Reform UK would be a disaster for Wales – but its rivals have left the door wide open | Will Hayward

5 hours ago 2

In just over a year’s time, the people of Wales will go to the polls to elect members to our parliament, the Senedd. It will be a crucial election for the people of Cymru, where Welsh Labour has been in charge for a quarter of a century. We have Britain’s longest NHS waiting list and the UK’s worst school-test results ranking.

Wales is desperate for a grown-up discussion about how to fix these problems, and for political parties that have the drive, vision and competency to make it happen. But what they are likely to get, the polls show, is a big dose of Reform UK, with the party polling at around 23%. This means it could become the largest party.

Make no mistake, the answer to none of Wales’s complex and deeply rooted challenges is Nigel Farage and his former company, now party. Since the general election, Reform has made its stance on Wales very clear. As Maya Angelou said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” So who has Reform shown itself to be regarding Wales?

Let’s start with its rationale for running in Wales. At its first Welsh conference, at the Celtic Manor hotel near Newport back in November, I had a conversation with one of its MPs, Lee Anderson. When I asked where he stood on devolution, he said it had been a “disaster”, but from his party’s point of view it had “benefits” because Reform could “win lots of seats that they can use to their advantage”.

So let’s be clear. Its aim in running for the Welsh parliament is not to improve the lives of people in Cymru, but to gain the resources that come with elected members to position the party for a run at the next general election. Time and again at that conference, Reform staff and politicians told me the Senedd was a convenient staging post for gains elsewhere in the UK. The disdain for Welsh democracy, and therefore the Welsh people, is plain.

Additionally, neither Farage nor Anderson could give one specific policy that Reform had for Wales, and clearly neither knew really basic information about the country, such as the fact that our largest public sector organisation – Betsi Cadwaladr health board – has been in special measures for the past decade. Add to this the fact that the party is saying it believes it will form the next Welsh government while simultaneously refusing to name a Welsh leader. Welsh voters, therefore, will be offered a “mystery box” for the identity of their next first minister. The contempt in which Reform holds Wales is clear.

If you want a flavour of what Reform politicians could look like in Wales, you need look no further than when they have previously been elected (though under other guises). Former Ukip member of the Senedd Gareth Bennett spent almost £10,000 of taxpayers’ money in rent and other costs for a constituency office that never opened. Last month, a Reform councillor in Torfaen posted an image of himself “officially” cutting a ribbon at the opening of a Lidl despite the supermarket saying there had been no such ceremony. Oh, and climate change denier and brown-envelope enthusiast Neil Hamilton was also a member of the Senedd for Ukip …

The door for Reform to make inroads in Wales has been left wide open by the Welsh Conservative party, whose actions as the largest opposition have been so incalculably pathetic that it’s hard to see how they could be worse. Think I am exaggerating? Let me give you an example.

For the past six months, the Welsh Labour party, which is one short of a majority, has been desperately trying to work out how to pass its budget. There was an indicative vote inside the Senedd in February. The night before, the Welsh Tory press office emailed journalists a release titled “Labour deserve to lose vote on woeful budget”.

The very next day, it turned out that the government was set to win the vote by default because – wait for it – the Welsh Conservative leader, Darren Millar, was going to miss it in order to fly to Washington DC for a prayer breakfast that Donald Trump was attending. To be clear, we are talking about the official leader of the opposition inside the Senedd. Imagine if before the general election, Keir Starmer had allowed a Tory budget vote to pass because he was praying with a foreign leader. Not to cast further aspersions on Millar’s commitment to challenge Welsh Labour in the Senedd, but he also ran to be an MP last summer.

The latest polls suggest that the Welsh Conservatives will be fourth at the next Senedd election. Wales is desperate for a sensible voice on the centre-right of our politics, but instead is left with a Welsh Conservative party in which the “Welsh” identity part is conspicuous by its absence. People in the party have told me they are “excited” at the prospect of Reform doing well, because it means it could join them in government as a junior partner. Their only real policy seems to be: become a Reform tribute act and hope to retain some seats through voter muscle memory. Though perhaps praying now constitutes a big part of their election strategy?

Ultimately, it is obvious for anyone willing to pay attention that Reform is not the answer to Wales’s challenges. But it has been offered fertile ground in which to make gains by a Welsh Labour government unable to manage public services, and a Welsh Conservative opposition so lacking in talent and ambition that it would rather ride Farage’s coattails than put forward its own credible plan.

What no one outside Wales seems to have noticed is that it is actually not Reform, the Tories or Labour that the latest polls have forecast to be the largest party – it is, narrowly, the Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru. Welsh politics is fragmenting, with vastly different visions for Cymru’s future being put forward.

Wales has been absolutely hamstrung by Brexit, from our farmers to our industry to our communities which once received huge amounts of EU cash. It is clear that we can’t keep buying snake oil just because the seller has changed its logo.