The basic responsibilities of the Leader of the House of Commons are quite clear: to plan and oversee the UK government’s legislative programme and manage the day-to-day business of the Westminster parliament. Attacking the policies and decisions of the devolved administrations of Scotland and Wales is nowhere in the job description. But current holder of the post Penny Mordaunt has been abusing her position since her appointment in 2022 by regularly interfering in Welsh and Scottish affairs. She has become a main mouthpiece for the increasingly desperate Sunak government’s sordid estimate of what mendacious far-right manipulation might press enough low populism buttons to staunch the mass defection of the fast disappearing Tory vote.

Mordaunt got up on her hind legs in the Commons earlier this month to give her ignorant verdict on the long-overdue democratic reforms being proposed by the Welsh government that, among other things, will increase the number of Senedd Members (MSs) from 60 to 96 from 2026. She stated she was “shocked” by the plan, because: “To put this in context, on the same constituent-to-politician ratio they are outlining in Wales, if that were transferred to the House of Commons this chamber would have to accommodate 2,058 MPs.” Then she added, with bare-faced mendacity, that “more politicians” would take resources away from healthcare in Wales – pretty rich when the Tory government has cut the Welsh budget by 10% in real terms and has systematically decimated the NHS right across the UK. Are we supposed to buy the laughable proposition that she gives two hoots about Welsh health? As for the cost of enlarging the Senedd, a little research would have informed Mordaunt that it will amount to an irrelevant 0.07% of Welsh resources – a trifling amount when it means enhancing Welsh democracy and accountability and bringing what is currently the world’s smallest legislature up to a size that befits a properly functioning nation state. But of course those are things that Tory imperialists and autocrats have never wanted for Wales.

What’s more, if it is an overabundance of politicians she objects to, then how come her party has stuffed the House of Lords with over 105 new life peers in the last four years? The ever-expanding Lords is the largest unelected parliamentary body on the planet (apart from China’s ‘National People’s Congress’) and the addition of all these peerage-purchasing Tory donors has brought its numbers of ermine-clad freeloaders to a ludicrous 785 – to add to the 650 MPs in the Commons, many of whom are so surplus to requirements they have the time to simultaneously pursue other careers and hold multiple lucrative company directorships while rarely bothering to even turn up at Westminster. As for extravagant overspending, nothing will ever come close to match the UK government’s binges on the 40+ vast, luxury buildings it has in central London alone. And that’s peanuts compared to what’s planned: an ever-rising estimated £20 billion on the complete renovation of the Palace of Westminster.

When it comes to the mathematics of Mordaunt’s latest illegitimate interference in Welsh affairs, her sheer stupidity is startling – even for a woman who before she became an MP was dismissed after just a few months as Director of Communications of Kensington & Chelsea Council for “incompetence”. Listen Mordaunt you blithering, blustering Poundstore Thatcher: every democratic body has to have a workable number of representatives, a number that cannot be simply extrapolated by comparing multiples of each body’s population. To give an example that the MP for Portsmouth North might perhaps be able to grasp, Portsmouth has a population of 210,000 and Portsmouth City Council has 42 councillors. Using the same “constituent to politician ratio” that Mordaunt applies to Wales, this is the equivalent of the UK (population 67,000,000) having 13,440 MPs! Or to reverse the calculation, if Portsmouth had the same “constituent-to-politician ratio” as Westminster it would have just two councillors! Here are some more examples for madam incompetence to digest. There are 129 members of the Scottish Parliament for a population of 5.5 million; there are 90 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly for a population of 1.8 million; and there are currently 60 Senedd members for Wales’ population of 3.1 million – all those ratios if replicated in the House of Commons would also mean huge increases in the number of MPs, yet Mordaunt has never hitherto mentioned this as an issue despite the fact that, for instance, even the existing totally inadequate Welsh figure that Mordant says should not change would translate into 1,286 MPs! I could go on with examples from every elected administration on the planet to show what incoherent nonsense Mordaunt spouted, but one final Welsh example will suffice: Cardiff Council has 79 councillors for a population of 350,000.

Of course, the subtext of Mordaunt’s approach to Wales boils down to the kneejerk virulent Cymruphobia that all rightwing Tories have coursing through their veins. We are the last colony that they can oppress, repress, possess and boss and they will stop at nothing to keep it that way – it makes the pathetic crypto-fascists feel powerful, you see. All the many other countries Britain seized by violence have broken free of British/English clutches and, apart from a few tiny islands thousands of miles away, only Wales is really left now for them to abuse, traduce, bully and hurt with impunity. They never did want Wales to have any shred of self-governance, much less a Senedd gradually establishing itself, putting down roots and becoming an integral component of a nascent Welsh state. Hence attack-bitch Mordaunt is persistently unleashed by multi-millionaire Sunak to have a go at any and every manifestation of Wales existing in its own right and not just duplicating the vile values of Tory England. Her uncomprehending hatred of Wales completely fails to understand why the proposed reforms to Welsh democracy are necessary.

When the National Assembly was set up by the Blair government in 1999 it was merely a glorified committee that could only pass ‘secondary legislation’ that might tweak English laws and always required English approval, so perhaps 60 members was sufficient back then. This changed first in 2006 when the Assembly was given the power to pass ‘measures’, a weaker form of primary legislation, and got a true ‘First Minister’ rather than a ‘First Secretary’ along with a legally distinct executive. Then in 2011 the Welsh people voted in a referendum by an overwhelming two-thirds majority to assume full primary law-making powers in areas that were devolved. It was nowhere near autonomy or even the powers held by the Scottish and Northern Irish governments, but was a huge step forward (nevertheless there’s a long way to go, England still controls 90% of Welsh affairs today). A series of further enhancements to devolution followed: powers over some aspects of taxation; a shift to the Scottish model of ‘reserved powers’ rather than ‘conferred powers’; and the right to determine its own structure, size, form and electoral rules leading to the National Assembly becoming Senedd Cymru (Welsh Parliament) in 2020. Even allowing for the subsequent post-Brexit illegal Tory grab of powers in devolved matters that had previously been supervised by the EU, all this meant that the Senedd just couldn’t operate properly with only 60 members: sub-committees could sometimes not raise a quorum if members were off sick or unable to attend; the scrutiny of government decisions and legislation was inadequate; a breadth of expertise and special interests was lacking; and the workloads of ministers and junior ministers were often overwhelming. An increase in MS numbers was long ago recommended by the Richard Commission in 2004 and further backed by the 2014 Silk Commission (set up by the UK Tory government), by two Electoral Reform Society reports in 2013 and 2016 and by a team of Cardiff University academics in 2017. It is therefore eminently sensible and logical and welcome – no wonder Mordaunt disapproves!

What Mordaunt didn’t mention in her attempt to demonise Wales according to the wicked script of the far-right Tory media of Britain (English-run rags such as the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph, Times, Sun, South Wales Echo and Western Mail) was that the changes don’t just include expansion of the Senedd. There will also be an alteration to the voting system from the current partially proportionate system (40 MSs elected by the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ system inherited from Westminster plus 20 elected proportionately by regional lists). The new voting system will become entirely proportionate (the D’Hondt Method), making Wales the most truly democratic part of the UK where each party will get precisely the share of representatives the vote has determined – meanwhile the disgraceful UK will remain one of the last countries in the world voting according to First Past the Post whereby parties that have only got 25% of the vote are returned with huge majorities (explanation: over and over again it regularly returns the Tories to power). But this is the difference between Wales and England: we are fair, progressive, decent and democratic; they most definitely are not. Another example of this is seen in the way Wales has already extended the franchise by lowering the voting age in 2019 to include 16 and 17 year-olds, while Westminster refuses to do this even though people of that age can marry and fight wars (explanation: young people tend not to be Tory). In fact the UK government is calculatedly doing the very opposite, restricting the franchise by introducing draconian voter ID rules under the pretext of preventing virtually non-existent fraud. As a result hundreds of thousands of poorer or older voters who don’t have passports and driving licences are being denied the vote in Westminster elections (explanation: they tend not to vote Tory). By contrast Wales does not demand voter ID in its elections. However, the Tory government have recently seen fit to extend voting rights (with no ID checks) to expats who permanently live abroad and don’t pay UK taxes (explanation: they, of course, are nearly all Tories who love Britain so much they wouldn’t dream of living here). The corruption is breathtaking – and there are even those in the Tory Party, like defence secretary Grant Shapps, who are arguing for voting rights to be extended to the dead! Shapps says that “it is their lifetime of taxes that paid for this country so would it be so very wrong to use AI technology to extrapolate the voting preferences of the dead and enact them? Rather than wrong, it is in fact the moral thing to do.” Yes, mobilising the vote of non-existent people is seriously being mooted by a government minister. Well, it’s one way of securing Tory hegemony for eternity!

Other changes proposed in the Senedd Cymru (Members & Elections Bill), which should become law by next year, include:
● fixed-date, four-yearly elections, rather than the English method currently being displayed by cowardly Sunak in which the general election is a guess-the-date opportunistic farrago calculated to serve the best advantage of the incumbent government;
● candidates must be resident in Wales (eg: no more Neil Hamiltons);
● so-called ‘independent’ candidates must disclose party membership;
● the inclusion of ‘gender balance’ in each party’s list of candidates.

There are aspects of the reforms that I can disagree with: I would prefer open lists to party lists; I would prefer one of the slightly more equitable proportional systems than the D’Hondt Method; and I would prefer the 16 new constituencies being formed (with six representatives from each) not to be based on simply pairing the 32 constituencies that Westminster has imposed on Wales for the next UK election (reducing Welsh MPs from 40) but on more coherent, cogent and geographically rational boundaries that have been determined by Wales. However this is definitely a major step in the right direction and further reforms can correct shortcomings and anomalies in future.

As for Mordaunt, who like so many Tories faces electoral annihilation this year, she should leave Wales alone and concentrate on finding a new job better suited to her talents. Um…let’s think…lugging Charlie’s tumescent sword around…?