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Apols for the formatting.
Labour’s trouncing in the valleys town of Caerphilly was the biggest drop in support for the party in a Welsh by-election — although its strategists have taken some solace from the failure of Reform UK to capture the seat. In an area that Labour has represented for more than a century, the party was humiliated. Its vote collapsed from 46 per cent to 11 per cent as Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, took control.
The Conservatives were, meanwhile, eviscerated in their own worst by-election performance in history, receiving just 2 per cent of the votes. Yet it was Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour prime minister, who was feeling the heat on Friday as commentators reached for their thesauruses to describe the scale of the defeat. It points to Labour losing control of the Welsh Senedd next May when local and regional elections are held across the UK.
Labour’s best hope of wielding power in the Senedd beyond next spring now appears to be as a junior partner in a Plaid-run coalition. With Starmer’s popularity sinking to fresh lows since his landslide general election victory in 2024, next year’s elections could be a moment of acute political danger, with some MPs already speculating about a change of leadership. But it is not clear whether appointing a new Labour leader could reverse structural changes in British politics, fuelled in part by social media, which have seen the decline of the old duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives.
Rhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid Cymru leader, said this could be “the start of a reset for Welsh politics” as he had “no doubt” his party could soon be running Wales. “What it shows is that the two-party system is dead,” said David Bull, chair of Reform UK. “It’s pretty indicative of what is going on in the rest of the country.”
On the face of it Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s populist right-wing party, should be feeling energised after coming second with 36 per cent of the vote. Reform only picked up 2 per cent when the seat was last contested in 2021. Farage’s party appealed to many older voters, soaking up large numbers of former Conservatives along with other people who have not voted for years. And yet some Labour MPs have taken solace from the fact that Reform was still trumped by Plaid. One minister on Friday said the result showed the existence of an anti-Reform majority in Wales and the UK. “It reminds us that while 30 per cent can be an election-winning tally against a fragmented opposition, it is not enough against, as in Caerphilly, a strong competitor,” said Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University.
Adam Langleben, executive director of Progressive Britain, a Blairite think-tank, said: “The glimmer of hope is that the public rejected Reform and clearly voters coalesced around the party that they felt was best able to stop Reform. In most places, the most viable party to beat Reform will be the Labour party.” This may sound like wishful thinking. And yet analysis carried out jointly by the consultancies Public First and Stonehaven, based on MRP polling over the year to August 10, found that tactical voting could now be sufficiently prevalent to deny Reform a majority at the next general election. The research found far more seats potentially affected than in either 2019 or 2024, with the impact particularly pronounced in the north-west, south-west and south-east and also “disproportionately” high in Wales. Overall, it concluded, the trend could benefit both Labour and the Conservatives and cut Reform’s projected seat tally from about 400 to around 210, resulting in a hung parliament. “Tactical voting is no doubt going to play a critical role in the next election and Caerphilly has demonstrated this,” said Seb Wride, partner at Public First and Stonehaven, whose polling involved 40,000 survey responses over the course of the year and placed greater weight on those received most recently. That theory holds water so long as Labour is seen as the most likely party to stop Reform, which — for now — it is in much of England. Starmer’s worst scenario would be if his party is eclipsed in national opinion polls by either the Greens, Liberal Democrats or Jeremy Corbyn’s new party. That may seem unlikely. But nobody was predicting two years ago that Reform would overtake the Tories in the polls. The problem facing Labour is that it is already hugely unpopular in swaths of the country, even before a second Budget, which will include another batch of tax rises. On Friday, a blame game erupted between Welsh Labour and the national party, with some politicians in Wales blaming Starmer for the haemorrhaging of votes. Welsh Labour has for years tried to distinguish itself from the national party through a so-called “clear red water” strategy. Ron Davies, a former Labour Welsh secretary, said the party would struggle to ever recover from decisions such as means-testing winter fuel — a policy that has since been reversed. “It was a devastating result for Labour . . . the Labour party nationally was very, very unpopular on the street, from door to door, canvassing. There was no interest whatsoever in supporting Labour,” he said. But one Labour aide in London said the Caerphilly result was partly due to mistakes made in Wales, including a controversy involving donations to former first minister Vaughan Gething. He said that next year’s Senedd elections would be even worse because of a decision by Mark Drakeford, Gething’s predecessor, to change the voting system in a way that will benefit smaller parties. “They’re drowning in their clear red water,” he observed.