Matt Smith: The Cardiff Bay Village takes blob politics to a whole new level | Conservative Home

Matt Smith has stood as a Conservative and Unionist candidate for Parliament and the Senedd. He was a Policy Analyst at Vote Leave.

In his book Ruling the Void, political scientist Peter Mair described of the hollowing out of modern western democracies as “citizens withdraw from politics” and “elites withdraw from civil society into the state” amidst “mutual indifference”.

Within Britain, this void is most visible in the hollowed out politics of Cardiff Bay, where public disengagement and the polarisation of devolution’s rulers enables institutional capture by leftist ideologues.

To paraphrase Mair, performative Senedd elections are “little more than dignified parts” of an elite-driven and enfeebled political process. Fewer than half of Welsh voters have ever turned out; 53 percent of eligible voters did not vote in 2021. Captured and weakly accountable institutions act as a political firewall against public expectations.

Rhodri Morgan, Labour’s second first minister and so-called ‘father of devolution’, saw that Cardiff Bay did not “have the wealth of think-tanks, universities and professional associations, organised interest groups and corporate lobby bodies and political consultancies of London.” Consequently, home rule took shape in the absence of an existing “Welsh political culture, Welsh policy making capability and peculiarly Welsh set of political processes.”

Devolved governments have resorted to astro-turfing a political process into existence. The two-dimensional Potemkin structures of the insular Cardiff Bay village are Welsh Government quangos, third sector NGOs, grant-maintained civil society groups, trade unions. and the permanently-retained activist class. Political off-takers within this infrastructure of incumbency, rather than devolution’s missing voters, are the key constituencies of the Welsh government, which is increasingly seen as the epicentre of woke idiocy.

Their group think based on identity-corporatism and globalism is being cemented into the public sector. As if designed to troll the public Welsh government policies emerge on a belt-fed rubbish collector of bad ideas, each of which is more ridiculous than the last.

The tyranny of the lanyard weighs heavily in Wales. Investment in the institutional left is in part reflected by the £10.5 million in the Welsh Government’s 2025-2026 budget allocated to financing ‘equality, inclusion and human rights’. Twenty identity politics-themed quangos oversee ideological regulation of the public sector. The Budget Improvement and Impact Advisory Group ensures funding decisions align with ‘an equalities and inclusion perspective’.

It goes on: the Anti-Racist Action Plan Wales (ARWAP) External Accountability Group advises an administration divisively committed to changing the ‘beliefs and behaviour of the white majority’. The Audit of Commemoration in Wales Task and Finish Group targets statuary, buildings and place names politicising the public square.

The LGBTQ+ Action Plan Action Group lobbies decision makers to think in terms of certificated gender over the protected characteristics of biological sex. 

Following the Supreme Court ruling on the biological meaning of “woman” and “sex” under the 2010 Equalities Act Tonia Antoniazzi, Labour’s Gower MP, warned devolved government is captured by charities lobbying for an anti-biological sex based rights agenda. Independent civil society voices calling for the ‘Action Plan’ to be scrapped say they have been ignored by ministers in Cardiff whose press release following the judgement was decidedly circumspect. 

The dead hand of Welsh Government DEI is visible in the weaponisation of cultural soft power quangos. Woke waste sleuths Senedd Waste (aka DOGE Wales) investigating Arts Council Wales’ spending on ARWAP-inspired projects discovered a research grant of £10,000 for “decolonising the Welsh cake”.

A further £7,500 was earmarked for the “My Welsh Skin” project. Thousands went to the absurdly titled ‘Privilege Café’, where ‘white privilege [theory] is the foundation of each conversation’. Huge sums have been allocated to embedding the ‘Global Majority’ through its ‘Creative Steps Programme’.

The elite-captured Museum Wales closed Cardiff’s iconic National Museum of Wales building yet has managed to spend £75m in two years on woke exhibits turning galleries into padded-cell echo chambers for provincial progressive elites. The quango nevertheless wound up being accused by its ‘Project Manager of Decolonising Collections’ of “unresolved racism and bullying” and exhibiting signs of “white fragility”.

Eluned Morgan, the First Minister,  recently commemorated the end of the miner’s strike yet her party’s administration previously told The Big Pit National Coal Museum to ‘decolonise’ and recognise ‘past injustices’.

Quangocrats pitch-role for wider ideological conformity within government, the public services and local authorities. Senior Cathays Park civil servants must now have one performance objective linked to anti-racism ideology. Welsh Government human resources want 20 per cent of external hires to be from ethnic minorities – a disproportionately high target one Labour councillor said is “likely to breed resentment”.

Public Health Wales spent nearly £25,000 on Stonewall accreditation. Swansea Bay University Health Board spent £120,000 on diversity training over four years. Cardiff City Council presides over serious urban deprivation yet over the last five years spent a staggering £3m on DEI themed jobs. A top-up of £5,000 is available in the form of a ‘minority ethnic incentive grant’ for trainee teachers  despite a pervasive teacher recruitment crisis.

Left-leaning third sector NGOs gear the Welsh Government’s rogue foreign, international aid and refugee and asylum policy notwithstanding these being reserved areas. The Welsh Government’s budget allocates £8.2 million for ‘international relations’ and £1m for ‘international development’. Its ‘Wales in Africa’ policy allocated The Size of Wales charity nearly £1,500,000 to plant trees in Uganda.

Cardiff ministers spent £55m on the Nation of Sanctuary Plan promoting their globalist utopian ideology. Morgan distanced herself from the Labour Prime Minister’s “island of strangers” speech abjuring what she called “divisive language” on immigration. Her Counsel General contradistinguished “the way we regard immigration” in Cardiff Bay and “the way that the UK government regards it”.

Political capture of the commanding heights of society is further entrenched through stakeholderism – the tactic of dispersing political power to supposedly independent ‘stakeholder’ interests and funding to left wing causes. An eye-watering £668m was funnelled to third sector organisations last year; a former chief executive of the Welsh Local Government Association warned Welsh civil society is “colonised by grants from the Welsh Government” politicising civil society.

Anti-profligacy campaigners Waste Watch Wales uncovered taxpayer funded allocations of £1.9million for its Union Learning Fund, £1.5m for the Trade Union Congress and £500,000 on ‘Net Zero Skills’. Bankrolling propaganda by proxy ministers ensure there is an politically reliable thumb on the political scales.

The progressive nomenklatura is supported by devolution’s patronage state and its private sector outworks. Taxpayers’ Alliance research found 138 ‘woke jobs’ on the Welsh Government payroll costing nearly £9m. Welsh Government-owned Transport for Wales employs five people in DEI-themed jobs yet new Valleys line trains will not provide toilets. The Careers Wales quango records 9,846 people working in equality and diversity officers with 500 more roles providing gainful employment for diversitycrats.

Lord Glasman, founder of Blue Labour, recently warned that politically correct speech diktats create a hostile environment for working class voters. Patronising minorities and lecturing those deemed insufficiently progressive drives rising equalities fatigue amongst voters yearning for a ‘return to real’, as is shown by collapsing support for Morgan’s ruling Welsh Labour and Mark Drakeford’s call for a rearguard coalition of ‘progressives parties’.

Rhodri Morgan said Wales is a ‘blue collar nation’ that needed an ‘assembly of the werin (people) not an assembly of the crachach (establishment)’. Instead, the progressive corporatism of the Cardiff Bay Village has made devolution into a safe haven from, rather than for, democracy.