Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images
When there were mines in Wales, there were canaries that detected noxious gases before anyone else. There are no mines in Wales now, and probably very few canaries, but we are being warned of something dangerous heading ominously for the Labour party.
By-elections rarely make the weather, they reflect it. The one taking place in Caerphilly for the Welsh Senedd will be a dramatic case in point. Whatever happens on Thursday night, Labour, the only party that has represented the seat in Cardiff and Westminster, is going to lose. In a poll from Thursday (16 October), Keir Starmer’s party were on 12 per cent, down from 46 per cent when the Senedd seat was last contested in 2021. The questions are now twofold: Who else wins? And what that will mean for progressive politics in Wales and for Labour nationally?
Either Reform or Plaid Cymru will edge the seat; they are nip and tuck in Caerphilly just as they are in Wales as a whole. But this is a cataclysmic fall from grace for Labour – one which, if replicated across Wales next May and across the country, not least in Scotland, would leave the Prime Minister and his party in a perilous position, despite their large Commons majority.
Welsh Labour has a particular place in the mythology of the party. Almost as long as there has been a Labour Party, Wales has been Labour. It has returned scores of MPs and has governed the country continually since devolution in 1999. There’s only ever been a Labour First Minister. That run looks almost certain to come to end in May with Labour polling on 14 per cent, Reform on 29 and Plaid Cymru on 30 in the last nationwide poll a month ago.
Labour’s Welsh wipe-out follows a familiar pattern of gradually then suddenly. Much like Labour in Scotland a decade ago, long years of slow almost imperceivable decline have led to a dramatic collapse. Seasoned observers say that the bottom has simply fallen out of the Party, which has few ideas and even fewer activists to campaign. The hostility canvassers meet on the doorstep is unprecedented, and results from anger at the party in Westminster and in Cardiff. People were promised change and the change they got was the winter fuel allowance, but no change to their living standards or chances. There is a mood that in Wales, the NHS, education and the economy have not improved anywhere near enough, and nationally, after a decade and a half of austerity, it feels like there is no prospect of recovery. Add in the dismay around Gaza, and you see Labour’s vote splitting off to Reform but mostly to Plaid.
But deeper, subterranean factors are at play. Work by Professor Richard Wyn Jones at Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Unit shows the Welsh are feeling more Welsh – not British and Welsh. This trend has been particularly noticeable since Brexit and Covid, the latter showing that the country could take its own independent course. Culture might be ordinary, in the words of Raymond Williams the fabled Welsh critical theorist. But culture eats political strategy and everything else for breakfast, and culture is consuming the otherwise well-meaning paternalism of Labour in Wales.
Under Mark Drakeford the party did flourish politically and intellectually between 2018-24. A pilot for universal basic income, the Well-being of Future Generations Act and the shift to a new system of proportional representation for the Senedd suggested a more distinctive path for the party. But since Drakeford stepped down the party has struggled first under his short-lived successor Vaughan Gething and now Eluned Morgan.
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One senior figure in the party’s ranks describes the following factions in Welsh Labour. There are those who never wanted devolution, preferring a colony status, and who are now itching to say, “I told you so.” There’s a batch who simply want to stick their heads in the sand and hope it all goes away. And there’s a third group who want to actively face the music and own and shape a future in which they are almost bound to play second fiddle to Plaid Cymru, but in a progressive Wales, one that overcomes not just Reform but the causes of Reform. This demands a progressive consensus, but with Plaid leadership.
But there is another group, those that purposefully want Plaid Cymru to win, and then want them to fail so that they can contest a general election that pitches Labour against Reform. This strategy mimics Labour’s national ploy and indeed that of Emmanuel Macron in France – the politics of the lesser evil. And this group could become the dominant group within Welsh Labour because candidate selection for the Senedd has been overseen, and machine-drilled, by the staff sergeants of Morgan McSweeney and the hard-right cabal of hyper-factionalists who run the party nationally. If they end up running the show, then Labour could be finished for good – and not just in Wales. Speaking at their conference at the start of October, Plaid leader Rhun ap Iorwerth said of Labour “It’s a party so wrapped up in self-preservation that it refuses to countenance the possibility that others may know what they’re doing.”
Because what the people of Wales want, as across the rest of the country, is change. They want taxes on wealth, public ownership of essential utilities like water, power to be put in their hands, an end to austerity, and more. Labour is the party of orthodoxy, caution, the establishment and the system. While both Plaid Cymru and Reform look like the anti-system parties. Of course, after 26 years of running the country, Labour is going to tire. But the crisis of Welsh social democracy comes unsurprisingly in tandem with the crisis of social democracy across the globe. Wherever they come from, there are few answers to this crisis to be found in revving up and reviving an old industrial top-down approach to politics. And the crisis comes at a moment of fragmentation as the old two-party system disintegrates into oblivion. As such, real answers are more likely to come from Manchesterism than McSweenyism.
If either Reform or Plaid gain an outright majority in the Senedd – which is unlikely – two questions arise. First, if the Conservatives can tip the balance for Reform will they, or will a cordon sanitaire be put in place? Pressure is building to unite the right. Jacob Rees-Mogg took to X last week to all but demand Tory voters in Caerphilly back Reform. On the progressive side no such mutual interest and solidarity is expressed, especially not from Labour. At their national conference in Liverpool, Eluned Morgan compared Plaid, who shared government successfully with Labour under Drakeford, with Reform saying, “different poison, same bottle”. If Caerphilly is a progressive tragedy, in that the progressive parties’ votes are bigger than the regressive side but split, then unfortunate statements like this will have played their part.
If Plaid come first next May, will Labour play nicely with them in the national interest, or will they put party and factional interest first? The ultra-tribal tendency of its current leadership bodes ill. But the progressive intent of Labour’s mainstream matches the pragmatic social democracy of Plaid. As the Plaid leader strikingly said at his conference, “people struggling in communities the length and breadth of Wales are encouraged to blame other poor people in the hope that they forget that it’s government failures to tackle inequalities that are at the root of the problems we face”. Such a view would be shared across most progressive activists and voters.
Of course, the independence issue separates the parties, but the Plaid leader is hardly playing the fundamentalist wildcard when asked when independence will happen, he calmly answers “if and when the Welsh people want it to happen”. With social liberals such as Jane Dodds in the Senedd and the likes of Anthony Slaughter as leader of the Greens in Wales (who is likely to win a seat) there is a basis for a very progressive alliance in government. But it will take leadership, imagination and generosity on all sides to make it happen.
The exact order of the result next May will really matter. If Plaid only comes second and the cordon sanitaire works around Reform, then some kind of multi-year progressive agreement will need to be struck, or a full coalition formed. You can’t come second and pretend to call all the shots, forcing other parties to back you or sack you. Instead, progressives in the Senedd will have to find a way to build a voting majority in the parliament which reflects the voting majority in the country.
In Caerphilly on Thursday the Labour candidate will be experiencing the reality of navigating a multiparty reality in a two system. Speaking to Labour List last week he said, “I passionately believe that the people of this constituency do not want a Reform member of the Senedd. As long as we can unite together to send that message, we can tell Farage that we do not want his divisive politics in our constituency.”
The polls show conclusively that Labour cannot win, and so every vote for them in such a close race makes it more likely that Reform takes the seat. The same applies for votes for the Lib Dems and Greens. Labour rules mean expulsion for those who advocate actively supporting Plaid in this circumstance, but what people do in the privacy of the ballot booth is down to them. Thankfully, the contortions of first past the post won’t apply in Wales in May as the whole election is conducted under a proportional system, with parties allocated seats on the basis of their vote share. Yes, this will apply for Reform as well, but under first past the post their support can be magnified many times. Under PR their influence will either be marginalised completely or tempered (as Compass, the organisation I’m the director of, showed in this analysis of how proportional voting systems minimise the impact of national populists).
In Wales, as across the UK in July last year, it feels like time for a change. But as we painfully found out, a cross on a ballot paper is just a start. National populism simmers and eventually irrupts when progressives can no longer govern the economy or the state effectively. If Plaid, working with Labour and all progressive parties, can show that a democratic and egalitarian project is not just desirable but feasible, Wales can be a global beacon for a better politics, which I reiterate, doesn’t just tackle Reform but the causes of Reform. Nothing less will do.
[Further reading: Powell vs Phillipson is an old battle reborn]
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