Plaid Cymru’s Caerphilly Victory Matters Everywhere

Caerphilly is not unique. Polling suggests that Labour’s collapse will be repeated on a wider scale in the Senedd elections next May, and in Westminster at the next general election. This is commonly read as one component of a general crisis among the UK’s ‘establishment parties’, but this analysis has its limits. In reality, it reflects a political trajectory evident across the industrial world.

The last decade has been defined by a backlash against what we might call the ‘middle managers’ of capital: the broadly liberal coalition of parties and institutions tasked with administering global capitalism as it lurches from crisis to crisis. 

As the public endures the social impact of these crises – globalisation-induced industrial decline, deregulation of markets, privatisation and the dismantling of public services – the causative capital flows remain largely invisible. Instead, it’s this ‘front line’ of capital that has a tangible presence in people’s lives: a “managerial and administrative elite”, as Sam Badger describes it, acting as “direct mediators between the ruling class (the state and capitalists) and the workers”.

Welsh Labour is the political embodiment of this class: the ultimate middle managers, with the Senedd the ultimate institution of passive mediation between capital, state and public. With minimal autonomous economic powers (which Welsh Labour has historically resisted expanding), devolution can achieve little more than treating the symptoms of Westminster austerity to varying degrees of effectiveness. 

At best it attempts to inoculate Wales against Tory inhumanity. At worst it internalises and embeds the logic of neoliberalism that has plagued every level of UK governance for decades. It should shock nobody that support for the party – and confidence in the institution it has run for 25 years – is collapsing in line with this worldwide upsurge in discontent.

Welsh Labour’s success lay in its ability to make political capital out of this powerlessness: using domestic dominance to pantomime a radicalism that maintained a critical distance from Westminster without ever meaningfully challenging it. The result is a legacy that scarcely stretches beyond the technocratic meddling that voters have grown to loathe.

Caerphilly’s recent history is particularly representative of these dynamics: intergenerational poverty in the aftermath of industrial decline; key public services under threat as austerity bites; absent politicians on bloated salaries becoming a by-word for a political class losing touch with the communities they’re supposed to represent. 

In the eyes of the public, it’s not the capitalist class committing these social crimes, but local liberal officials: professional do-gooders carrying out procedure. 

As people get poorer, prospects diminish and communities fall apart, the only political presence in their lives is one that, even if occasionally humane and effective, cannot alleviate material conditions or challenge the economic orthodoxies that bear ultimate responsibility. 

Though they fell short in Caerphilly, the possibility of Reform filling this void still looms large. As tolerance for the political establishment breaks, we’ve seen a concurrent rise in the ‘anti-elite’: not anti-capitalists as such, but those lauded as having mastered capital for their own ends, in opposition to the public-servant ‘capitalists’ directly overseeing the managed decline of communities. 

It’s clear, of course, that the disaster-nationalism of the new far right will do little for these communities beyond transforming them into post-industrial ‘network states’. But in a vacuum of solutions, even the mere utterance of concern for the powerless carries significant currency. 

Liberals, meanwhile, are bewildered by the idea that this post-capitalist far-right has become the ‘anti-establishment’, and are stumped by the support they’re currently enjoying. Lacking the means or inclination to solve the deep-rooted socioeconomic problems that have led to the rise of Reform and their outriders, they are stuck with the same old ineffectual playbook: weak gotchas, meek cries of corruption, and insulting voters’ intelligence.

Yet after last night’s result, hope for an actual alternative suddenly feels more tangible. Support for Labour might have disintegrated, but the culture that once sustained it hasn’t simply evaporated, and the party’s loss of influence may finally open up space to its left. 

Plaid Cymru could solidify a position as Wales’ main centre-left party, though it may still skirt too close to the political establishment to be truly transgressive. As in England, the Green party is currently poised to be the popular successor to the rump-Corbynism of the past half-decade, the possibilities of the new left party notwithstanding. A genuine ‘progressive alliance’ between these three tendencies – facilitated by the Senedd’s new voting system – could present a real socialist force to counteract Reform.

We shouldn’t get too ahead of ourselves. Labour’s implosion is long overdue, and the latest rejection of Reform is heartening, but there are no short-term solutions that can overcome the long-building phenomena that have led to the latter’s ascendancy. 

Caerphilly’s problems remain mere symptoms of issues that reach far beyond its boundaries. Without a continued pivot towards socialist renewal, we will only defer Reform’s potential, rather than see it vanquished.