WALES MATTERS: NEXT STEPS FOR DEVOLUTION

In a little over eleven years we will mark the 500th anniversary of the Anglo Welsh Union of 1536. Even as a unionist I hesitate to use the word celebrate because we seem to be living in an age of disunion. Scottish independence is still an open question; Brexit ended the UK’s membership of the EU; NATO – arguably the most powerful Treaty entered into by free states – is under threat as the USA doubts the value of the Atlantic alliance; and the very coherence of statehood itself is threatened by the digital revolution and the emergence of multi-national monopolies intent on exercising political power. These geo-political disruptions have come at a time when the Union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is already under severe strain. The tercentenary of the 1707 Act of Union passed with little ceremony despite the then PM Gordon Brown urging us to value our shared British identity. 2007 is more readily remembered for the arrival of a SNP minority government. Those who had predicted that devolution would ‘kill nationalism stone dead’ were entirely mistaken. While few outside Wales ever consider the significance of the 1536 Union, it was a notable act of state building in a process that eventually led to a full union between Great Britain and Ireland. That union started to unravel just before World War One when some unionists threatened to prevent Irish Home Rule to the point of civil war. The diehards only succeeded in making southern Ireland’s secession inevitable. The lesson is surely clear, without adaptation and timely reform the Union is unlikely to survive.

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