Welsh Assembly 1979 onwards

[cibwr]

If by some twist of fate Labour had made getting the Wales and Scotland bills through the House of Commons without a referendum a matter of confidence and the statute had remained on the books what would the Assembly have looked like?

The act stipulated that the first Assembly election would take place at a time designated by the Secretary of State for Wales, assuming that the government hadn't fallen we can assume that this would take place on the third Thursday in March 1979. The act stipulated that initially Westminster constituencies were to be used to elect members by first past the post, 2 from most constituencies but three in whose electorate was 125% or more of quota. As there were 36 Welsh constituencies for Westminster the number elected would be 79 - Barry, Flint East, Monmouth, Newport, Pembroke, Pontypridd and Wrexham being more than 125% of quota. Subsequent elections would be on a single seat basis, the boundary commission dividing each Westminster constituency into 2 or three, with the usual stipulation of trying to keep within local authority boundaries, but each Assembly seat lying wholly in a Westminster seat.

With a bit of a hand wave and based on the 1979 general election, and taking the vagaries of fptp into account I think the result would be as follows:

Aberavon 2 seats - 2 Labour

Aberdare 2 seats - 2 Labour

Abertillery 2 seats - 2 Labour

Anglesey 2 seats - 1 Conservative 1 Labour

Barry 3 seats - 3 Conservative

Bedwellty 2 seats - 2 Labour

Brecon & Radnor 2 seats - 1 Conservative 1 Labour

Caernarvon 2 seats - 2 Plaid Cymru

Caerphilly 2 seats - 2 Labour

Cardiff North 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Cardiff North West 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Cardiff South East 2 seats - 2 Labour

Cardiff West 2 seats - 1 Labour 1 Conservative

Cardigan 2 seats - 1 Liberal 1 Conservative

Carmarthen 2 seats - 1 Plaid Cymru 1 Labour

Conway 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Denbigh 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Ebbw Vale 2 seats - 2 Labour

Flint East 3 seats - 2 Labour 1 Conservative

Flint West 2 seats - 2 Conservative

Gower 2 seats - 2 Labour

Llanelli 2 seats - 2 Labour

Merioneth 2 seats - 2 Plaid Cymru

Merthyr Tydfil 2 - 2 seats Labour

Monmouth 3 seats - 3 Conservative

Montgomery 2 seats - 1 Conservative 1 Liberal

Neath 2 seats - 2 Labour

Newport 3 seats - 3 Labour

Ogmore 2 seats - 2 Labour

Pembroke 3 seats - 3 Conservative

Pontypool 2 seats - 2 Labour

Pontypridd 3 seats - 2 Labour

Rhondda 2 seats - 2 Labour

Swansea East 2 seats - 2 Labour

Swansea West 2 seats - 1 Labour 1 Conservative

Wrexham 3 seats - 3 Labour

Giving us Labour 46, Conservative 26, Plaid Cymru 5, Liberal 2. A comfortable Labour majority of 13 over other parties.

Subsequent elections would have been interesting given that we would be using single member constituencies.

[piperdave]

Well you learn something every day! I never knew what the electoral provisions were had the 1979 referendums succeeded more emphatically. Similar rules were in place for Scotland, apart from Orkney & Shetland being given discrete representation. I make it that there would have been 152 seats using the 1979 general election electorates.

71 constituencies with 2 members each at least gives you 142. 10 constituencies would all have 3 members being over 125% (Aberdeen South, Aberdeenshire West, Ayrshire Central, Clackmannan & East Stirlingshire, Dunbartonshire East, East Kilbride, Midlothian, Renfrewshire West, Stirling-Falkirk-Grangemouth, and West Lothian) Midlothian should have had a fourth at 194.9% but would have had to wait for the boundary review to get it.

5 constituencies were at less than 62.5% of the quota and so you could have argued that they should only get one member. These were Caithness & Sutherland, Glasgow Central, Glasgow Govan, Glasgow Shettleston and the Western Isles.

I'm interested, cibwr, in how you decided when constituencies would have split representation? I would expect that the overwhelming majority of constituencies, perhaps with the exception of very rural parts of the country, would have voted 1 and 2 (and 3) for candidates of the same party.

[Pete Whitehead]

Mar 28, 2016 14:06:43 GMT cibwr said:

Subsequent elections would have been interesting given that we would be using single member constituencies.

So the next thing is to speculate what these constituencies would have looked like. Presumably they would have been based on the 1983 Westminster seats with each being split in two for a total of 76 seats (I don;t suppose any of these seats would have been 125% above quota, though one or two would have been well under)

[Deleted]

Mrs. Thatcher might have had it abolished.

[cibwr]

They were where I split the representation they were just judgement calls, usually based on there being the probability of personal votes getting otherwise losing candidates above the line, such as Gwynfor in Carmarthen. I based the results primarily on the 1979 general election.

I am not sure Thatcher could abolish it, by the time she got round to it, it would have been too firmly embedded and Labour would have defended it. It wouldn't quite be the GLC and Thatcher didn't abolish that until 1986. Abolishing councils was one thing - abolishing a national representative body quite another.

[cibwr]

Mar 28, 2016 19:03:07 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

Mar 28, 2016 14:06:43 GMT cibwr said:

Subsequent elections would have been interesting given that we would be using single member constituencies.

So the next thing is to speculate what these constituencies would have looked like. Presumably they would have been based on the 1983 Westminster seats with each being split in two for a total of 76 seats (I don;t suppose any of these seats would have been 125% above quota, though one or two would have been well under)

Indeed and that would be an interesting exercise in fiction, anyone have ward maps from 1983, 1987, 1991 etc? To say nothing of election results for those periods?

[Pete Whitehead]

Well of course we have the results here www.electionscentre.co.uk/?page_id=2400
Not sure on wards but my impression is that they haven't changed all that much in a lot of places. I do in any case have ward and civil parish monitors from the 1991 census which include ward maps and think these were all the same as those in use in the 1980s

[cibwr]

Thanks for the link most useful, if you have the ward maps they would be a great help, thanks!

[Deleted]

Mar 29, 2016 9:27:32 GMT cibwr said:

They were where I split the representation they were just judgement calls, usually based on there being the probability of personal votes getting otherwise losing candidates above the line, such as Gwynfor in Carmarthen. I based the results primarily on the 1979 general election.

I am not sure Thatcher could abolish it, by the time she got round to it, it would have been too firmly embedded and Labour would have defended it. It wouldn't quite be the GLC and Thatcher didn't abolish that until 1986. Abolishing councils was one thing - abolishing a national representative body quite another.

As we know, Labour could have tried to defend something as much as they liked in the Eighties, it wouldn't have stopped Mrs T. Had a referendum approved the establishment of a Welsh Assembly, it would have been more difficult to justify abolition. But if Labour had simply established it without a vote, she could have claimed it lacked legitimacy.

[cibwr]

She could have but it wasn't a council, it was a national body, I would have thought that abolition after the 1987 UK general election would have been difficult for them, after all they were not very popular by then in Wales and she couldn't really claim a mandate. After all the met counties were a thorn in her side and they didn't go until 1986.

[Devil Wincarnate]

cibwr, what do you think happens to Plaid?  Do they take advantage of a bigger stage on a smaller scene, or does FPTP stifle them in a more embarrassing way?

[cibwr]

I think you will see differential turn out of Plaid supporters, as you do now, and that Plaid will do better given the spotlight. Yes FPTP will be a break but they will have a respectable vote and will gain some seats outside Y Fro. Much will depend on where the lines are drawn with the new FPTP constituencies, and of course you can't simply project what happened in Our Time Line to this one, butterflies etc. And for the purpose of the exercise lets assume that sanity prevails and Thatcher does not try to abolish the Assembly, now comfortably housed in a revamped and renewed Cardiff Coal Exchange.

[cibwr]

Time I updated this and had the next election results, will try and produce a sensible map (though it will mainly be based on current warding structures but that should be reasonable enough for the purpose) again this will all be guesswork.

[cibwr]

Another project worth looking at I think.... splitting the constituencies will be a bugger.

[cibwr]

Mar 31, 2019 17:00:59 GMT cibwr said:

Another project worth looking at I think.... splitting the constituencies will be a bugger.

Well now I have boundary assistant back I can make some maps - though using current boundaries, which will be approximate to the ones that I think we would use.

[cibwr]

A quick recap - after all it has been some years - The Welsh Assembly is established in 1979, Each Westminster constituency returning either 2 or 3 members giving us an assembly of 79 seats.
Labour 46, Conservative 26, Plaid Cymru 5, Liberal 2. A comfortable Labour majority of 13 over other parties.

It had been an eventful inaugural Assembly term, the election of the Leader of the Executive Committee, quickly dubbed by the Western Mail (the National Newspaper of Wales) the Premier of Wales, proved to be a foretaste of things to come. The actual vote in the Assembly was a forgone conclusion as the executive of the Welsh Council of Labour, as the Labour party executive was grandly named, had already decided its candidate - and it was dully rubber-stamped by the Assembly group and the Assembly as a whole. Jack Brooks had a long carer in Local Government - first on the old Cardiff County Borough Council and then on the South Glamorgan County Council and having been snubbed by the powers to be in his ambition to go to Brussels as an elected member of the European Parliament, the chair of the Executive Committee of the Welsh Assembly was seen as something of a consolation prize. His acceptance of a peerage from his friend and colleague Jim Callaghan in the dissolution honours list of October 1979 was somewhat controversial.

His successes in his first term of office included the pushing through of plans to redevelop the derelict docklands of Cardiff and the widening of the A55 in the North together with its extension to Holyhead. Navigating the Cardiff Bay bill through the Commons was a practical piece of bipartisanship with the new Tory Secretary of State for Wales, Nicholas Edwards. The novel Welsh bill procedure handed the committee stage to a revamped Welsh Grand Committee though report stage still went via the Commons.

Less successful were plans for reorganising local government. While the Assembly had no power to change the local government structure it was tasked with presenting a review to the Secretary of State for Wales. As a plurality of members of the Assembly were serving or ex local authority members it was to be expected that this would be controversial. The last reorganisation had reduced the number of authorities substantially and had replaced them with a two tier structure. The counties pressed for a single tier structure, based on them, while the districts wanted the same but based on them. Additionally Cardiff, Swansea and Newport wanted their County Borough Status restored what ever the outcome was. Even Merthyr Tydfil demanded its re instatement as a County Borough. Debate was heated, and depended on where members came from and what their previous electoral history was. In the end matters were fudged. Cardiff and Swansea were recommended to regain their county borough status as unitary authorities, with both Cardiff and Swansea being enlarged, Cardiff gaining some further rural areas and Swansea taking in much of the Lliw Valley district - the rest going to the Neath district. This would leave both the remnants of the counties of West Glamorgan and South Glamorgan nonviable - plans to create a new South Glamorgan out of The Vale and Ogwr district were proposed as were plans to absorb both Afan, Neath and the Vale into a reconstituted Glamorgan with Rhymney Valley merged into Gwent. Elsewhere it was proposed to reconstitute Pembrokeshire by merging South Pembrokeshire and Preseli and Carmarthenshire by merging Carmarthen district with Dinefwr (Llanelli to remain a borough council). However both the new Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire were to be districts of Dyfed. The only other change proposed was the merger of Brecknock and Radnorshire to form a new district of Brecon and Radnorshire. The completed report split the Labour party and only narrowly was approved by the Assembly. It has sat gathering dust in Whitehall and is expected not to see the light of day.

The election its self was set against the backdrop of a resurgent Conservative party, bolstered by their success in the Falklands War and the split in the Labour party with the emergence of the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Alliance. No member of the Labour group Assembly group had defected - but two Labour MPs had. Labour in Wales had never had the level of entryism that the Labour Party had in the rest of the UK, confined as it was to the student and youth sections, so suffered less from the splits than did its counterparts in England.

Now fast forward to the second election 17th May 1983. The boundary commission has split the new Westminster seats into two Assembly seats, reducing the Assembly to 72 members. Elections were held the same day as district council elections and to no one’s surprise turn out was under 45%.

[cibwr]

South Glamorgan

Cardiff Central

Assembly Constituency Cardiff Castle Labour

Assembly Constituency Cardiff Roath Conservative

Cardiff North

Assembly Constituency Cardiff North East Conservative

Assembly Constituency Cardiff Whitchurch Conservative

Cardiff South & Penarth

Assembly Constituency Cardiff South West & Penarth Conservative

Assembly Constituency Cardiff Rumney Labour

Cardiff West

Assembly Constituency Cardiff Ely Labour

Assembly Constituency Cardiff Llandaff Conservative

Vale of Glamorgan

Assembly Constituency Barry Conservative

Assembly Constituency Vale of Glamorgan Conservative

[cibwr]

Mid Glamorgan

Pontypridd

Assembly Constituency Pontypridd Town Labour

Assembly Constituency Llantrisaint Labour

Rhondda

Assembly Constituency Rhondda East Labour

Assembly Constituency Rhondda West Labour

Cynon Valley

Assembly Constituency Aberdare Plaid Cymru

Assembly Constituency Mountain Ash Labour

Merthy Tydfil and Rhymney

Assembly Constituency Merthyr South & Rhymney Labour

Assembly Constituency Merthyr Town Labour

Caerphilly

Assembly Constituency Ystrad Mynach Labour

Assembly Constituency Caerphilly Town Plaid Cymru


Bridgend

Assembly Constituency Bridgend Town Conservative

Assembly Constituency Porthcawl Conservative

Ogmore

Assembly Constituency Ogmore East Labour

Assembly Constituency Ogmore West Labour

[cibwr]

West Glamorgan

Aberavon

Assembly Constituency Port Talbot Labour

Assembly Constituency Britton Ferry Labour

Neath

Assembly Constituency Neath West Labour

Assembly Constituency Neath East Labour

Gower

Assembly Constituency Gower and The Mumbles Conservative

Assembly Constituency Lliw Valley Labour

Swansea West

Assembly Constituency Swansea South West Conservative

Assembly Constituency Swansea Central Labour

Swansea East

Assembly Constituency Swansea North East Labour

Assembly Constituency Swansea East Labour

[cibwr]

Gwent

Newport West

Assembly Constituency Newport South West Labour

Assembly Constituency Newport North and Caerleon Labour

Newport East

Assembly Constituency Newport St Julians Labour

Assembly Constituency Newport Caldicot and Llanwern Labour

Islwyn

Assembly Constituency Newbridge Labour

Assembly Constituency Blackwood Labour

Blaenau Gwent

Assembly Constituency Ebbw Vale and Tredegar Labour

Assembly Constituency Abertilleri Labour

Torfaen

Assembly Constituency Pontypool Labour

Assembly Constituency Cwmbran Labour

Monmouth

Assembly Constituency Monmouth North Conservative

Assembly Constituency Monmouth South Conservative