It has been a longstanding gripe of the Welsh that they exist on the political as well as geographic fringe of the UK. A debate on BBC Radio Wales at the start of the year seemed to offer proof of this complaint: here were the senior figures from the major Welsh political parties (except Reform UK), having it out in the first formal, official debate before May’s Senedd election – theoretically one of the most significant domestic political events of the year. And not a soul in Westminster appeared to notice.
To be fair, at that specific juncture, on 4 January, Welsh politics was being somewhat overshadowed by something else. Just hours before the debate, news broke that America had bombed the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and had captured the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Even Keir Starmer’s carefully planned media strategy – a range of television interviews before parliament returned that Monday – was blown off course by Washington’s shocking intervention. Yet would the response have been any different, even without Maduro’s sudden removal? Recent history suggests not.
The relative indifference on the part of national media and politicians towards Wales has long allowed its government to escape proper scrutiny. This has served the Welsh government well, but its people very poorly. Combined with the historic dominance of Welsh Labour, which has won every Senedd election since devolution in 1999, the lack of attention has left Wales with a bloated, wasteful and inward-looking government that rarely faces any criticism at all.
