Welsh Politics Is Entering Its Post-Britain Era

This is far from the first epochal vote in the history of Welsh politics. The 1922 general election saw Labour become Wales’ largest party for the first time, a dominance that endured until just last week. The resounding defeat of the 1979 devolution referendum was a watershed moment for advocates of Welsh autonomy. The 1997 referendum saw the ‘Yes’ vote finally win out, albeit “by one of the narrowest margins in British electoral history”. This paved the way for the first election to the then-National Assembly two years later, which set the template for Wales’ political composition for the next quarter-century. 

Last week’s Senedd election suggests that this period of stability has come to a sudden end. The task now is to establish how significant this latest tectonic shift is, and what it represents.

At face value, the degree of change is unprecedented. Support for Labour has utterly collapsed, with the party losing representation in areas it has been synonymous with since its inception. Plaid Cymru made a historic breakthrough, winning seats in parts of Wales unthinkable even half a decade ago. Reform UK also made huge gains, though nowhere near the level its supporters would’ve hoped. The composition of the Senedd is totally unrecognisable.

But we shouldn’t get too ahead of ourselves: there are signs of deeper continuity that we still need to be mindful of. While the insurgencies of Plaid Cymru and Reform have supplanted their establishment analogues in Labour and the Conservatives respectively, the extant voting blocs these parties inhabit remain largely intact. 

The most immediate, surface-level change is simply the institutional collapse of the British state’s dominant parties. The decline of Labour’s political and cultural influence in Wales has long been coming, as has the Tories’ equally catastrophic downfall across the whole of the UK. This is leaving a power vacuum that the rising parties are attempting to fill, pushing to the extreme edges of their blocs as they clamour to differentiate themselves from that which they are replacing: Plaid Cymru to the left of Labour, Reform to the right of the Tories.

So while there are surefire signs that something truly new is occurring in Wales, this election isn’t in itself the great transformation that either insurgency would like it to be. In reality, systemic factors will temper the political impact of this shift, at least in the short term. But this could yet catalyse a cultural change that will have profound meaning for the future of Wales. Put starkly, structures are taking shape that may fundamentally cleave the politics of Wales from that of England, putting the British state itself on ever shakier ground.

The introduction of a wholly new voting system, reconfigured constituencies and an enlarged Senedd will play no small part in this divergence from British electoral norms. Most crucially, the new D’Hondt method of seat allocation, while proportional, is prone to squeezing out smaller parties, and thus, as Dr Jac Larner has identified, “the structural incentive is to concentrate support behind the largest party in your ideological grouping”. The consequence is a coalescence of the post-Labour, anti-Reform voting bloc around Plaid Cymru, who look set to become the left-of-centre party of choice in Wales, in clear contrast to the rise of the Green party in England. 

This has led to a wide polarisation: for the foreseeable future, Welsh politics will be dominated by a newly energised Welsh-nationalist left and a hardcore British-nationalist right. The inherent limitations of devolution will raise these stakes even higher. After 27 years of existence, the Senedd remains a contested space, not just in terms of what can be achieved within it, but whether its existence is politically tenable. Neither Plaid Cymru nor Reform will be able to achieve much within its confines. 

As ever, the true locus of power is Westminster, where the near-inevitability of a Reform government renders Welsh rule an existential question, defended by a leftist political party that only exists in Wales with a UK-dominant rightwing party poised to overrule it. This dynamic will accelerate the expression of political differences, not just along conventional left-right lines – but also national and cultural lines.

The result is a political culture radically different to England, and unique within the United Kingdom. For the first time, we can observe a politics that is distinctly, identifiably Welsh.

The task for the Welsh left now is to tease out these intractable cultural antagonisms and convert them into something politically tangible. The interrelationship of Welshness and Britishness is extremely intricate. It will be necessary to extract the actual politics that lie beneath these nationalisms and the trajectories they are wedded to: the socialism of Welshness versus the capitalism of Britishness. The most recent iteration of the independence movement failed to articulate this. It cannot make that mistake again. Nor can Welsh socialists rely on the organisational infrastructure of their English counterparts – the political composition of each country is now too different. Wales must rely on its own internal movements.

There are many challenges ahead, and this election settles nothing with any certainty. Despite approaching a majority, Plaid Cymru will struggle to govern with complete stability. And despite underperforming, the dangers bound up in Reform attaining this level of influence and popularity shouldn’t be understated. There is a risk that Plaid could become the new embattled establishment while Reform retains its insurgent status, undergirded by its growing power in England. And of course, Wales remains at the mercy of Westminster’s vastly different political configuration, now coupled with an increasingly belligerent British state. 

There is a long, hard fight on the horizon. Yet for the first time in a generation or more, there is real hope that a political movement can form that confidently reflects modern Wales: free of the historic constraints of the Labour party, equipped to reject the onslaught of Reform. 

Welsh Labour could never survive the pressures that 40 years of Thatcherism and British nationalism placed upon it. It’s now unclear whether the British state itself can survive it either.