recent office holder was Robert Buckland who was, err, the MP for South Swindon …
While Wales has had some shocking secretaries of state, this isn't why the role should be ditched. It needs to be gone because, however principled, competent and driven the holder of the office, there is no way they can realistically do the job of being Wales's voice. They have no power, barely any staff, are appointed by the prime minister and bound by collective responsibility. The current situation represents the worst of both worlds: it gives the illusion of Wales having a voice when it comes with a pre-installed mute button.
The current holder of the office is Jo Stevens. Speaking to people in other departments as well as the Wales Office, I get the impression that she is at least proactive in making Wales's needs part of the conversation. I am told she has been focused in trying to get the historic injustices on rail funding remedied ahead of next week's spending review. Whether it works remains to be seen – and she sadly failed this week to prevent the new rail project between Oxford and Cambridge being classed as an 'England and Wales' scheme, meaning that Wales will not receive Barnett consequentials from it. But at least she isn't openly contemptuous of Welsh democracy like many of her predecessors.
The fact remains, however, that whether or not Welsh issues are raised in Whitehall is totally dependent on the whims of a cabinet member who is appointed and often living outside Wales. That's a terrible status quo. Wales should appoint its advocates, not the prime minister, who has only once in the history of the UK been Welsh. The role of secretary of state for Wales needs to be replaced by a representative of the Welsh government, which is directly elected by the people of Wales. Better still, we need to properly reform the UK so the UK government doesn't double as the English government.
Devolution gave Wales and Scotland a voice, and that voice should reverberate around the cabinet table. It is long past the time that Whitehall needs to acknowledge that the UK is made up of distinct countries. Giving these nations a real voice doesn't weaken the union, it strengthens it.
Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?
