Are Scotland and Wales converging devolution cousins?

By Richard Parry, 

The elections on 7 May 2026 produced one important statistic – turnout in Scotland fell from 64% in 2021 to 54% this time, whereas in Wales it rose from 47% to 52%. The Senedd had been trundling along throughout its history with minority turnouts similar to local government, whereas Scotland in 2021 seemed seriously poised to become a first-order election of greater weight and political impact than the nation’s component of UK elections. Now their impact, or lack of it, is similar.  Both nations have a six-party system, accounting for all the members of the legislature. Voice has been given in Holyrood and Cardiff Bay to extremes of left and right, but the centre of gravity is very different – Scotland having 17 Reform members to 15 Green, Wales 34 to 2. 

Labour’s Scottish and Welsh parliamentarians are now concentrated at Westminster (37 out of 54, and 27 out of 36 respectively) as Andy Burnham’s arrival as Prime Minister on 20 July opened up a new context for devolution in the UK driven by English place- (and mostly city-) based localism.  Burnham’s speech in Manchester on 29 June had already signalled a new interest in a similar sub-national devolution within the two nations, seen by some as Labour’s historical ploy to weaken devolved parliaments. In that speech, Burnham’s choice of historically nationalist Dundee and Bangor as examples of places that ‘feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster’ seemed ill-advised. Burnham’s invitation on 27 August for devolved leaders to join him in a meeting of a revived ‘National Economic Council’ pursued another long-term ploy, of mobilising devolved nations to pursue UK economic objectives.

But now at the table are nationalist and convergent administrations. Convergence involves both Wales becoming more like Scotland and Scotland becoming more like Wales. It is now a familiar theme that Scotland set the norms of devolution within the UK, which expanded over time and enabled Wales to dock into them. The Scottish-only space is now defined by justice and policing and the active use of some social security and income tax powers. In all these cases the Welsh system has shown some resistance to taking on powers, based on prudence as well as policy, resistance likely to weaken under Plaid Cymru.  But Scotland is now emulating Wales in the incorporation of a party imported from England – Reform (and in Wales its Farageist predecessors). In May Reform in Wales (29%) even outpolled England (about 26%) as well as Scotland (17%). As Scottish Election Study data show, Reform voters in 2026 were markedly sympathetic (40%) to the abolition of the Scottish Parliament but this now applies in equal measure to Conservative voters. SNP domination of the devolved system has led to potential unionist alienation from it.

In many ways the two election results are counter-intuitive. In both nations the election was about regime change – the circumstances under which a long tenure in government (27 years for Welsh Labour and 19 years for the SNP) might be terminated. After Labour’s massive UK election victory in 2024, the glide path appeared to be one of Labour seat gains at Holyrood, backed up by Liberal Democrat successes to provide a plausible coalition that would surpass the SNP in seats and be ushered into office by abstentions by Conservatives (and if necessary Reform). In Wales, the new electoral system seemed to at least offer Labour a good chance of first place, dominating a progressive coalition with Plaid Cymru, coupled with a payoff from a supportive UK government vested in Labour’s Welsh success. In the event, the massive, mysterious, largely self-inflicted slump in Labour’s (and Keir Starmer’s) popularity upended these scenarios. Labour in Wales were victims of a new electoral system, the SNP winners from a continuing one as they dominated constituency seats on a reduced vote share.

Even without their vote efficiency, it is remarkable how the SNP survived many crises – Sturgeon/Murrell, breaking the coalition with the Greens, Humza Yousaf, the challenge from Alex Salmond’s Alba until his death, losing 39 of 48 Westminster seats in 2024, losing the ‘de facto referendum’ on independence that election was supposed to be 37% (SNP + Green + Alba) to 63%, and losing through a self-inflicted Supreme Court reference the possibility of unilaterally putting an IndyRef 2 bill through the Scottish Parliament. Welsh Labour also had one disastrous First Ministership overlain by a scandal involving money, Vaughan Gething’s. Both administrations were vulnerable to criticism about their performance on devolved public services, but only the SNP weathered the storm.

In the end it has not been necessary in 2026 to explore new coalition combinations in order to unblock a ruling party hegemony, something familiar from continental European experience. In the UK the closest we have come to an opportunistic coalition is the ‘Rainbow deal’ between the Conservatives, Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrats after the 2007 election that would have forced Labour out of Welsh government. In the event this was never finally ratified by all three parties and Labour were able to make a better offer to Plaid that admitted them as junior coalition partners and led to the successful 2011 referendum on giving the Welsh Assembly primary law-making powers. Experience in the 2021 parliaments of the not-quite-coalition arrangements between SNP and Greens, and Labour and Plaid, has given a new attractiveness to minority but single-party government.  

A single-party government is especially important when it is nationalist one. After 2007 in Scotland the SNP were able to change the political interpretation of devolution from a system designed to make the Union work better to one exploring the limits of governmental power possible under the nation’s own political resources. Coupled with civil service norms on exclusive responsibility to devolved ministers, this enabled the activation in Scotland of a live independence option. Already Plaid has become the first administration able to conduct a Cabinet meeting in the Welsh language. They are in a position to take forward the definitional work on independence started cautiously by the 2024 all-party McAllister-Williams Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales. With the SNP stuck on progressing its own independence project, it may be Cardiff that becomes the more active political location until the now non-coincidental next devolved elections, 2030 in Wales and 2031 in Scotland. Original devolved terms of four years were extended by stealth to five to avoid a clash with a fixed-term UK general election in 2015.  Now Wales has reverted to four, a reminder that by a two-thirds majority the Parliaments can now alter their own electoral arrangements, an idea inconceivable in 1997.