Could "Abolish the Welsh Assembly" save Ukip in 2021?

The BBC  reports that UKIP's Welsh assembly leader expects the party to back his campaign to abolish the Senedd, saying it would be "strange" to change his main policy.

They say  that "Gareth Bennett was elected by party members on Friday with his mandate based around scrapping the assembly*.

Though that wasn't his own platform Bennett seems  closer to the BNP than Ukip and that's saying something.

Currently, UKIP policy is to support devolution in the UK, but Mr Bennett says he will have "discussions" with the central party over the issue.

Three of his fellow UKIP AMs have said they do not agree with the policy.

"Speaking to BBC Radio Wales on Sunday, Mr Bennett says there needs to be a "process of negotiation" with the main party after it chose to back a continuation of devolution in the last assembly elections."We can't have a policy in Wales which doesn't dovetail with our national UK-wide policies," he said."The UK policies are that we do broadly support the devolved institutions. That policy only changed a few years ago and I'm not sure there was much democratic mandate within the party for that change."We will very quickly come to an agreement over where this policy is going to go but clearly that was my main policy I've just been elected leader by the members in Wales so it would be pretty strange if that policy wasn't now going to be implemented."

Mr Bennett reiterated he wants to have a referendum on the future of the assembly and abolishing it without one would be "ludicrously undemocratic".

That nice of him

He added he would like to see a "beefing up" of the Wales Office and Wales should be run from Westminster as opposed to the "ever-increasing empire that's being built at Cardiff Bay".

UKIP AMs David Rowlands, Caroline Jones and Michelle Brown dismissed the idea that abolishing the assembly would become party policy.In a statement, Ms Brown said: 

"Like my other colleagues in the UKIP group, I do not foresee the abolition of the Welsh Assembly becoming party policy, and neither do I think it should."There is room in the group and party for different opinions on a range of issues, and I respect that Gareth has a different opinion from the majority of the group on this issue."

Professor Roger Scully who knows how to crunch the numbers  tells us that 

Most studies of public attitudes indicate that opposition to devolution declined surprisingly quickly in the years after the 1997 referendum; this work also indicates that support for some devolution for Wales within the UK has been the clear majority opinion in pretty much all studies since about 2003. But while abolition may be a minority view, it does have some support.
Quite how large is this minority? As ever, different polls, asking different questions, suggest slightly different things. Just prior to the twentieth anniversary of the 1997 referendum, which voted narrowly in favour of establishing the Assembly, a Welsh Political Barometer poll asked some relevant questions. In a multi-option question, where respondents were asked to indicate their most-favoured constitutional status for Wales from several options, some 17 percent chose the “no devolved government in Wales” position. But when the same poll asked people directly how they would vote in a hypothetical vote today on establishing a Welsh Assembly, some 27 percent indicated that they would vote against creating such a body. More recently, the BBC/ICM published around St David’s Day asked another multi-choice constitutional preference question; this one found some 12 percent of respondents favouring the abolition of the Assembly.
In short, all available recent evidence is that abolition of the Assembly is a minority view. But this minority is not a tiny one, and it is every bit as entitled as anyone else to have their views articulated and advanced in the political process. Moreover, it is quite possible that a determined campaign by a political party could increase support for abolition among the Welsh people. After all, support for what we now call Brexit was very much a minority taste until not long before the referendum in which the UK voted to Leave the EU.

 The latest Assembly Poll puts Ukip on 5% well down on  the 13 % they received in the last Assembly elections generating seven seats and  it could result in a Ukip wipeout  in the Siambr.

However in the same election The Abolish the Welsh Assembly" Party got 4.4% of the vote and if they were to  Unite under  Mr Bennett's Banner then we could see a UKIP-AWAP list approaching the same number.

This could see Mr Bennett returned to the Assembly  even if some of his group did not support abolition.

He could well accomplish this if the current Assembly  continues in its  Laissez-faire style of goverment that has been the hallmark of the current Third-Rate  Minister Carwyn Jones.

The challenge for those in Labour, Plaid and even the Conservatives  leadership contenders, is to create a  vision forf Wales in which through the Assembly rather than Westminster we can see a goverment that can change  our lives.