Cardiff Memorandum Signed: 'Westminster's Time Is Coming to an End'
The three first ministers made their history in Cardiff Bay: a signed memorandum calling on Westminster “to prepare, plan and facilitate constitutional change in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”, with Sinn Féin’s president in attendance and a separate Welsh-Scottish governmental agreement inked the same day. “Westminster’s time is coming to an end,” the summit’s message ran. No referendum timetable was named; the Prime Minister’s “off limits” stands unmoved.
The memorandum’s verbs are its content: “prepare, plan and facilitate” casts constitutional change as an administrative inevitability Westminster must merely schedule — a rhetorical position that costs nothing to sign and shifts the burden of refusal onto London with each repetition. The document’s weakness is the same as its strength: three governments with different mandates, timescales and exit doors can agree only on the abstraction, and the absence of any timetable concedes that none commands a majority for the concrete act. But institutions are built by ratchet, and an annual summit, a standing secretariat, a shared legal strategy — if those follow — would convert a photo-opportunity into a process. Watch what machinery the memorandum spawns; declarations fade, secretariats persist.