.png)
4 hours ago
1
Since Brexit, one of the hardest tasks in British politics has been to make accurate predictions. Just when you think you know what is going to happen, a prime minister will do something stupid like call an early election during a monsoon, proudly shake hands with dozens of Covid patients, crash the economy (yes, you, Liz) or squander the benefits of a 150-plus majority.
Add to this the rise of Reform UK Party Ltd and Elon Musk’s relentless desire to promote any party globally that resonates with his “divorced dad energy”, and you would be hard pressed to guess what awaits the UK in the 2029 general election.
But if you really want to get an insight into what Britain faces, you only need to look at Wales. This is because the people of Cymru will be going to the polls in less than 18 months to elect members to our Senedd, and in many ways it is going to be an extremely instructive canary in the coalmine, or bellwether (both idioms are very appropriate for Wales), for what is coming for the wider UK three years later.
If you have never paid much attention to Wales, don’t feel too bad; neither have many prime ministers. However, once you start looking closely you realise that Wales is the UK’s ghost of British future.
In Wales there is an incumbent Labour government that has, for the past decade, used “we are not the Tories” as one of its chief selling points, and “it’s not our fault, blame the Tories” as one of its primary excuses for not dealing with the issues it faces. Public services in Wales are in a terrible state – some of them even worse than England’s. There are now more than 24,000 outstanding appointments in the Welsh NHS where the patient has been waiting longer than two years. Our population is 3.1 million. In England (population 57 million) that figure is just 151. The first minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, has said that those waiting lists will have fallen by two-thirds by April, but given that in the previous 12 months they dropped by just 2.3%, this is ambitious.
As the Labour government in Westminster is now finding, the Labour Welsh government has the inevitable task of dealing with fallout in public services from more than a decade of Conservative-imposed budget cuts. These are not issues that can be dealt with in just a few months or with one spending review. However, there are also problems in Wales where the responsibility is unequivocally that of Welsh Labour.
For instance, Wales’s largest public sector organisation, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which has a budget of almost £2bn and serves almost a quarter of Wales’s population, was put into special measures in 2015 and remains there a decade later (though it was rather conveniently taken out of special measures just before the last Senedd election in 2021, only to be put back in again at the start of 2023).
So what we have here in Wales is an incumbent left-of-centre government that, despite receiving a strong electoral mandate, has been unable to deliver on the hope it promised to the electorate. Would you bet against that being the situation in the UK ahead of a 2029 election?
There are crucial lessons here for the UK Labour party. You can’t just assume that your base will stay with you: you need to continue to prove yourself to them. It seems eminently possible that the most steadfast brick in the “red wall” could crumble, come 2026. Going into an election you need to be able to point to quantifiable ways in which you have improved people’s lives and say, “We did that.” At the moment, the Welsh government has little to offer that can outweigh the issues in health and education (Wales’s Pisa scores slumped to an all-time low at the start of last year).
The Welsh elections are also likely to demonstrate how well Reform UK will do if the incumbents are unable to make the case strongly enough that people’s quality of life is improving. Welsh Labour has been the largest party in Wales in every UK and Welsh parliament election since 1922. But recent polling showed Reform tying with Labour (and Plaid Cymru leading Senedd voting intention) even though Reform hasn’t bothered to name a Welsh leader yet and doesn’t intend to until after the election. That means Welsh people could feasibly find themselves the day after the election not knowing who their first minister is.
While the parallels between Wales and the wider UK are clear, UK Labour should be more optimistic. It has a stronger hand to play than its Welsh counterparts.
For one thing, the UK government has fiscal levers that the Welsh government couldn’t even dream of. Though the administration in Cardiff Bay has a limited ability to borrow and raise income tax, this capacity is so minimal it is unlikely to move the needle. Meanwhile, its UK counterparts could initiate seismic positive changes regarding taxation, reallocation of wealth and borrowing for infrastructure projects (if they had the inclination).
Additionally, Keir Starmer has a majority, whereas Morgan only has 30 of the 60 Senedd seats. At present, the first minister is spending much of her time trying to convince the Lib Dems or Plaid Cymru to help get her budget through. This isn’t a problem UK Labour is likely to face.
And it can’t be forgotten that Welsh elections are simply more democratic. Wales has just introduced a far more proportional system, meaning that generally, if you get X percent of the votes, you will get X percent of the seats. It could be that first-past-the-post will keep the likes of Reform away from power in Westminster. But as the Tories discovered, first-past-the-post works great until it doesn’t.
But the biggest asset that the UK Labour government has compared with its Welsh colleagues is time. It has time to give public services the investment they need and make missteps along the road. Meanwhile, Morgan is banking on NHS waiting lists being slightly down from a historic all-time high to save Welsh Labour.
Perhaps the UK party can learn from its Welsh counterpart’s mistakes. But it is a great shame for the people of Cymru that it may take a historic defeat for Labour, the party for whom they have voted unwaveringly for over a century, for it to realise that it should never have treated Wales as an afterthought or Welsh support as a given.
-
Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?
