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To an idealistic minority, the Senedd (Parliament) in Cardiff Bay is a stepping stone on the road to Welsh independence. To the more hard-headed analyst though, the establishment of the body – initially as a devolved assembly – along with the Scottish Parliament, was a masterstroke by the Blair government designed to see off the independence movements. Put simply, the core belief/argument of the independence movement is that it is impossible to deliver for Wales (or Scotland) within the existing system. However, to get elected in the new devolved bodies demanded that those same movements must claim that they could make the existing system work (and thus independence is unnecessary).
The voting system was designed to block any party from winning a majority, while effectively ensuring the Labour Party a place in government. This failed in Scotland, where a left-leaning Scottish National Party was able to form a majority on the back of public discontent with the Blair government. But in Wales, Labour has been in government continuously for quarter of a century – once in coalition with Plaid Cymru (to that party’s detriment) and more often propped up by the LibDems.
Labour dominance in Wales stems from its industrial history and its population geography. South Wales was one of the cradles of the second (coal-powered) industrial revolution. Iron works and coal mines ran down the glacial valleys from Glynneath, Hirwaun, Dowlais and Blaenavon to the coastal plain just north of Newport, Cardiff, Neath and Swansea… the latter becoming the centre of the world’s copper making once Cornish mine owners figured out that it was cheaper to take the copper ore to the coal than to smelt it in Cornwall. From the Rebecca Rising to the Chartists to the election of Annie Powell as Britain’s first female communist mayor, Wales has a long tradition of dissent… although its communist leanings on the economic front have always been tempered by a strong social democratic tendency on the political front – Welsh workers voted for communist union leaders and Labourist MPs. And to put this in context, in the twentieth century far more Welsh workers supported the successors of the 15 men in red shirts who narrowly beat the All Blacks in 1905, than supported either Labour MPs or communist union leaders.
The concentration of industry in South Wales – broadly south of the modern A465 Heads of the Valleys road – also concentrated two-thirds of the population into that area. The remainder of the country being largely rural save for the industrial enclave in the northeast which was historically linked to industrial Cheshire, Liverpool and Manchester. Twenty of Wales’s thirty-two parliamentary constituencies in last year’s general election are in the southeast… all of them won by Labour. Labour also won three of the eight rural seats in mid and west Wales (Plaid Cymru winning four seats along the west coast and the LibDems winning one seat adjacent to the English border). Labour also won the four seats in the northeast. Even in Boris Johnson’s “red wall” victory in 2019, most of Labour’s south Wales seats remained solid (only Bridgend and the Vale of Glamorgan falling to the Tories).
But if a week is a long time in politics, a year is an aeon. And the combination of an extremely unpopular Labour government in Westminster and a change in the voting system in Wales has left Welsh Labour looking extremely vulnerable ahead of next year’s Senedd election. Some fall in support was inevitable because of the election of a Labour government in Westminster, since a large part of Welsh Labour’s sales pitch has been using the Senedd as an umbrella to shelter the people of Wales from the excesses of Tory rule. With Labour in office in Cardiff and London, this is a harder sell – not least because ex-industrial south Wales still contains some of the most impoverished districts in northern Europe… and things have been getting worse in recent years.
There are deeper trends at work though. Successive Labour administrations in Cardiff Bay have failed to address structural deficiencies inherited from Thatcher’s Tories in the 1980s and early 1990s. The Welsh population in 2024 was 3,164,000, roughly twice the population of Birmingham. Yet Birmingham is administered by a single county council while Wales has twenty-two. Similarly, while Birmingham has a single NHS Integrated Care Board covering Birmingham and Solihull, Wales has seven Local Health Boards, three all-Wales NHS Trusts, and two Special Health Authorities… you get the idea – quarter of a century of funding that might have regenerated ex-industrial, rundown seaside and small town rural Wales has been squandered on a bloated bureaucracy largely populated by Labour place-people.
This level of grift might have been viable in the early days of the Welsh Assembly, when living standards briefly picked up after the devastation inflicted by the Tories in the 1980s. But following the 2008 crash, Wales was particularly hard hit. The economy has consistently lagged the UK, while incomes have stagnated, resulting in real losses following the post-pandemic supply shock and sanctions on cheap Russian energy. Which leaves Welsh Labour in a similar position to the UK Tories last year. Having been in government continuously for quarter of a century and having apparently failed to address such fundamentals as economic decline and falling real incomes, Welsh Labour has nothing left to offer other than the blind loyalty of electoral inertia… vote Labour because your grand parents and their parents voted Labour.
Plaid Cymru looked set to be the initial beneficiaries of Labour failure, but – as with the UK more broadly – Reform UK have recently taken the lead in the polls. This points to a very messy outcome to next year’s election because of the new voting system, which could leave Labour and the Tories fighting for third place… which is why the forthcoming Caerphilly by-election is being given more weight than ought to have been the case.
The Caerphilly constituency covers the southern half of the Rhymney Valley and is a classic ex-industrial Labour seat. But early polling shows the main battle is between Plaid Cymru and Reform, with Labour in third place, while a more detailed analysis of the constituency puts Reform well ahead. Turnout will clearly be decisive, as will the broader politics of the UK, where Labour become more unpopular with each passing day.
Reform is probably best placed simply because they can ride their current wave of UK national popularity. The only potentially controversial issue was whether they would abolish the Senedd entirely. But since this would be supported by around a third of the Welsh electorate, this is unlikely to deter Reform voters. Plaid Cymru are more hamstrung because they lack a UK profile and because they will want to keep their policies under wraps ahead of next year’s election. And so, while they will likely join Reform in pointing to twenty-five years of Labour failure, they are less likely to put forward a detailed policy platform.
Welsh Labour – like the UK Tories last year – cannot put forward a policy platform, since it will be met by the obvious question, “why haven’t you already done it?” And so, they must stand and fall on their – very mixed – track record. Which is why they have fallen back on an electoral strategy that has demonstrably failed time after time… Project Fear. Of course, given Wales’s size and lack of clout on the world scale, Welsh Labour cannot claim that voting against them will cause cancer, as the Tories claimed ahead of the 2016 EU referendum, or lead to World War Three, as the Clinton campaign claimed ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Instead, they are going with spending cuts if they lose the seat.
This is nonsense, of course. Losing the seat would merely leave Welsh Labour having to engage in the kind of backroom haggling that is commonplace in local authorities across Britain. It would mean Welsh Labour having to grant some spending favoured by one or more opposition party in exchange for at least two opposition members agreeing to vote through the minority Labour administration’s budget.
Far more important though is the tacit message that Project Fear sends to the electorate. In effect, things may be bad with Labour at the helm, but they’re only offering more of the same. And this will be reinforced by the inevitable – and increasingly ineffective – name calling deployed against Reform, who will no doubt be portrayed as literally nazis (something that has failed to prevent them leading in over 100 consecutive UK opinion polls since last year’s general election).
According to the bookies, Reform are well on the way to winning next year’s election – a result which would presage a Reform victory in the next UK general election. If, on the other hand, Plaid Cymru were to secure Caerphilly, this might indicate that Reform’s support in ex-industrial south Wales is less solid than polling suggests. Either way, Labour’s inability to offer solutions and its resort to Project Fear points to a political bankruptcy which will result in Wales being very different to the past 25 years.
As you made it to the end…
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