One year to save Welsh Labour

The Senedd (Welsh Parliament) election scheduled for May 2026 is now just a year away and excitement and intrigue is already reaching fever pitch.

Wales does not typically produce exciting elections, having been a one-party dominant system for the past century. But that is changing!

The major political realignment that is taking place elsewhere in the UK is also taking place here, with the two-party system (or one-party system in Wales’ case) now coming to an end. But not without some distinctive Welsh characteristics:

• Plaid Cymru (The Party of Wales) is consistently leading in the polls.
• The Reform Revolution that took place in recent English local elections looks likely to spread into Wales.
• In the 2026 Senedd election the number of parliamentary seats will increase from 60 to 96.
• Members of the Senedd (called MSs) will be elected through a new, fully proportional, closed-list system, based on sixteen constituencies, each with six members.
• The Conservatives look to be heading to another significant electoral defeat, consistently polling in fourth place
• A divided Labour party is slumping in the polls to third place.
   

These unique, and never before seen, conditions will lead to a Welsh election unlike any we have experienced for generations.

But how are the individual parties faring? In the first of this series looking at the state of the Welsh parties we begin, of course, with the hegemonic Labour Party.

Welsh Labour – The winning machine

It’s hard to imagine that less than a year ago, at the 2024 Westminster elections, Labour won 27 of Wales’ 32 seats.

Business as usual was resuming, it seemed, as Labour again swept to victory. Few parties in the world have dominated elections the way Labour has in Wales, winning every Westminster contest since 1922 and every Senedd election since the first in 1999.

But the signs discontent was brewing in Wales had been there for some time. 

In 2016, unlike her Celtic cousins in Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales voted for Brexit. This vote seemed to stem from a dissatisfaction in how the political status quo was working for Wales.

And in the 2024 Westminster elections, Labour won an additional nine Westminster seats, but its share of the vote actually dropped by 4%. This really bucked the trend in England, and particularly in Scotland, where Labour’s share of the vote increased. The real story of 2024 was not Labour hegemony in Wales, but Tory collapse.

New challenges

With the party’s landslide victory and return to government in London, Welsh Labour has been presented with a challenge it hasn’t faced since Senedd elections in 2007: how to win in Wales when there is an increasingly unpopular Labour government in Westminster.

Labour’s initial strategy was to talk up the benefits of having Labour governments in London and Cardiff, both working together for the benefit of Wales.

That strategy has disintegrated as Welsh Labour has failed to convince its London counterparts to support big political issues in Wales. One such issue has been around funding for the HS2 rail project. 

The Great Train Robbery

If there is one issue that unites all Welsh parties in the Senedd it is the injustice they feel from HS2 being designated an England and Wales project, even though none of the new track comes close to Wales. This has been dubbed the ‘The Great Train Robbery’. 

By being designated as an England and Wales project, Wales receives no additional funding in compensation for the extra spending taking place on the project in England (called a consequential). Scotland and Northern Ireland, meanwhile, receive billions in extra cash.

Despite supporting calls for extra HS2 funding before the election, Welsh Secretary of State, Jo Stevens, has since u-turned, even bizarrely claiming “HS2 is no longer in existence”. 

The decline of steel

Wales has a long and venerable history of copper, gold, iron and steelmaking, with production of metal part of the national psyche. 

Welsh ironmasters were historically so innovative, their production practices became known as the ‘Welsh Method’.

So successful were they, exports of Welsh steel were sent around the world, used to build notable landmarks like the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

But the long decline of Welsh steel production has also inflicted significant trauma on Wales, with Shotton Steel the site of the single biggest mass redundancy to ever take place in Western Europe, when 6,500 jobs were axed in a single day.

And so, the closure of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot, and the thousands of resulting redundancies, has been a political issue of huge significance. With Welsh Labour campaigning against these job losses, the Conservatives were set to take the blame, having been in government in London when the process started.

But this changed after what happened with British Steel and the Scunthorpe steel plant, which was threatened with closure by its Chinese owners. The Labour UK Government acted quickly and decisively to nationalise British Steel and save the plant.

Many people in Wales were left wondering why Labour could move so rapidly to secure the Scunthorpe site, while allowing thousands of job losses in Port Talbot, through a move to a slimmed down, electric arc operation.

Port Talbot and HS2, in addition to other issues such as London Labour’s refusal to devolve the Crown Estates, has given the impression of two governments of the same party not working together, with Welsh Labour simply unable to get what it wants from its London Labour counterparts.

First Minister turmoil

If there is an impression that the two Labour Governments in London and Cardiff are now at odds with each other, then there is no doubt that Welsh Labour is at odds with itself.

This was exposed when Mark Drakeford stood down as First Minister, leading to a divisive leadership contest fought out between Vaughan Gething and Jeremy Miles.

The contest got off to a challenging start when Vaughan Gething was endorsed by the Unite Union in dubious circumstances. Mr Miles was disqualified from being endorsed by the influential union on a bizarre technicality, having not been a ‘lay union official’. It would later turn out Mr Gething had only joined the union a few months previously. The affair would lead to claims of a stitch up.

But the contest really exploded just days before final voting, when it emerged Mr Gething had received massive donations of hundreds of thousands of pounds by a company owned by a man twice convicted of environmental offences.

Vaughan Gething just about won the vote to be leader of Welsh Labour and became First Minister, but the donation scandal would not go away. Four toxic months of party infighting followed before Mr Gething was forced to resign.

He was replaced by Baroness Eluned Morgan, who is a member of both the Senedd and the House of Lords. Ms Morgan had finished a distant last in her 2018 bid to become Welsh leader but was elected unopposed in 2024, seemingly the least offensive option to both warring parties. 

How is this impacting the polls?

Welsh Labour is currently facing its most challenging set of circumstances since the first Senedd election in 1999.

These include an unpopular Labour Government in London introducing austerity policies that disproportionately affect Wales, an intense period of infighting both within Welsh Labour and between Labour governments, two other parties (Plaid Cymru and Reform) who are increasingly popular, a First Minister with a small public profile, challenging global economic conditions, industrial job losses and a perception of public service decline.

And these challenges are reflected in recent polling. The most recent Barn Cymru poll, conducted by YouGov, projects Welsh Labour support collapsing:

• Plaid Cymru - 30%
• Reform UK - 25%
• Labour - 18%
• Conservatives - 13%
• Liberal Democrats - 7%
• Green - 5%
• Other - 2%
   

Projected into seats this would give Labour just 19 of the 96 Senedd seats, with Reform UK securing 30 and Plaid Cymru winning with 35.

Labour responds by targeting… Labour

For 14 years Welsh Labour had the luxury of being able to blame the Conservatives in London for issues in Wales, sometimes with justification, sometimes without.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, therefore, that the focus for First Minister Morgan’s latest criticism is once again the government in London, Labour or no. In a recent major speech, she exclaimed that she will “call out” UK Labour when it “gets it wrong for Wales.”

And in an echo of Rhodri Morgan’s Clear Red Water strategy of distancing Welsh Labour from London, Ms Morgan talked of the “red Welsh Labour Way”.

This more confrontational strategy with London Labour may work for her but becomes challenging when controversial decisions are enacted by her own government in Cardiff. 43% of voters think she is doing a bad job as First Minister, with just 23% thinking she’s doing a good one.

End of the road

All indicators suggest that after a century of election wins and 26 unbroken years of running the Welsh Government, it may be the end of the road for Welsh Labour.

But Labour has seen off multiple threats in Wales in the past. It simply only knows one outcome here, and that is winning.

With a new proportional electoral system and the two-party system coming to an end there really is a feeling that anything could happen in 2026. 

But this time things do feel different. Welsh Labour managing to win in 2026 would make the Battle of the Alamo look like a tea party.

The historical political realignment that is taking place across the UK is coming to Wales, and the traditional behemoths of Labour and the Conservatives are set to be the biggest losers of this realignment.