Welsh Labour’s clear red water is getting murkier

View from Cregennen Lakes, 28 April 2024 © 2024 Bobby Crosby

Welsh politics has been getting more media attention than usual recently. Upcoming Senedd elections are shaping up to be the canary in the coal mine for the future of British politics, and so commentariat eyes are turning west.

At the end of last year, a YouGov poll put Plaid Cymru ahead of Welsh Labour for the first time since 2010, with Reform tying for joint second place. An anti-incumbent electorate, a failure to turn around public services, a collapse in the combined vote share of the two main parties, and the rise of Reform sets the stage for 2026. Sound familiar?  

With these elections due as the next major test for a rapidly crumbling Labour brand, Wales is looking competitive for the first time in a long time. Having been the largest party in every election in Wales for over 100 years, the anticipated humbling of what is often called the most successful democratic party in the world is newsworthy by itself.

But why does Welsh Labour keep winning? Wales’s economy developed in subservience to England, so it never developed the larger middle class that the senior partners in the union did, and booming 19^th century mining and shipping industries make the valleys and the coastal cities of the south the center of gravity, packing future working-class voters high and wide. Electoral consequences flow henceforth.

Fast forward to the early 2000s and second First Minister Rhodri Morgan – after a quick power struggle with his Blairite predecessor Alun Michael – takes the deliberate step of tacking to the left of New Labour while linking this to a distinctly Welsh radical tradition.

An advisor in his team, one Mark Drakeford, calls this ‘clear red water’, although the phrase is never actually spoken in the speech after which it is named. The party’s distinctly Welsh attitude, redistributive economic agenda, and full-throated support for devolution within the Union aligns it with the median voter, and Welsh Labour could claim the mantle of sticking up for Wales even with a Labour government in Westminster.

These are the fundamentals, then: a country generally inclined to a model of centre-left governance and the increasing devolution of power, and a party willing to mould itself in that image.

Welsh Labour is drifting away from that winning formula. The party has made a mistake by drawing attention to Wales having not one but two Labour governments, ostensibly working together, as the first struggles to fix the Welsh NHS and the other clearly blunders its first six months in office.

Try as UK Labour might to blame everything on the last lot, they cannot escape the simple truth that they are now the government, and the government has failed to stop living standards from slipping. Death and taxes. People don’t wax lyrical about governments in the best of times and patience is historically thin. Welsh Labour, meanwhile, is hit by double incumbency after a year where almost every incumbent democratic government facing reelection suffered defeat.

Simultaneously, the party seemingly indicates it is more interested in tinkering around the edges with a few million for coal tips (needed for potentially life-saving maintenance it may be) while the country is shortchanged of £4bn having helped pay for HS2 without receiving an inch of track in return. There may be record investment in the NHS, but there will always be record investment in the NHS as the population ages. I could go on.

Welsh Labour just hasn’t picked a big enough fight with the party now in power in Westminster yet to give the impression it is still its own entity. It is risking shedding the electoral insulation that is historically served it so well, and an unpopular UK Labour will cost it votes alongside the votes it has lost itself: naturally, owing to an abnormally lengthy stretch in power; but by underdelivering too.

The tragedy for Welsh Labour is that, at the end of the day, it isn’t really their fault. Wales suffers when the UK suffers. The biggest policy levers are not in reach. A legacy of underinvestment, an older population, the inability to make significant tax or spending decisions and so on make for policy blame without the macroeconomic control. Once easily pinned on the Tories, continued failure won’t be so easily brushed off with Labour in power in Westminster. To top it off, the expanded Senedd and overhauled proportional electoral system looks set to disadvantage Welsh Labour.

Plaid and Reform then. The former have done well to decenter independence. They avoid making the only economic argument for it that might hold water, which is to unleash chaos and become deliberately poorer for decades, to get a shot at escaping systematic economic neglect and outpacing the UK in the long term (see Ireland). But they don’t need to. Labour avoided making any kind of real economic arguments against the Conservatives in 2024 and it served them fine.

Plaid has a solid shopping list to go into 2026 with. Change with Labour promised but not yet delivered, Plaid can steal their clothes, demanding the HS2 billions and devolving justice and the Crown Estate. These might not be the most salient issues for voters, but it allows them to take the mantle of standing up for Wales.

Politically, the party is left wing enough to threaten Welsh Labour on that flank but likely able to retain any voters who are both pro-independence and small-c conservative, although this seems to be a shrinking constituency. They have an adept, fluent leader and benefit from long term trends in Welsh identity since 2016, with left-wing voters increasingly self-reporting as ‘Welsh only’. There is a case to be made that if you are not necessarily pro-independence, but are disillusioned with Westminster politics and with Labour, identify as Welsh, and are generally left of centre, then Plaid starts to make sense.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Welsh Conservatives are at real risk of being driven out by age demographics, to the benefit (and partly owing to the rise) of Reform. A recent report by Cardiff University found that 35% of 2019 Welsh Conservative voters had been lost to Reform by 2024 and that 40% of their voters in that year would be dead by the time of the next general election if trends during that period continued.

There are emerging signs that Reform is proving more popular with young and first-time voters too. This is patently unsustainable and if efforts are not made to target millennial and middle-aged voters then these trends would prove fatal. Polls are predicting Reform leapfrogging the Tories but it is not unreasonable to wager they could replace them completely in the next election cycle, should Reform prove to have staying power.

The conditions that heralded the age of modern British populism in 2016 remain in place, and Wales is fertile territory for Reform. A media environment rife with disinformation should not be underestimated either. It is undeniable that the idea of a shared truth is fractured, and insurgent parties will benefit from this the most.

Nevertheless, there must be a ceiling to Reform’s support. Returning to changes in Welsh identity over the last decade, those who report as Welsh or Welsh and British represents a growing proportion of the electorate and these people are increasingly unlikely to vote for right-wing parties. Those most likely to vote for Reform identify as English only, which remains a comparatively small group. Reform just isn’t a Welsh party and their piratic and detail-free platform will alienate many. They are also an upstart party and while they clearly have momentum, they lack the comparative party infrastructure, dedicated activists, and data that established parties do. It is unclear whether they will be able to field sufficient logistical strength by next year.

In many ways, antipathy towards Welsh Labour is standard mid-term stuff, and a squeeze back to the governing party as May 2026 approaches should be expected. This will not be enough. Plaid showed its teeth by ending the Cooperation Agreement and they are on a high with both record polling numbers and representation in Westminster. They could well force Labour into a chaotic minority government by refusing a coalition, or even take the crown for themselves should they become the biggest party.

The big question for 2025 is whether UK Labour spots that next year’s elections are essentially Welsh midterms for their own Westminster government. The First Minister has been hinting that some sort of financial deal might be on the horizon. Considering long-established neglect of Wales and Starmer’s miserly governing style, it is almost certain that if a settlement were to materialise, it would look paltry and only bolster Plaid’s argument that Welsh Labour is forced to beg for scraps.

The fundamentals look shakier than they have for a long time. Welsh Labour are born of the Welsh political landscape, which is to say that they owe a lot to its demography, but they also tend to play a good hand well. Now they risk being caught between a well-calibrated Plaid and a fast-rising Reform.

The best option for Welsh Labour is, appropriately, the most radical one: ditch the ‘two Labour governments’ messaging and prove again that you can be different from tainted, sclerotic, flailing Westminster politics.

Whatever happens by May 2026, we can be sure that Wales, in being simultaneously taken for granted by UK Labour and taken advantage of by Reform, will be let down by ultimately English parties. Welsh Labour should stick to its winning formula.