Labour’s century-long dominance of Welsh politics is coming to an end. Having dominated Westminster-level politics in Wales since the early 1920s and been the largest party in the devolved legislature in Cardiff since it was first established in 1999, Labour is now facing a humiliating defeat in the next Senedd election to be held on May 7th.
The most authoritative recent polling (YouGov for ITV Cymru and Cardiff University) has Labour in fourth place in voting intentions for May, trailing well behind Plaid Cymru and Reform UK, in first and second place respectively, but also – for the first time – trailing the Green Party.
Indeed, the party was only a whisker ahead of the Conservatives, a party that was most recently the largest party in Wales in 1859. In the few weeks remaining until the election, it is now much easier to imagine Labour falling to fifth place than it is to conceive of the party resurrecting its fortunes.
How do we begin to explain such a turn of events? Why are the Welsh electorate apparently so determined to throw overboard everything we thought we knew about their country’s politics? Three key factors seem to be at play.
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First, the Welsh Labour Party is suffering from the consequences of social change that has afflicted every major northern European centre-left party whether in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark or Norway. Bolstered by the structuring effect of Westminster’s “first past the post” electoral system on party competition, Labour has been able to resist the impact of these developments longer than most. But who can now doubt that a tipping point has been reached? At the devolved level, without the security blanket of a sometime wildly disproportional voting system, this leaves Labour in a vulnerable position.
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These social changes are familiar. Deindustrialisation leading to the decline of the “traditional” working class and the decoupling of left-wing beliefs from what remains of the labour movement. The rapid growth in the proportion of the workforce with a university degree shifting a large section of society in a decidedly socially liberal direction. But there is also an additional, Welsh-specific dimension to social change that is serving to further undermine Welsh Labour support.
Put simply, Wales is becoming less British. Younger voters, in particular, are turning their backs on a British national identity and identifying as either exclusively Welsh or, sometimes, eschewing national identity altogether. We know that those who feel Welsh but not British tend to be more left wing and socially liberal than those who feel both Welsh and British – excellent news for Plaid Cymru.
Second, in political science terms, Labour is paying the “cost of governing”. The longer any party is in power, the more likely it is to disappoint some section or other of its erstwhile supporter base. All things being equal, governing parties can therefore be expected to lose support over time.
Given that Labour has now been in power at the devolved level in Wales for nearly 27 years, the question is how it has avoided paying the cost of governing before now?
After all, few would regard the Welsh government’s record as particularly distinguished. Two factors are relevant. When the Conservatives were in power at the UK level between 2010 and 2024, Labour were adept at blame-shifting. Policy failures in Wales were attributed to the Tories in London – a suggestion that large parts of the traditionally anti-Conservative Welsh electorate were predisposed to accept. Blame shifting has recently become substantially more difficult not only because Labour is in power at both levels of government, but also because the Covid pandemic gave the Welsh population a crash course in the extent of devolved powers and responsibilities.
Finally, the end of Labour hegemony is coinciding with the collapse of the “Welsh Labour” project. Associated with previous first ministers Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford, the attempt to portray the party in Wales as embodying distinctively “Welsh values” proved extremely successful. It has long been recognised that parties prosper at the sub-state level by portraying themselves as the champions of the region rather than the tribunes of the centre. This was exactly the approach crystallised in the Welsh Labour slogan “Standing up for Wales”.
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When in December 2023 Mark Drakeford announced his intention to stand aside as first minister, it rapidly became clear how shallow the wider party’s commitment to this project really was. Those leaders who had championed “Welsh Labour” had failed to embed the project in the party’s structures. When they disappeared from the scene, old-fashioned Labourism reasserted itself. Top-down, centralising, making a graven image of Westminster: the Welsh Labour Party of 2026 now bears little resemblance to the party that won the 2021 devolved election so handily.
Wales has changed; the Labour Party in Wales has changed. A parting of the ways is now inevitable and, for the formerly dominant party, is likely to be brutal.
Richard Wyn Jones is a Welsh academic and director of the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University
