The Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales' co-chairs, Professor Laura McAllister and Dr Rowan Williams, have spoken about the importance of visibility for Wales. For the past year, their independent commission has been gathering evidence on how Wales is currently governed.
On Wednesday, the former footballer and academic Professor McAllister and former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Williams took part in a session with the Welsh Affairs Committee in Westminster where they were asked about the purpose of their commission, what they had found so far and the work they had been doing, by a group of cross-party MPs.
In December of last year, a report by the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales found there were "significant problems by the way Wales is currently governed" within the Union. The report went on to argue that the "status quo" was not a viable option for providing stability and prosperity for Wales.
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Their online consultation included over 2,000 Welsh citizens, expert groups, and community-led organisations. The interim report concluded there were three feasible and alternative constitutional routes for how Wales could be run that would improve the lives of the citizens of Wales.
These options included strengthening and securing the current devolution settlement, a federal approach with a new UK constitution which creates equality between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, or independence where Wales would become a sovereign country that would be eligible to apply for full membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN). You can read more about this report here.
The most popular constitutional preference was independence, which was favoured by 55% (1,906) of the respondents that took part in the online consultation. During the session in Westminster on Wednesday, Rob Roberts MP for Delyn asked the co-chairs of the commission whether they were concerned that these respondents, who may not be representative of the whole of Wales, would "skew" their final report.
In his question, he also referred to the 1997 Welsh devolution referendum, in which 50.3% voted in favour of a Welsh Assembly over 49.7% who were against, based on the 50.22% turnout of registered voters. In response, Dr Williams said: "Of course these are not representative of the whole population of Wales, which is why we have engaged in further research about this. We know that an online consultation will bring precisely what you say and of course we are concerned of the skewing effect that may have, hence the further work we’ve done."
Professor McAllister then added: "I would be even stronger than Rowan and say that I’m not the slightest bit concerned about that figure from an online self-selecting survey because it will be treated as such in our evaluation and the evidence. The public attitude towards devolution has changed significantly since 1997 and the figures you quote, and we have the empirical evidence to show that."
She added: "It’s very important to us to be able to forensically analyse the case for each of these constitutional options, so for example as you’ve quoted - independence, which is one of them, in all of our work when we’ve looked at independence we’ve looked at it from a very vigorous, fiscal position.
"So we’ve analysed the public expenditure, revenue, borrowing, fiscal viability perspective of Wales becoming independent. That has to be done in each constitutional option because each of them poses challenges - constitutionally, politically and financially, to how we govern our country. So that is why I’m not concerned about the percentage of individuals who have responded to the online survey because it will be taken in the round."
Later on in the session, the chair of the committee, Stephen Crabb MP, referred to Professor McAllister's involvement with football and more specifically Wales' football campaign during last year's World Cup in Qatar. In his question to the academic, he asked if the sporting campaign had evoked a sense of "national reawakening", and whether there was a link between that and what was discussed in the committee in terms of the constitutional future of Wales.
In response, Professor McAllister said: "I’m always nervous to read across - those are my two obsessions, football and politics. I’m conscious that I’ve got a bias built into that, but you’re absolutely right. I think the success of the men and women’s teams have certainly given great confidence around Welsh identity.
"And all credit to the Football Association of Wales for exemplifying that in terms of bilingualism and the way in which we’ve sold positive aspects of our nation. As you know, I was out in Qatar and we had representation from Welsh Government and UK Government, and I met ministers from UK Government whilst I was there.
"And we were able to sell Wales to the world on a huge platform. I think where one would say there has been an obvious crossover is in terms of visibility, because I think in terms of the biggest weakness we have is Wales isn’t known in parts of the world and that doesn’t create opportunities for us then to do business and trade and so on. But I think more generally, amongst younger people, certainly there’s a very confident sense of Welshness, whichever way you interpret that, there are various interpretations.
"I think that’s encouraging because I hope that figures that have been quoted to us about poor turnouts, which are entirely fair, relating to Welsh devolution will change with the young generations. I think they think differently having grown up in the devolution years."
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