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Next year will be pivotal in British politics, and 7 May will be the point around which things pivot. Elections to local councils, the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Senedd will give millions of voters across the UK a chance to express party preferences. Their verdicts could imperil Labour and Conservative leaders. In Wales, Labour might be sent into opposition for the first time since devolution. Plaid Cymru and Reform UK are set to make substantial gains. At Holyrood, the Scottish National party (SNP) is on course for a majority. That would be an extraordinary defiance of political gravity for a party weighed down by nearly two decades of incumbency.
In England, both Labour and the Tories risk losing scores of councillors as their vote shares are gobbled up by the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Greens. Those results will be taken as evidence that Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are failing as leaders. But it would be a mistake to filter the results only through that lens. The fragmentation of national allegiances began much longer ago.
While electorates have routinely used midterm ballots to punish the party in government, devolution changes the calculus of power. The SNP has shrewdly presented itself as a champion of resistance to remote rulers in Westminster, deflecting accountability for its own record in government. In Wales, Labour benefited from a similar dynamic when Downing Street was in Tory hands. That trick is no longer available. The Conservative threat has receded. Eluned Morgan, the Welsh first minister, conceded that sharing a party with the prime minister is a handicap in the Senedd campaign. She asked voters to recognise that “Keir Starmer is not on the ballot paper in this election”.
Asymmetric union
Resentment at the concentration of power at Westminster has also been a feature of English politics in recent years, but its manifestation has been less explicitly nationalistic, at least in terms of party affiliation. There was a strong element of English exceptionalism, tinged with xenophobia, in the Eurosceptic movement that came to fruition as the campaign for Brexit. That ideological impulse, unsatisfied by release from EU membership, now fuels support for Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle, with a sharpened anti-immigrant focus. As the name indicates, Reform UK doesn’t limit its ambitions to England alone, but that is a function of historic ambiguity in the expression of English nationalism.
The differences between England and Britain, clear in legal and geographical terms, have often been blurred in discussions of culture and identity. The terms were often used interchangeably well into the 20th century. That conflation endures in the minds of some English politicians, even if only subconsciously.
That legacy complicates the politics of devolution. England is the dominant nation in the union, accounting for around 85% of the UK’s population and a slightly larger share of the economy. The asymmetry was baked into the 1998 devolution settlement that created the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. The lack of specifically English institutions seemed barely relevant. England had ample representation at Westminster.
The Labour government at that time perhaps underestimated the potential for the new devolved institutions to pull at the seams of the union. The new constitutional arrangement was designed with the opposite effect in mind. It was meant to neutralise Scottish nationalism in particular. Complacency was encouraged by Labour’s historical strength in Scottish and Welsh politics. Party identity, transcending the union’s internal boundaries, was supposed to be a countervailing factor, resisting centrifugal forces.
There seems to be no prospect of Labour’s Scottish hegemony being restored. In Wales, it is in steep decline. In England, where Labour and the Tories have enjoyed dominance in various regional strongholds, devolved institutions are also proving to be catalysts for disruption. In local elections earlier this year, Reform UK captured two newly created regional mayoralties – Greater Lincolnshire and the combined authority area of Hull and East Yorkshire.
The significance of those gains was submerged in the general scale of Reform UK’s success that night, taking hundreds of seats at local authority level and winning a parliamentary byelection in Runcorn. But more local authorities are due to be combined under the jurisdiction of directly elected mayors, while Labour and Tory poll shares are flatlining. Those are auspicious conditions, not only for Reform UK but for all candidates who stand to gain from the decline of the two big Westminster parties.
Centrifugal forces
The institutional architecture of English devolution is a mess, having evolved ad hoc in sporadic bursts. There is no consistency of size or constitutional status between various metropolitan areas and combined authorities. Resolving some of those imbalances is supposed to be the function of the English devolution and community empowerment bill, currently on its way through parliament. The guiding principle, according to Labour’s 2024 manifesto, is to “transfer power out of Westminster”.
There will be some devolution of control from Whitehall, but also a consolidation of regional power at the expense of lower tiers of government. The bill is distorted by tension between the declared commitment to decentralisation and Treasury reluctance to cede meaningful control over fiscal levers. There is also conflict between political and economic motives. The theoretical objective of devolution is to give voters greater agency over what happens in their local area. But the government’s preferred method for boosting growth is through infrastructure and housebuilding, expedited by decisions directed from the centre.
Earlier this month, four new mayoral elections due next May were postponed to 2028. Ostensibly that is to allow time to complete lower-tier council reorganisation, but opposition parties have cried foul. An unpopular Labour party certainly has diminished incentive to hold ballots that look likely to devolve power to insurgent rivals.
That the Conservatives might also suffer is little comfort to Labour. The duopoly that dominated Westminster for generations is in chronic decline. Change started in Scotland; now Plaid Cymru is driving it hard in Wales. Tinkering with the devolution timetable will not stop the same underlying forces expressing themselves in England. Across the multinational union a new political geography is emerging.
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