Nowhere in the world has a party commanded a nation longer than Labour in Wales. Barring an upset in local council elections this week, Labour will celebrate a century of dominance come November. The party holds a majority in a third of Welsh councils. The expectation is that this Thursday it will win another 100 seats and take back control of two extra councils.
Things looked very different in 2019, when voters turned from Labour to the Conservatives as the “red wall” began to crumble in north Wales. Since then, the mood has soured for the Tories. The cautious approach of the Labour first minister, Mark Drakeford, during the pandemic contrasted with that of the prime minister, Boris Johnson. While these are local Welsh elections, the UK’s national politics is never far from voters’ minds. Labour’s poll ratings are far ahead of the Tories.
Brexit captured a nationalist sentiment in Wales – but one that Mr Drakeford has turned to Labour’s advantage. Cardiff University’s Richard Wyn Jones, Jac Larner and Daniel Wincott found that feelings of Welshness had become more intense since 2016, and simultaneously voters rejected any diminution of devolved powers in the name of leaving the EU. In last year’s Senedd elections, anti-devolution parties collapsed without producing an equal-sized increase in vote share for the Tories.
Nationalist forces have brought Labour low in England and Scotland. But not in Wales. Independence here is a language movement and Mr Drakeford, like his predecessors, is a fluent Welsh speaker. Labour’s electoral coalition spans both nationalism and unionism. This politics was forged in Labour’s heartland of the south Wales valleys, which have a rich history of workers’ institutes and nonconformist churches. English jostled alongside the Welsh language. Today, this region is where almost a third of the Welsh population lives.
Plaid Cymru, which backs independence, appears to have flatlined. The party takes votes from an electorate that feels very Welsh and not at all British. For the Tories, the opposite holds. The signing of a cooperation agreement between Labour and Plaid Cymru in the Senedd last year has already seen a more distinctively Welsh policy programme emerge. Probably the most eye-catching is that some second-home owners could pay four times their current level of council tax from next year to prevent house prices becoming unaffordable for the locals.
Mr Drakeford, unlike his Scottish counterpart, lacks control over justice and welfare spending. The Senedd is likely to usurp Westminster’s authority in these areas in the years ahead. It can already vary income taxes. In 1997, Wales voted for devolution by a margin of 50.3%, one of the narrowest victories in British electoral history. Remarkably, Welsh Labour has been able to straddle – and even close – this divide. It is a lesson the party elsewhere in Britain should learn from.
• This article was amended on 4 May 2022. The south Wales valleys are home to a third of the country’s population, not three-quarters as an earlier version said.
