A leading Tory Brexiteer has called for devolution to be "rolled back" and the Welsh Government to be stripped of its powers. Writing in his column in The Telegraph Lord David Frost claimed that devolution has led to the "creation of closed-shop fiefdoms, effective one-party states" and added that it needed to stop.
Describing Wales as one such "tinpot amateurish" example, he added that devolution was meant to be about "enabling powers to be exercised closer to the people in a more practical and accountable way." Instead he accused the UK Government of having been "supine in policing the boundaries of devolved powers".
Initially concentrating on the current situation in Scotland where Humza Yousaf recently replaced Nicola Sturgeon as the country's First Minister and leader of the SNP, Lord Frost stated that ministers needed to act in order to 'fix things'. "They should make clear that, if re-elected, they will review and roll back some currently devolved powers," wrote 58-year-old peer.
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"Scotland should not be able to legislate to disrupt free trade within the UK; and it does not need to have most tax-raising powers currently available to it. These powers are embryonic independent government powers. They aren’t necessary to run an effective local administration, which is what devolution should be about."
Lord Frost, who was the chief negotiator for exiting the European Union during the Brexit negotiations in 2019, said that, "Devolution was designed in a different world – a world in which many powers theoretically devolved were actually held at EU level and could not be exercised in practice." However, he added that Brexit had changed this.
Lord Frost said that the administrations in Cardiff Bay and Edinburgh did not need "embryonic independent government powers". He said: "They aren’t necessary to run an effective local administration, which is what devolution should be about."
And he claimed the UK Government had been made "a supplicant to the devolved administrations to maintain common rules across the country."
It's not the first time the former special advisor to then PM Boris Johnson has spoken out on the subject either. The senior Conservative also spoke out following the pandemic, calling for Wales (along with Scotland), to be stripped of its powers to set distinct policies in areas such as Covid lockdown rules. Writing in early 2022 in the same newspaper he said the scrappage would encourage a sense of "common national endeavour, with an understanding that 'we are all in this together'."
In 1999 the people of Wales voted narrowly in a referendum to start directly managing many of their own affairs. In 2011, a far larger percentage of Wales voted to extend these powers to the Welsh Parliament (then called the Assembly).
In 2021's Welsh Parliamentary elections anti-devolution parties were wiped out and Labour won a working majority on a massively pro-devolution agenda. Since devolution, Westminster has generally not interfered in the areas that are devolved to Wales and the two governments have clashed in the Supreme Court over their respective powers.
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