A historic humiliation for Welsh Labour

‘I ddim ond dweud y gair “Ffarwél”.’ The closing line of Myfanwy, one of the greatest poems in the Welsh language, reads: ‘I can only say the word, “Farewell”.’ It serves as a fitting eulogy to the Welsh Labour Party, which has just been trounced in Welsh Senedd elections.

This is a pivotal moment. The Labour Party has dominated Welsh politics for over a century. It has won a majority of parliamentary seats in every election since the end of the First World War, and has been the largest party in all of Wales’ devolved governments since the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, was created in 1999.

But last Thursday – a day that will go down in Welsh history even more than Llanelli beating the All Blacks in 1972 – not only did Welsh Labour get booted out, but the long-suffering Welsh public also bid a fond farewell to Eluned Morgan, the Welsh first minister. She is the first head of government to lose her seat while still in office in British history.

This was a devastating result for Labour. The Daily Mirror described it as ‘savage’, Labour’s own deputy first minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, admitted that it was a ‘catastrophic result’. Even the Guardian recognised it as a ‘historic defeat’.

Welsh voters were clearly in no mood to wave Labour off without a good kicking. ‘People have had enough’, one voter told me. ‘For years we have been taken for granted if not treated with disdain’, said another. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish’, said a third.

On a high turnout of 52 per cent, 36 per cent voted for Plaid Cymru, while 26 per cent chose Reform UK, leaving the former with 43 seats and the latter with 34 seats in the 96-seat Senedd. Though falling short of a majority, Plaid Cymru will now lead the Senedd with a significant mandate, and its leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth (born Rhun Jones), the ex-BBC Wales chief political correspondent, will become first minister.

Despite every trick the Welsh Labour government played to strengthen its hold on power, from boundary changes to a lower voting age to EU-style proportional representation, it picked up just nine seats on 11 per cent of the vote.

The magnitude of Labour’s loss cannot be overstated. The voting public has been aware of Labour’s electoral games, not to mention the whiff of corruption, for years, but has excused it because the governing party in Westminster – usually the Tories – was deemed even worse. But now, with a Labour government in Westminster no better at representing voters’ aspirations, the public has turned. After years of being sidelined by English Tories and screwed by Welsh Labour, they have chosen either the nationalist identity politics of Plaid Cymru or the populist anger of Reform.

Plaid Cymru’s success at this election was less a positive vote for Welsh independence than it was a tactical, anti-populist ‘stop Reform’ vote. In many ways, it was a vote to continue Welsh Labour’s technocratic governance in another guise.

Though it didn’t win, Reform still performed impressively. Hitherto, it had only one sitting Senedd member (a result of a defection from the Tories). So its current tally of 34 seats – almost one-third of the chamber – is a remarkable achievement.

But let’s be clear, this was, first and foremost, a slap in the face to Labour. This, lest we forget, was a party rooted in the Welsh valleys and founded by Welshman Keir Hardie in 1900. The Labour movement at the time exemplified and encouraged the autodidactic ambitions of the working class. Education was a way of fighting back against a patronising Westminster establishment. The famous story of Archie Lush, an unemployed miner who travelled to Oxford in 1927 to meet his prospective university tutor at Balliol College will suffice:

‘He gave me a long list of books to read before I came up. When I told him I had read so-and-so, he just didn’t believe me. And he said, “Well, where would you get these books?”… And I said, “Tredegar Workmen’s Library”. Well, that convinced him that I couldn’t possibly [have read them]… But I had read them, and I was able to tell him what was in them…’

But no more. During the 21st century, Welsh Labour has presided over the complete destruction of education in Wales, devaluing and running down the working class in the process. Aided and abetted by Plaid Cymru Senedd members, Labour has delivered the lowest educational outcomes for young people anywhere in the UK. A fifth of primary school leavers in Wales are functionally illiterate.

But then Labour has long since ceased to be the party it once was. It represents the views of metropolitan liberals, not the interests of a diminished trade-union movement, let alone an industrial working class. It has revelled in its distance from its roots. Welsh Labour, like the Labour Party as a whole, is now a party of suits with no connection to their historical base and oblivious to the ‘lived experience’ of those whom Labourites call ‘working people’.

Labour’s estrangement from its roots was writ large in last week’s elections. In Keir Hardie’s constituency of Merthyr Tydfil (now redefined as Pontypridd Cynon Merthyr), Labour won just one seat to Reform’s two and Plaid’s three. In ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s constituency of Islwyn (now known as Casnewydd Islwyn), Labour won just a single seat compared with two for both Plaid and Reform. The same happened in Michael Foot and Aneurin Bevan’s old stomping ground of Blaenau Gwent Caerffili Rhymni.

This is seismic stuff. And it has been a long time coming. Ordinary people lent their vote to Labour at the last General Election only to see Starmer’s government continue the Tories’ betrayal. And now these two sides of the same lanyard class, which has long held its working-class voters in contempt, are paying the price. Neither the Tories, with just seven seats, nor Labour could get into double figures.

But Plaid Cymru is not the answer. It’s just the Labour Party with added leeks. Don’t ask the party’s leading figures what a woman is (although Rhun ap Iorwerth might translate a word for you), as it has a manifesto commitment to gender self-ID and is ‘proud of [its] record in having led the campaign to establish Wales’s first transgender clinic’.

Now Plaid Cymru faces running a principality that, thanks to Labour, is on its knees. Hospital waiting times are around 65 per cent higher than they are in the UK as a whole; educational performance is below the OECD average and the lowest in UK; GDP per head is around 75 per cent of the national average and child poverty is running at over 30 per cent. The list goes on.

As a minority government, Plaid Cymru finds itself in an invidious position. If it allies with Labour, the very party the public just voted out, to push its policies through, it will inevitably reveal what a bunch of charlatans Plaid Cymru really are.

The olive branch offered by Anthony Slaughter, leader of the Wales Green Party (who is ‘open to conversations’ with Plaid Cymru) might be more appealing. But it will be of no benefit to the Welsh public, who will still feel that its votes have been taken for granted. It should go without saying that the Greens’ preference for restricting growth, reversing Brexit and creating a ‘green jobs’ workforce doesn’t bode well for the people of the principality. Draught-stripping your doors with EU grants isn’t the productivity that Wales needs.

Last week’s results were unquestionably a political earthquake. But the ground hasn’t yet swallowed up the old parties, nor settled enough to allow the new ones to grow. In many ways, Reform has bought itself some time by not winning this time. If it is shrewd enough, it will watch and learn from Plaid’s mistakes as this leeked-up version of Labour tries to impose its unwanted campaigns on an already riled-up public.

Austin Williams is the director of the Future Cities Project. Follow him on X: @Future_Cities