Why Labour will be crushed in its Welsh heartlands

Wales is preparing for the end of more than a century of total dominance by the Labour Party, and specifically for the end of Labour rule in Cardiff Bay, which has been undisputed since devolution in 1999. It was taken for granted that, whatever happened in the UK as a whole, Labour could always rely on a power base in Wales, where it had won a majority of seats in every UK parliamentary election since 1922.

Labour’s dominance will end next week, when the party is predicted to come a poor third to Reform UK and Plaid Cymru in the elections for the Welsh parliament or Senedd. It is at least conceivable, if unlikely, that Labour might even drop to fourth or fifth.

This has been coming for some time, and Labour’s attempt to mitigate it with some fairly cynical gerrymandering will probably make things worse. For this May’s elections, it has divided Wales into 16 new super-constituencies, most of them notably artificial, each electing no less than six members on a party-list basis.

Since Labour’s support was the most widespread of the main parties across Wales, the assumption was that it would always be able to stack up three or perhaps four assembly members out of six in its strongholds, while picking up one or two wins in all the other constituencies. Although other parties might do well in different parts of Wales, none looked likely to be consistently second elsewhere.

What was not foreseen, and was in fact unimaginable only a few years ago, was a collapse in the Labour vote across Wales so catastrophic that the party of Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan would be replaced as the standard bearers of the left by the Welsh nationalists of Plaid Cymru.

Yet that is what is happening. The latest opinion poll by YouGov, which tends to be better in Wales than most pollsters, with a large sample of more than 3,000 voters, puts Labour on a mere 13 per cent, compared with more than 40 per cent in the last Welsh elections in 2021. If these polls are borne out on election day, Labour will struggle to win a single seat in some super-constituencies.

The party was in long term decline in Wales even before its recent woes at the Westminster level. In the 27 years Labour has run Cardiff Bay since devolution, Wales has fallen further and further behind England in terms of education, healthcare and economic development. There is no longer any excuse for voting Labour here unless one is on the public payroll or close to a Labour candidate, or both – since the two categories tend to overlap.

It might get even worse for Labour, as Plaid has been capitalising on this collapse in the polls. Much of Plaid’s messaging relies on the strategy that proved successful in the crucial Caerphilly by-election last October – namely, urging all left-leaning voters to back Plaid to ‘keep Reform out’.

That by-election was in fact a huge triumph for Reform, which achieved a stunning 36 per cent swing in its favour, despite having little organisation on the ground. However, it was Plaid that still won the actual vote, and the mainstream media spun Reform candidate Llyr Powell’s extraordinary second-place finish into a humiliating defeat for his party.

This gave Plaid the momentum and helped it to take a decisive lead over Reform in the polls – until now. That latest YouGov poll puts Plaid and Reform sharing the lead with 29 per cent of the vote apiece.

Neither party is likely to win an absolute majority. It is possible that Reform might win a plurality of popular votes or the most seats, or both. But even if it does, becoming the leading party in Wales, it will still be excluded from power. Plaid, Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats have all pledged not to make any sort of deal with Nigel Farage’s insurgent party.

This actually is to Reform’s advantage. Apart from looking a bit childish, the unity of the four parties of the left in opposition to Reform sets up a clear dichotomy, a straight choice between Reform and the existing Welsh political establishment.

Indeed, anyone paying attention can see that it is highly probable that Labour will be rejected decisively by the electorate, only to sneak back into power as part of a coalition with Plaid. The two have been in coalition together before, as well as making less formal deals to keep Labour in power when it lacked a working majority in Cardiff Bay.

This is because Labour and Plaid have more in common with each other than either likes to admit. There are no real major policy differences between them, except nominally over Plaid’s signature commitment to Welsh independence, which it has been downplaying furiously in order not to scare the voters now that it is finally in sight of power.

So, for all the talk of a historic shift, little will change for Wales and most Welsh people when a Plaid-Labour government takes over from what has effectively long been a Labour-Plaid administration.

The constant refrain of ‘keep Reform out’ is therefore an attempt to distract attention from the reality that it is only one faction of the discredited and unpopular Welsh establishment taking over from another. Yet if any engaged but uncommitted voters can be found in Wales, they will be asking why Plaid, which has been working towards this moment for 27 years, has nothing to offer but attacks on Reform, a party that has not been in power for one second of that time.

This means Reform has already won, in one sense. Welsh politics now revolves around a party that came from nowhere. This is a revolutionary moment.

John Winterson Richards is a writer on Welsh affairs and author of The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Welsh.