The break up of the UK is not ‘unthinkable’ for all three First Ministers currently in office across the state. Mark Drakeford has been deeply committed to the Union, but his vision is of a voluntary union of nations. Only parochially metropolitan folk can still call break up ‘unthinkable’.

ICYMI Rhun ap Iorwerth, First Minister, Wales www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Marion Kozak’s work on the ‘80s National Childcare Campaign & then Daycare Trust deserves the widest possible acknowledgement & celebration. Fed into Labour’s late 90s National Childcare Strategy and the Sure Start. Cameron ‘s Coalition deliberately destroyed Sure Start: a deeply regressive move.

Sarah Pochin MP has highlighted something which is unfortunately very true - football tournaments are always associated with a big increase in domestic violence. Absolutely nothing to do with the team - but very much to do with the culture that surrounds supporting the national team.

The planned meeting between Rhun ap Iorwerth and Keir Starmer will not take place in June as originally planned. The pair had been planning to meet to discuss potential constitutional changes for Wales. I understand that the Welsh Gov put forward several dates but the PM was unable to make them.

One of the secrets about the FT is that if you buy the paper they sometimes tell you what they really really think before some subeditor spots it. Compare the print and digital copy about SpaceX www.ft.com/content/1638...

As well as folk interested in Cymru, everyone interested in UK politics, Labour and Social Democratic parties or bloc politics needs to make sense of the Senedd election. A weekend watch of @jaclarner.bsky.social , your indispensable guide, here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bcH...

Carry on Campaigning? Or Brexit as Not-So-Jolly Gents' Japes, plus Wives and Sisters making dinner. I have just done a rough and ready analysis of the 'talking head' contributions to the BBC's 'Brexit: a Very British Civil War'. A short 🧵about this Blokey Affair: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

Dear England. @realbaddiel.bsky.social on R4 dissecting Sixty Years of Hurt. English National Identity and football is in the zeitgeist. But empirical analysis suggests Euro 24 activated already existing identities, rather than making a deeper changes. Ever brilliant @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social

Lovely to see work on NI environmental governance recognised...even if colour choice looks like a poster for an action movie in the 2010s #orangeandteal

It’s a grim not-so-merry-go-round for students trying to find their way in super-massive cohorts. @sylviademars.me point that many students using AI to get a 52 could do much better by not taking the shortcut lands hard with me. But 2.2 is a long way providing a smooth path to a legal career. Or 1/3

Fantastic news from NILQ - a very important generalist law journal and an invaluable resource in particular for folk concerned with territorial governance across Britain and Ireland. Well done @markflear.bsky.social and team who have steered the journal to new heights.

Potentially a very big deal. Changing the Westminster electoral system would fundamentally change our politics. Lesson from other countries is also that once FPP has been ditched it is unlikely to be brought back.

👇👇Essential short Senedd election thread. Follow @jaclarner.bsky.social for Welsh politics analysis and data. 👇👇 A nugget in the thread shows that the absence/presence of British identity differentiates left/right blocs in Wales. Its a challenge to Wes Streeting’s ‘patriotic’ pitch to UK Labour.

Essential reading 👇

My take on the UKSC's Dillon judgment - it is a combination of regressive and dubious reasoning. It radically reduces the range of cases in which Art 2 is applicable, in reasoning which flies in the face of the UK Government's promises over the provision: ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/05/14/c...

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 New Blog 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 A short piece on how the new Senedd voting system worked! How many votes did it take to win a seat? Was it proportional? Who benefitted? Where did parties win support? And what would it take to win one more seat? If you're interested: blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/thinking-wal... 🧵👇

Interested in electoral systems and proportional voting? Essential reading from @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social on the new (D’Hondt) voting system in Wales worked out.

Llongyfarchiadau mawr i griw @yougov.co.uk ac i griw @itvcymruwales.bsky.social a @walesgovernance.bsky.social sy'n gweithio hefo nhw. Big up the whole YouGov team and the associated ITV/Wales Governance Centre teams! yougov.com/en-gb/articl...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c7...

This is an incredibly moving story of how sheer chance can change not only your life but your outlook on life. Imagine finding yourself in #Aberfan on that fateful day and and being lauded for the images of such heartbreaking sadness. 💔 #Wales #Cymru www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

On Scotland, @robjohns75.bsky.social highlighted how independence still drives voting intention in Holyrood elections. Focus from unionist parties on "getting out the SNP" acts as a proxy for the issue because the SNP so much embodies independence.

On Wales, @jaclarner.bsky.social showed how national identity was changing in Wales, with more people identifying as only Welsh, and increasing Left-Right polarisation along the lines of Welsh vs British identification Reform also doing better than the Tories among stronger Welsh identifying areas

My column in today’s paper: the devolved and local elections had obvious winners: Plaid Cymru, the Greens, the Lib Dems and most of all, the SNP. It also had obvious losers: Labour and the Conservatives:

My latest Guardian piece. Plaid won 35.4% of the vote last week while Starmer’s Labour picked up 33.7% of the 2024 GE. Yet Starmer has 63% of the seats in Westminster while ap Iorwerth has 45% of the seats in Wales. Electoral systems matter. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

For ICON-S Dublin attendees this year, there will be a roundtable on my book, Judicial Individuality on the UKSC, at 2:30pm on Day 1 of the event (29 June). Join me, @aoifemod.bsky.social, @colinmurray.bsky.social and @anuragdeb.bsky.social for a discussion on judicial behaviour on the UKSC

A post about the Senedd election and the forthcoming Plaid Cymru government. open.substack.com/pub/ukania/p...

Fascinating stuff. Only thing I'd add is that ability of list to compensate for disproportionality in const depends on limited split ticket voting. Prelim SES data suggest *split tickets at an all time high* this election, thus further weakening Lab and Con chances esp Quebec proposed a model of ...

All elections are exciting, but the 2026 Senedd election could be the election of a century in Wales. To hear more about it, join us 25 May for the 2026 SES annual lecture, delivered by @walesgovernance.bsky.social 's @richardwynjones.bsky.social Will probably contain Venn diagrams

Essential reading for anyone wanting to understand what has just happened in Wales. 👇👇👇

I’m going to choose to take this out of context and thank you for praising the excellent job that our @walesgovernance.bsky.social colleagues, including @lauramcallister30.bsky.social, @jaclarner.bsky.social, and @richardwynjones.bsky.social did today!

Was really great stuff. Both clear how the new system worked but didn’t overwork, was a great programme.

Wholly unsystematic impression alert. Back from voting in Caerdydd Penarth. Turnout locally seems high.

A new post on the election everyone's talking about today: the 2011 AV referendum! There's probably going to be talk about changing the voting system soon, but there's a right way and wrong way to sell this. Here is an ad showing how NOT to do it. Why is a young ZP in thumbnail? Read to find out!

"If and when a UK-EU SPS agreement is agreed, constitutional questions arise not only for the UK government and Parliament, but also for the devolved institutions in Cardiff and Edinburgh." @cbarnard.bsky.social & James Wolffe on the UK-EU SPS agreement and devolution ukandeu.ac.uk/the-uk-eu-sp...

An interesting read. Brexit didn’t just change politics. It may have reshaped national identity. This new research examines how transformative political events like Brexit influenced citizens’ sense of national belonging: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gpgnt...

In Wales, this special from @catrinhj.bsky.social & @richardwynjones.bsky.social is probably the best programme on the elections. It's still not scrutiny that confronts politicians and citizens on the current state of knowledge on a topic. Take the 20mph speed limit 1/ www.s4c.cymru/clic/program...

🚨NEW BLOG🚨 With polls opening in less than 24 hours, I thought it would be good to look over the kind of information environment voters would be operating in in Wales! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/thinking-wal...

Racial discrimination was legal in Britain until 1965 -2 decades after WW2- & remained legal in housing & employment until the 1968 & 1976 race relations acts plugged holes in the 1st in the face of by public & parliamentary opposition, who argued constraining freedom to discriminate was un-English

Essential reading if you have a vote to cast in Wales tomorrow. Or if you are interested politics across the U.K. 👇👇

Notable that much of the variation in Welsh polling has disappeared in the final days of the campaign. The standard deviation in Plaid Cymru estimates across firms fell from 4.3 to 1.8 percentage points since autumn; for Labour, from 5.6 to 2.3 Most convergence happening in last 10 days (1/2)

Wednesday, 6th May at 6 PM BST, I will be on with Hugo Bromley, Peter Sloman, and @jackliddall16.bsky.social at the University of Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics! We will discuss the issues and state of play in the UK devolved and local elections. Come join online! www.cfg.cam.ac.uk/events/scott...

The headline findings are certainly worth your time!!! Please read our (@jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social @jaclarner.bsky.social ) paper ‘Reshaping Belonging: National Identity Change in post-referendum Britain’ forthcoming in @bjpols.bsky.social tinyurl.com/mrj96ywu

The headline findings are worth your time, but Dan’s contribution here is a thoughtful history of how national identity has (and has not) been measured in British surveys over time

A great thread here on how the muzzling effect of early assumptions has turned national identity into one of those dogs that haven’t done much barking in British electoral research.

Some wider thoughts on this research. A (not so) wee 🧵. The UK experienced a series of high stakes events between 2014 and 2020. Thanks to @britishelectionstudy.com for asking a pre and post referendum NatID question. Without panel data on this q, we could never have known about this change. 1/n

Worth underscoring this research finding: by politicising it, Brexit weakened British national identity (across GB).

Protip to anyone teaching UK parties and elections or political psychology: ASSIGN THIS! At least from anecdotal experience, students find the prospect of long-held identities changing for political reasons very interesting.

Delighted this paper is coming out in the @bjpols.bsky.social Working with @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social and @jaclarner.bsky.social is a pleasure and privilege. (Anyone who gets the chance to work with either should grab it with both hands!) Diolch to my coauthors, the BJPS editors and our referees.

📝 What a lovely way to end the week: The Journal of Environmental Law has now published my article entitled "The devolution of the Crown Estate in Wales: an environmental law perspective". You can read the article (Open Access) here: academic.oup.com/jel/advance-...