WHEN the Sunday Times tells us that the UK is at risk of breaking up, we know the Tory government and the ruling class are worried. 

They should be. Change is coming and it becomes the responsibility of the left to take the lead in the debate on reform, to put forward a progressive socialist alternative to our current archaic and dysfunctional system.

During the current public health emergency, it is understandable that constitutional reform is not an issue on many people’s minds. 

However, it would be a mistake to underestimate its importance for the way power is exercised.

In Wales the growth of Yes Cymru is evidence that increasing numbers of people see Westminster and the union as an increasingly Anglocentric London-based institution with which they struggle to identify.

Brexit has catalysed the urgency for reform. With a centralising Tory government in Westminster, clawing back devolved powers through the Internal Market Act and now the EU Future Relations Act, the scene is set for increasingly acrimonious dissatisfaction and dissent across the UK.

As Scottish opinion increasingly embraces independence, English regions demand greater autonomy, Northern Ireland moves closer to economic and political union with Ireland and growing calls for independence in Wales, we need a new progressive agenda. 

For too long this debate has been channelled by political parties and groups through the myopic parameters of either an outdated separatist model of independence or an increasingly hard-line and right-wing British unionism.

The We the People report recently launched by an independent group of Labour members and civic activists and introduced by the First Minister of Wales, proposes a new agenda, a “radical federalism.”

Decentralisation of power is at the heart of the paper together with the empowerment of people and communities over the decision-making processes that affect our lives.

This isn’t a new philosophy. Aneurin Bevan wrote many decades ago, that the purpose to securing power was to give it away. 

Devolution has contributed to this process in Wales and Scotland but has now reached the limits of its useful purpose. 

Merely creating parliaments in Scotland, Wales and England as mirror image versions of Westminster will not in the future deliver the scale of empowerment we all want to see without the continuance of strategic decentralisation and an expansive role for local government. 

The paper calls for governance across the UK to be transformed in the way we exercise power, how we sustain and protect the environment and how we safeguard and extend fairness, justice and equality throughout the nations, regions and communities of the UK. 

Decentralisation would be aimed at delivering power, wealth and opportunity back into the hands of people and communities. 

Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham recently summed up a growing resentment in the regions of England. 

“What we need,” he said, “is more devolution so that more places like Greater Manchester can be masters of their own destiny.”

The structure of the UK must be based on a voluntary union of nations with subsidiarity at the core so that a reformed federal UK would only carry out those strategic tasks which could not be best performed at a more local level. 

A fair share of resources and prosperity across the UK with a needs based financial settlement and a socio economic framework that would guarantee minimum and common standards in health, social welfare, human rights, education and housing. 

The Lords would go, to be replaced by a modern and effective chamber of the nations and regions and there would be an end to the patronage and privilege that has been increasingly abused over the past decade. 

Inherent in any reform would be European-style improvements to industrial democracy and the establishment of ethical employment standards.

For Wales, in any convention or debate on reform, we must determine our own future which means having our own convention to decide what the people of Wales want to see in a new reformed federal UK, if that is our choice.

The paper aims to catalyse a debate for a progressive socialist alternative beyond the current choice of least bad options — a policy which focuses on the real empowerment of people and communities.

The challenge for Labour is to show political leadership and promote a convention that can reach out across parties and engage with a diverse range of political, civic and progressive organisations to develop a new reform agenda for a future radical federal UK.

Mick Antoniw MS is the Labour Welsh Parliament/Senedd member for Pontypridd. He chairs the legislation, justice and constitution committee and is one of the contributors to the report which can be accessed at www.radicalfederalism.com.