Taking place amid a global pandemic, the 2021 Senedd Election saw Welsh Labour returned as the largest party at the sixth consecutive occasion since the institution’s founding in 1999. Results for opposition parties were mixed: the Conservatives achieved their highest ever vote share but their seat tally fell short of pre-election expectations, and Plaid Cymru again made little progress. Using data from the 2021 Welsh Election Study, we explore the election campaign and results, and offer a first analysis of vote choice. We find that Labour not only benefitted from incumbency advantages drawn from voters’ approval of the Welsh Government’s handling of the pandemic, but through its use of symbols, branding and messaging, the party continues to remain attuned to a national identity position that broadly aligns with that of the electorate as a whole.

AbstractThis article analyses the development of the Council of Social Service for Wales during what is often called the Golden Age of the Welfare State. Recovering the neglected history of the peak organisation for voluntary social service in Wales adds to our understanding of the histories of social policy and postwar Wales. The article addresses social policy from a doubly peripheral perspective – it attends to a territorial periphery of the UK State while voluntary action can be left at the margins of Welfare State analysis. From this perspective we hope to cast new light on the historiography of the ‘British Welfare State’

The effects of an old-age allowance programme on intergenerational interactions in Taiwan

The Welsh Labour government occupies a unique position in UK territorial politics, favouring neither the status quo nor independence for Wales while advocating a new settlement for the whole state. This article provides a detailed examination of its policy, focusing on its position on the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Drawing from a range of documentary sources, we analyse the Welsh government’s constitutional proposals and its decision-making in the wake of the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. We argue that Welsh policy is defined by ambiguity. While it advances an alternative constitutional vision, it refrains from rejecting Westminster’s sovereignty outright. In the aftermath of the referendum, it sought to accommodate that sovereignty with its own constitutional claims through enhanced intergovernmental collaboration. In light of the Johnson administration’s centralising reforms, the strategy appears to have failed. Caught in the fractious politics of the Union, Welsh constitutional policy now faces an uncertain future.

Brexit has foregrounded radical divergences between the accounts of the UK's constitutional order advanced by the UK Government and the devolved governments, with the distinctions coming into sharp relief in debates over legislation to sustain the UK's internal market. This article examines the limits to the roots of the UK Government's insistence that the UK is a unitary state, and not a union-state, in the textbook tradition of constitutional scholarship. Writers from A. V. Dicey to S. A. de Smith asserted that the UK was a unitary state largely as an adjunct to their accounts of parliamentary sovereignty. We also examine how the received orthodoxy of unitary accounts of the UK's constitution came under increasing pressure after the advent of devolution, but that the UK's membership of the European Union, and the operation of the principle of subsidiarity within European law, forestalled a considerable amount of constitutional contestation. The need to replace European law as a foundation of the UK internal market, and the UK Government's attempts to exert control over this transition, has produced a sustained debate about what the union means after Brexit.

Debate around Wales' place in the United Kingdom has intensified over recent years, with radically differing visions for the union of the Welsh and UK governments emerging alongside growing (though still minority) support for Welsh independence. This article argues that these constitutional debates must be considered alongside Wales' current fiscal position. Wales' estimated fiscal deficit is reflective of long-standing economic underperformance as part of the UK, which we argue is unlikely to be addressed under current economic, fiscal and constitutional arrangements. On the other hand, it also suggests a difficult economic outlook for an independent Wales, which would require tough fiscal and economic choices to address Wales' apparent balance of payments deficit.

Introducing a multidisciplinary special issue on the multilevel dynamics of the UK's exit from the European Union (EU), this article considers social science 'impact' from Brexit-related research, including the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) UK in a Changing Europe initiative and Governance after Brexit programme. The issue draws on the initiative's Brexit Priority Grant programme, bringing together economists, political scientists, policy analysts and socio-legal scholars. It analyses the UK's regional and devolution-related Brexit dynamics. The article considers the potential and challenges of cross-disciplinary work and concludes with a critical analysis of Boris Johnson administration's 'levelling up agenda' in a post-Brexit and Covid/Covid-recovery context.

Daniel Wincott and Gregory Davies discuss the development of the ‘Anglo-British’ imaginary, particularly when it comes to constitutional interpretation, and discuss some of its implications. They write that when judges, lawyers and politicians offer an Anglo-British image of the UK, they tend to blur and obscure English, British and UK realities, while marginalising Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

The ‘Act of Union’ Bill stands out among proposals designed to reform and, ultimately, save the UK’s Union of nations and jurisdictions. Taking the form of draft framework legislation, it offers a blueprint for how UK-wide constitutional change might be instigated. In doing so, the Bill provides a useful thought experiment in constitutional design: it allows us to consider how a distinct set of reforms to the Union might interact with recent legal and political developments. This paper offers a critique of clause 2 of the Bill, which envisions new roles for the courts in respect of a constitutionally novel set of ‘core purposes’ of the UK state. While analogous legislation and case law suggest that a limited role is intended for the courts, we argue that clause 2 would pose significant constitutional dilemmas. Involving the courts in a contested vision of the Union and its aims could risk jeopardising the political confidence in judicial independence which is required for the effective resolution of intergovernmental disputes. Further, the ambiguous constitutional character of the Bill, which seeks to reflect traditions of both popular and parliamentary sovereignties, could facilitate a more assertive constitutional role for the courts in their approach to a clause 2-type provision. This would risk further politicisation of the judicial role.

Brexit has unveiled previously hidden aspects of United Kingdom (UK) society, law and politics. It provides a valuable opportunity to investigate the social reception of law, and in particular the mediation of the law and constitution in the press. The distinctive constitutional arrangements and histories of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England have given rise to different territorial interpretations of the UK state. These asymmetries have parallels in the UK’s territorial media landscape, yet we have little understanding of how this landscape contributes to constitutional discourses. This article offers quantitative content and thematic analysis of UK-wide media coverage of major court judgments which have served as critical junctures in the Brexit process. The analysis reveals striking territorial variation in the volume and substance of coverage. Here, the media appears to reinforce divergent understandings of the constitution: while English reporting chimed with a more unitary account of the constitution, reporting elsewhere was more consistent with a vision of the UK as union-state. In the light of these findings, we argue that media analysis can make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the law and the constitution.

Has Brexit triggered a constitutional crisis? Crisis is one of a family of concepts, including tipping points, catastrophic equilibrium and failure, identifying it as a decisive moment for overcoming contradictions and ambiguities. Across multiple UK levels - the whole state, constituent nations and different legal jurisdictions - even in 'normal times' the constitution has been marked by both a dominant 'Anglo-British imaginary' and territorial ambiguities. Drawn into political debate, these ambiguities became sources of basic constitutional instability during Theresa May's premiership. Although May avoided full-blown constitutional crisis, one may yet come. Equally, she did oversee basic constitutional change, not necessarily in the form of crisis.

Striking territorial variations in the 2016 Brexit referendum are neglected in the explanatory literature, a gap our analysis of the British Election Study (BES) helps to fill. Rather than modelling Britain as one political system, we present parallel models for England, Scotland and Wales. Typical in other multinational states, this approach is innovative for 'British politics'. The analysis shows different variables help to explain Leave support in England, Scotland and Wales. To analyse complex multilevel national identities, we develop a relative territorial identity (RTI) measure. The measure shows that those who prioritize their territorial identity in England tended to vote Leave, while the opposite is true in Wales and Scotland. The performance of this RTI measure helps to explain territorial differentiation in the 2016 Brexit vote.

IPPR Progressive ReviewVolume 27, Issue 3 p. 246-255 Article After Brexit and Covid-19 Ailsa Henderson, Corresponding Author Ailsa Henderson [email protected] Ailsa Henderson is professor of political science at the University of Edinburgh. AUTHOR EMAIL ADDRESS FOR WALS: [email protected] (Affiliation: Edinburgh University)Search for more papers by this authorDaniel Wincott, Daniel Wincott Daniel Wincott is Blackwell professor of law and society at the University of Cardiff.Search for more papers by this author Ailsa Henderson, Corresponding Author Ailsa Henderson [email protected] Ailsa Henderson is professor of political science at the University of Edinburgh. AUTHOR EMAIL ADDRESS FOR WALS: [email protected] (Affiliation: Edinburgh University)Search for more papers by this authorDaniel Wincott, Daniel Wincott Daniel Wincott is Blackwell professor of law and society at the University of Cardiff.Search for more papers by this author First published: 15 December 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/newe.12222Citations: 1 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume27, Issue3Winter 2020Pages 246-255 RelatedInformation

Ostensibly motivated by 'taking back control', is Brexit an opportunity to enhance the UK's capacity for self-government? If driven by an aspiration to maximise the central state's governing autonomy, it confronts a paradox: governance structures at once enable action and constrain it. Exploring this paradox of structure, this article sets Brexit in long-term perspective. As well as reshaping its external relations, Brexit inevitably unsettles the UK's internal structures, not least in (partly) disentangling he UK state and organised civil society from EU institutions and processes. Equally, those internal structures were themselves rarely static. Brexit has complicated the processes of their flux. The article introduces a symposium which addresses issues of this kind in three important domains: feminist civil society organisations (Minto), Westminster's role and scrutiny of European affairs (Cygan, Lynch and Whitaker) and the legal rights and access to justice of EU migrants under English law (Barnard and Fraser Burton).

Using archival materials we reflect on the legal process of creating (and mitigating) a border in Ireland after partition in 1922 and interactions between those laws and the people they affected. After 1922 superficially durable exceptions developed to the territorial state’s distinctions between citizens and foreign nationals under the aegis of the Common Travel Area. They survived the 1930s UK-Ireland “Economic War”, were sustained (if in a restricted form) during the Second World War and rebuilt in its aftermath. These arrangements proved beneficial for both countries, providing an outlet for surplus labour for Ireland and a resource for the UK economy. We nonetheless explore how far practice reflected this overarching cooperative framework, particularly given the complications introduced by the policies of Northern Ireland’s institutions.

The international trend of state restructuring and the rise of decentralized welfare systems means a key challenge for social research is to systematically explore the breadth of factors shaping the territorialization of third sector welfare delivery at the meso level in federal and union states. We address this lacuna by synthesizing historical-institutionalism and critical realism with Salamon and Anheier's classic framework on civic infrastructure development to produce an inductive analytical model for wider empirical testing. Its application here to the longitudinal case study data covering Wales shows it to be effective in providing a holistic understanding of the temporal and spatial processes underpinning decentralization. The wider significance of the case study lies in underlining the iterative, reciprocal relationship between governance reforms and territorialization - and showing how territorialization can originate in response to national crises and welfare demand caused by state and market failure in the delivery of public goods.

The outcome of the Brexit referendum in June 2016 – a narrow majority for the United Kingdom (UK) to leave the European Union (EU) – came as a surprise to most commentators and participants. Eighteen months after the referendum, Brexit had already posed massive challenges to the UK State. This chapter discusses the UK's recent constitutional development and considers the role of EU law in UK constitutional change. It explains how patterns in public administration and political economy shape the prospects for the UK State as it negotiates its way through Brexit. Two longer-term aspects of the UK political sociology helped to shape the context of the Brexit referendum. The first concerns the treatment of the EU issue by Britain's two largest political parties. Second, these parties have found it difficult to address questions of national identity across the UK, particularly in England. For most of the twentieth century, political parties were central to the democratic operation of Western states.