The Welsh parliament has banned dissent on immigration

You have to watch your step very carefully in the Welsh parliament these days. Joe Martin, the Reform UK Senedd member for Caerdydd Penarth, who, like most in his party, has very strong views about immigration, has just found this out the hard way.

On Tuesday, Martin told the Senedd that, by 2063, white Britons like him would be a ‘minority in our own country’ after decades of ‘demographic replacement’. After listing London, Birmingham, Leicester, Slough, Luton and Manchester as cities and towns where white British people are no longer the majority, he said that he did not ‘wish this to happen’ in Wales. He went on to state:

‘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’s 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.’

Martin has now been punished for this wrongthink. The Senedd presiding officer, Labour apparatchik Huw Irranca-Davies, ruled the comments ‘unnecessarily provocative and deliberately offensive’. Martin’s right to speak in the Senedd has been withdrawn as a result. It will not be restored unless and until he formally apologises.

The speaking ban has not gone down well. Reform has boycotted the Senedd on the understandable grounds that it is being prevented from representing its constituents. Reform leader Nigel Farage called the ban ‘outrageous’, and Martin has refused to apologise.

Martin’s views may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Critics have accused him of echoing Enoch Powell and of gesturing towards the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, which has it that white Westerners are being deliberately and systematically ‘replaced’ by malign elites. Others say the projections are simply unrealistic. Whether these criticisms are fair or not, the Senedd’s reaction should make us very worried.

For one thing, this is a case of blatant censorship. Martin was not shouting or using abusive language. He was guilty of nothing more than expressing, in ordinary English, concerns that many electors in Penarth clearly share, even if the liberal establishment does not. If it is now the position of the Senedd that the only views that should be expressed are those that don’t offend the Blob, the Senedd might as well not exist.

The Senedd is supposed to be a democratic parliament. It is there to give a voice to the Welsh people as a whole. What Irranca-Davies has essentially done is to tell the nearly 30 per cent of Welsh electors who chose to vote Reform that their views are unacceptable.

In the past few years, the Senedd has developed a patrician distaste for debate. What it prefers instead is censorship masquerading as a ‘kinder’ politics, by which it means a sort of comforting soup of consensus. In January 2025, a Conservative was prevented from asking questions about grooming gangs because he risked ‘inflaming any kind of discrimination’. In June this year, Irranca-Davies himself let the cat out of the bag when he formally ordered members not to use language ‘that has the potential to inflame debate’, as if debate were not the entire purpose of a parliament.

Irranca-Davies is armed with all the self-important pomposity of the lanyard class. Following the backlash over his speaking ban on Joe Martin, he sent a letter to all members of the Senedd, castigating them as if they were naughty schoolboys. He said he was ‘disappointed’ by the criticism. He asked them to ‘refrain from such conduct’ since it was ‘unhelpful’ and detracted from ‘the dignity of the Senedd’.

What we are witnessing is the attempted takeover of the Welsh parliament by a progressive establishment that does not like serious debate and prefers to silence anyone who disagrees with its worldview. No wonder so many people in Wales now think they would be better off abolishing the Senedd entirely.