Labour’s first MP, Keir Hardie, was elected in Merthyr Tydfil in 1900. From 1922, Labour was Wales’s most popular party at every general election and, since 1999, at every election to the Senedd, the Welsh parliament.
That is 104 years of dominance: one of the longest unbroken periods of electoral success achieved by any party in a democracy. The old joke that you could pin a red rosette on a donkey and it would win in Wales was funny because it was nearly true.
But those days are over. The writing was on the wall after the Caerphilly Senedd byelection in October 2025, when Labour’s vote crashed from 46% in 2021 to 11%, leaving Plaid Cymru to beat Reform UK by 47% to 36%.
Two-horse race
Caerphilly was not a byelection blip but a fairly accurate reflection of the national mood. Plaid leader Rhun ap Iorwerth predicted a ‘two-horse race’ between a ‘choice of two futures’: the conflicting nationalisms of Plaid and Reform. The results bore him out.
In the most proportional election yet held in the UK, Plaid won 43 seats with 34% of the vote, against Reform’s 34 seats and 29%. Labour trailed far behind with nine seats and 11%.
With the Senedd expanded from 60 to 96 seats, it is hard to calculate the scale of Labour’s fall, but the party is estimated to have lost the equivalent of 34 seats, including that of its leader, Baroness Eluned Morgan of Ely. Other parties were squeezed by the two-horse messaging, with the Tories on seven seats, the Greens on two and the Lib Dems on one.
Now begins the horse-trading. The PR system makes outright winners unlikely. Plaid would have preferred a government with the Greens and Lib Dems, but the numbers make that impossible. A minority government, with a confidence-and-supply deal with Labour, is more likely. Since Labour’s manifesto differed little from Plaid’s, that would signal continuity rather than the change Plaid promised.
Issues
Wales is the second most deprived region in the UK, just above the North East of England. Child poverty is acute: 29–32% of Welsh children grow up in low- or no-income families, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, while wages are typically 5–8% below the British average.
The NHS is a particular concern, with 600,000 people on waiting lists. Although Welsh Labour rejected privatisation in health and education, it failed to invest by using the tax-raising powers available under devolution, so the squeeze on public finances continued. Only Reform promised to change tax rates — by lowering them — so there is unlikely to be any improvement here.
Reform tried to make immigration an election issue, claiming the other parties favoured unlimited immigration and threatening to end Wales’s Nation of Sanctuary status. Labour launched this initiative in 2019, but has spent just 0.05% of its budget welcoming refugees. Ukrainians accounted for 91% of the total spend, exposing the racial hierarchy built into Labour’s version of sanctuary. In practice, the “hostile environment” for migrants and asylum seekers remains much the same as elsewhere in the UK.
Nigel Farage’s right-wing party also tried to whip up reactionary rage against net zero, especially the 20mph speed limit on roads in built-up and residential areas. In fact, the 20mph default limit on restricted roads in Wales was never primarily a carbon-cutting measure, but was designed to reduce deaths and injuries. Since its introduction in 2023, casualties on 20mph roads have fallen by nearly a quarter.
Independence
Welsh independence was not an issue in this election. Plaid has evolved considerably since its origins in 1925 as an independence party marked by reactionary and authoritarian influences. In the 21st century, it has positioned itself slightly to Labour’s left as a more traditional social-democratic alternative.
This also reflects the weakness of Welsh nationalism compared with its Scottish counterpart, which it generally follows. First, Wales is smaller and poorer. The defeat of the 1984–85 miners’ strike led to the collapse of coal mining, while the related steel industry is hanging by a thread in Port Talbot and Llanwern. Outside south-east and north-east Wales, there has been little investment. As an independent state, Wales would struggle to survive.
Second, its historic grievance over language discrimination has largely been resolved. Language rights have been a rallying cry since the horrific use of the “Welsh Not” to beat the language out of children. But successive Welsh Language Acts, the most recent passed last year, have dramatically increased the use of the language, which has for some time enjoyed equal status with English. Altogether, this led Plaid not to promise a second independence referendum, but to demand more devolved powers instead.
Labour’s fall
Welsh Labour’s decline has been steady since the Senedd’s creation in 1999. The then leader, Rhodri Morgan, coined the phrase ‘clear red water’ to define the party’s strategy: related to, but distinct from, Westminster Labour. The plan worked reasonably well until the 2008–09 recession, which pushed living standards down to poverty levels.
During Tory austerity, Labour could blame its shortcomings on Westminster, and even managed a relative revival under Mark Drakeford (2018–24), helped by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of UK Labour (2015–20). But the strategy unravelled rapidly amid a succession of leaders, a corruption scandal in Cardiff and Keir Starmer’s unpopular premiership in London.
The catastrophic Senedd results will now feed Labour’s turmoil, with anxious MPs and activists facing annihilation. To add to the woes of socialists in Wales, Corbyn has surely scuppered Your Party’s chances of leading a leftward break from Labour by refusing its “members” the chance to stand in the election. TUSC performed miserably.
The need for a fightback is more urgent than ever. The current economic crisis is likely to tip into recession because of the war in Iran (see pages 14–15), while Reform’s strong performance will embolden racists and reactionaries to take to the streets, blaming migrants and an “extreme woke ideology” — Reform Wales leader Dan Thomas’s phrase — for capitalism’s social ills.
New party
As for Welsh and British Labour’s collapse, we shed no tears. They made their own demise, and Baroness Morgan will no doubt now disappear into the House of Lords. But the burning need for a new party of the working class still exists, as the huge initial response to Your Party in July 2025 showed, including in Wales.
Neither Plaid nor the Greens are the answer. They offer only another variant of liberal reformism, and they will be found out when the huge coming cost of living crisis arrives in the autumn.
To prepare for that, we need a fighting socialist party. For us, that means a revolutionary party, but all socialists should get involved. We must also prepare for battle. Whether the attacks come from London, Cardiff or both, Welsh workers must join the fight against job cuts and inflation, war and racism.
