Tom Williams interviews Professor Richard Wyn Jones on the change of government and what’s next for Wales
Labour’s dominance in Wales had long seemed to be as reliable a certainty as death and taxes. Up until a matter of weeks ago, the party enjoyed the longest winning streak of any political party in the world, with a century-long string of victories in Wales and uninterrupted control of the Senedd since its formation in 1999.
Yet, in May, Plaid Cymru and Reform UK squeezed the party from both left and right, reducing the once record-breaking electoral machine to a rump of nine out of 96 seats in Wales’s parliament. So why have Welsh voters turned on Labour and what does a Plaid minority government mean for the future of governance?
Professor Richard Wyn Jones, a broadcaster, author and professor of Welsh politics at Cardiff University, blames the Welsh Labour Party’s declining support on a ‘double-whammy effect’ of the increasing unpopularity of the Starmer government in Westminster and the Morgan administration in Cardiff Bay. ‘Labour is genuinely quite unpopular in Wales for the first time in over a hundred years,’ he tells me.
‘There’s no story, no novelty, if Labour wins every election in Wales.’
Indeed, successive first ministers have seen their approval ratings crater in recent years. Mark Drakeford, who enjoyed an initial wave of popularity during the Covid pandemic, was deemed to be doing a ‘bad job’ by nearly three-fifths of voters towards the end of his term – while his successor, Vaughan Gething, went on to fare worse still. Eluned Morgan, taking on the mantle of a damaged Labour brand, saw her approval rating remain underwater throughout the entirety of her term – and left office with just one in five Welsh voters thinking she was doing a good job. This, combined with Starmer’s record-breaking unpopularity, ultimately proved too much to overcome for the historically durable Welsh Labour brand.
It should not surprise us that Plaid Cymru were best placed to sweep up the lion’s share of ex-Labour voters displeased with their old party, Prof Wyn Jones tells me. For the last 15 to 20 years, ‘what’s been very apparent is that a lot of those who voted for Labour were very positively inclined towards Plaid Cymru’, he says. ‘But those people never felt any particular reason to vote for Plaid.’ Up until, of course, now.
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But what can voters expect to change with Rhun ap Iorwerth at the helm? The most significant change, Prof Wyn Jones argues, may be one of political culture and the prominence of Wales in the wider national discourse. ‘Wales has been pretty invisible in national debates compared to Scotland or Northern Ireland’ until now, he says, arguing the reason for this may be that Wales has been seen as a ‘Labour fiefdom’. ‘There’s no story, no novelty, if Labour wins every election in Wales.’
As the SNP’s successive Holyrood victories since 2007 served to elevate Scotland’s voice in UK-wide political conversations, so too could Plaid’s for Wales. Already, Labour’s dismal showing in Wales in May has driven opposition among Labour MPs to Starmer’s continued leadership of the party. Prof Wyn Jones says: ‘the sweeping away of Labour’s dominance at the devolved level naturally leads people to conclude that it’s a matter of time before that happens at the UK-level, too,’ explaining the widespread panic that has gripped the parliamentary Labour Party. Expect Wales to gain further national focus also as tensions between Welsh and Westminster governments are revealed publicly.
In December, a majority of Labour backbenchers in the Senedd signed a letter accusing the Prime Minister of undermining devolution by bypassing the Welsh Parliament to legislate on issues pertaining to Wales. Yet, for the most part, differences of opinion between the governments remained private as ‘neither side had wanted to surface it’, says Prof Wyn Jones.
On the campaign trail, then-first minister Morgan spoke of her disagreements with Starmer in carefully coded language – speaking of a ‘red Welsh way’ distinct from that of Labour politics across the Severn Bridge. By contrast, ap Iorwerth has, unsurprisingly, spoken of being unafraid to ‘take the fight’ to the Prime Minister in order to ‘stand up to Wales’. Plaid ‘will have absolutely no reason’ to hide the disagreements with the UK government that Welsh Labour had preferred to keep private, says Prof Wyn Jones.
But while a newly combative approach may be welcomed by many (only 12% of Welsh voters think the UK government is doing a ‘good job’), Plaid Cymru will soon find themselves facing the same difficult policy dilemmas that plagued Welsh Labour and saw voters’ trust in them diminish.
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The NHS in Wales has missed its pre-election waiting-list targets and continues to see A&E patients waiting longer than their English counterparts. Improving outcomes will require addressing structural issues facing the Welsh healthcare system – namely a higher proportion of elderly residents in Wales than England and a sparser, more rural population (While England has 434 people per sq/km, for Wales this figure is just 150).
A subject of particular focus for criticism of Welsh Labour’s performance on the NHS has been North Wales’s Betsi Cadwaldar health board, which has spent most of its 17-year existence in special measures – with 500 North Wales patients said to be unnecessarily dying every year due to delays in receiving care. While ap Iorwerth had previously expressed his wish for the health board to remain as one, he has more recently said he ‘would get rid of Betsi if that is what was needed’.
While Plaid’s plans for the health board remain largely up in the air (their manifesto promises, open-endedly, ‘a tailored plan to deal with ongoing mismanagement at Betsi Cadwaladr’), their manifesto does promise to hire up to 100 new GPs and create 10 new surgical hubs to speed up treatment times across Wales.
But how realistic are these plans? On Plaid’s healthcare plans, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has warned that the party’s manifesto shows ‘little sense of the magnitude or potential costs’ of the proposals. Prof Jones warns of the risks of putting too much stock in IFS estimates amidst ongoing domestic and international uncertainty, given the Institute ‘takes the Treasury at its word about what’s going to happen to public finances at the UK-level over the next few years’. But, he says, the economic landscape Plaid inherits is ‘absolutely challenging’.
Were relations with the Westminster government to deteriorate as such, and were the likes of Labour and Reform to make nationalism versus unionism a wedge issue, could independence soon become an animating issue in Welsh politics?
As ap Iorwerth looks for funding for Plaid’s various manifesto promises, he is hoping for a replacement of the Barnett formula – the mechanism by which the UK Treasury allocates public expenditure for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and which critics have long claimed fails to sufficiently account for the needs of Wales. ap Iorwerth claims to have raised the issue of the Barnett formula and the wider issue of further devolution with the Prime Minister in a May phone call, and said Starmer had been ‘open to a conversation’ on these matters.
But Prof Jones says the relationship between the two leaders could soon become frosty. He says a Labour party left ‘deeply resentful and unhappy and traumatised’ by its staggering losses to Plaid Cymru is unlikely to be receptive to its demands. Instead, he anticipates Labour going into ‘muscular unionist mode’ against Plaid Cymru, adopting a combative position similar to that of its Scottish counterpart in relation to the SNP.
Were relations with the Westminster government to deteriorate as such, and were the likes of Labour and Reform to make nationalism versus unionism a wedge issue, could independence soon become an animating issue in Welsh politics?
Prof Jones seems to think so, and he points at the steady increase in support for independence since the Brexit referendum, with the percentage of Welsh adults wanting to leave the UK having increased from around 15% to one-third. Current support for Welsh independence is ‘around where support for Scottish independence was at the start of 2014 [the year of their independence referendum], he notes, adding that most of the support for independence comes from those unhappy with the results of the 2016 EU referendum.
Plaid politicians have said independence was not on the ballot during these last elections, but Prof Jones suggests the next election could see a change of tone. ‘What Plaid will be hoping [at the next Senedd election] is that if they can prove themselves to be competent, if they can show people in Wales that Wales has not been treated fairly, that devolution is not being respected, that Labour is closing down any prospects of further powers, then independence is the way to go,’ he says.
Less than a fortnight after being sworn in as first minister, ap Iorwerth said he raised the question of independence with Starmer and added that he wanted to lead a ‘national conversation’ about Wales going it alone.
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All considered, it seems likely that despite Plaid’s insistence that the election was not about independence, it could soon become the single biggest dividing line between the parties in the Senedd – and what was once considered a nationalist’s pipe dream could become a real possibility. In that case, what was already considered an election result of seismic, generational importance could end up being even more important than anyone had imagined.
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