It is rare for an event in the Welsh Senedd to attract national headlines, but the fallout from a question this week asked during business questions by Reform MS Joe Martin has done just that. The question itself has been widely misreported, so here it is in full:
‘Minister, can I have a statement from your government on the demographic replacement of white British people taking place in the UK, because the scale of change has been breathtaking. Mass immigration and differing birthrates mean that in just 37 years’ time, in 2063, we will be a minority in our own country, and that change has already place in London, Birmingham, Leicester, Slough, Luton and Manchester, and I don’t want it to happen here. Indeed, at every opportunity the majority of the electorate have wanted less immigration so that their nation can be preserved. A nation is not an economic zone, it is not a hotel and neither is it a charity. It’s a family which is capable of absorbing people of all races, if done at a sensible rate, but not if it’s replaced altogether.’
Not a notably extreme speech. Nor one concerned with ‘claiming white people are being “replaced”’, as the BBC stated. Also, it should be noted, factual in its claim that credible population forecasts predict the white British will be a minority in this country by the 2060s – with David Coleman predicting the year 2066 as long ago as 2010, pre-Boriswave, and Matt Goodwin’s recent work predicting 2063.
Despite this, Heledd Fychan MS, the Senedd’s business manager, refused to respond to the question. I spoke with Joe Martin, who told me that ‘rather than answering the question…she immediately asked the deputy presiding officer to rule on whether what I asked lived up to the standards expected of parliamentarians in Wales.’ Martin’s view is that his ‘constituents deserve to know what the government thinks about the enormous change that the UK is going through and that Wales is going through’. Instead though, the deputy presiding officer went away to consider matters, before calling Martin back into the chamber, where he said ‘what I’d said was racist, and that I wouldn’t be called on to speak again in that parliament until I apologised.’
Reform’s response to this has been strong, and unified. Martin said that the party ‘have rallied around me wonderfully. It’s been great to see the support I’ve had. Part of our response was to say that if you silence one of us, then you silence all of us. This is unacceptable. We will not legitimise a parliament which does not permit free speech. This is not a legitimate parliament’.
Helen Jenner MS, leader of Reform Wales echoed this, saying ‘it is now clear that the freedom of speech of one of our Senedd Members is being curtailed, meaning his constituents are being silenced. We stand behind Joe, and did not attend today’s plenary session in protest at his treatment. Every Reform MS was in their Senedd office working hard for our constituents’. Nigel Farage has also backed his Welsh colleagues, tweeting in support of them.
This isn’t the first time the Senedd has been accused of suppressing free speech. The chamber has a blanket rule that you aren’t allowed to use the word ‘blanket’ to describe Wales’s 20mph speed limit, and in 2018 Ukip MS Gareth Bennett was barred from speaking in the Senedd after saying that ‘if we carry on down this road of appeasing the nuttiest elements of the transgender movement, then what we will face as a society, within a very short space of time, is total implosion.’
When you think carefully about what is happening, this is all very disturbing. The government of a province of this country is refusing to answer perfectly reasonable questions about matters of fact, instead successfully pushing the parliament’s authorities to rule the question as unacceptable, and ban an elected parliamentarian from speaking until he apologises. None of this is democratic. These petty tyrants are allergic to debate, afraid of facts which threaten their world view, and would happily ban speech they disagree with.
Parliaments should, needless to say, be places where difficult ideas are grappled with, where arguments are had, and where divisive topics are debated. The desire to treat our parliaments like workplaces, to ‘HR-ify’ them, might be most obvious in the Senedd, but it is present in Westminster too. For that reason democrats of every stripe should welcome Reform’s stand in Wales.
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