The Welsh elections, which took place in May, saw Welsh Labour exceed expectations and gain enough seats to form their own government.
The ongoing dominance of the party, which has been in power since the creation of The Senedd in 1999, has confounded many, not just on the right but also parts of the left and and Welsh independence movement.
The overall result was a welcome rejection of the Tories, and has seen new battle lines emerge over the question of devolution, independence and democracy in Wales. Meanwhile, high levels poverty and inequality are set to remain intact.
In these two pieces, SC Cook looks at the lessons we can draw from the Welsh elections, the role of Welsh Labour and the challenges facing socialists and the radical independence movement.
In this first instalment, he considers what the election means and why Welsh Labour have endured.
Image: Mark Drakeford on the campaign trail in May, via Welsh Labour on Twitter.
Tories held back in Wales
The Tories came out of the general election in 2019 in a strong position in Wales. Even though their vote share only marginally increased from 2017, by just 2.5 percent, the collapse of the Labour vote by eight points left them with six extra MPs and 36 percent of the vote, just four points behind Labour.
The party took seats in the key areas of the north and south, as Labour went into the election promising an unpopular second referendum.
Following Johnson’s sweeping victory at that election and the Tories’ encroachment into Wales, the party was feeling bullish and sensed an opportunity to make further gains in elections to the Welsh Parliament in May.
In the months running up to the Senedd election, the Tories went about attacking devolution, announcing infrastructure spending to be controlled from Westminster as well as mooting the idea of building the environmentally damaging M4 relief road in defiance of Welsh Government.
The post-Brexit Internal Market Act 2020 was aimed at strengthening the role of Westminster across the four nations, and as such represented a major affront on the devolution settlement.
On the back of this, the Tories wanted to repeat their 2019 electoral performance, critically undermine the authority of Welsh Labour and pave the way for a further centralisation of the British state.
Specifically, they aimed to reduce Labour’s number of seats to an unworkable minority, leaving a weak government that had no clear legitimacy, whilst at the same time increasing the number of Tory MSs in order to make the party look like an insurgent force in Wales.
This would have given Boris Johnson a stronger hand in any future constitutional battle with Welsh Government, and weakened the nascent movement for Welsh independence.
As it happened, the Tories failed in that objective and, in a welcome break to the dominant narrative of Tory gains, it is they who had their authority checked. Given the deeply authoritarian turn of the Tory government, and the full scale assault on the NHS, everyone on the left should welcome their failure to advance in Wales.
It is true that the party did increase the number of MSs they had by five, and their vote did increase by 5 percent to make the party the official opposition.
Nevertheless, their clear ambition going in was much greater, and although the official party line was one of satisfaction with the result, the Tories will be disappointed that they were held back in several key seats.
At the same time, Welsh Labour’s grip on power increased, and the vote was seen as a rejection of the Tory’s covid response. The mandate now afforded to Welsh Labour means the government here should feel more emboldened in any constitutional confrontation with the Tories in Westminster.
And whilst we should have no illusions that Welsh Labour will use this mandate to its full effect, it is clearly the case that they are adopting a more bullish attitude to the Tories, and softening their stance towards the Welsh independence.
Whilst these are the main takeaways from the Welsh election, there are other political conclusions worth mentioning.
The result confounded a popular media narrative: that all former UKIP and Brexit Party voters have now been captured by the Tories.
In many leave voting areas in the Valleys, whilst the Conservative vote did increase, it generally did so at a far smaller rate than Labour’s did, and came nowhere near piling on all the votes that had previously gone to Brexit supporting parties on the right.
Equally satisfying was the total annihilation of the far right, fascist-linked presence in The Senedd, with all former UKIP MS’s getting wiped out. The new phase of reactionary politics that Brexit was supposed to give rise to in Wales has not materialised.
It is also tempting to see the election as a rejection of Welsh independence, considering Plaid Cymru’s poor performance. But the issue of independence was not a central theme of the election, and Plaid’s failure to put the idea front and centre allowed opponents to define it in negative terms.
At the same time however, as will be discussed later, Mark Drakeford’s high profile conflict with aspects of Boris Johnson’s Covid strategy was what drove Welsh Labour’s high vote, and can be translated as support for greater political independence from Tory rule.
The fact is that support for Welsh independence has grown significantly over the past 18 months and the constitutional crisis has only intensified following the election, something a radical movement for secession can capitalise on.
Finally, there are some potent myths surrounding the Welsh election and specifically Welsh Labour. These are prevalent on both the left and sections of the independence movement, and have built up an image of Mark Drakeford as a kind of national hero, who is seen as both a socialist and someone who can be relied upon to fight back against Tory power grabs.
Whilst some of these ideas are based in reality, they for the most part rely on a distorted idea of Welsh Labour and its role in managing British capitalism in Wales.
The current move to fall in line behind Mark Drakeford, often uncritically, is part of a wider dynamic on the left and radical movements of being pulled into the political centre ground, something that hides the reality of class society and fundamental divisions between rich and poor.
In these two pieces, I will look at the social roots of Welsh Labour’s support, the role the party has played in the implementation of neoliberalism and austerity in Wales, its relationship to the independence movement and what the future may hold.
Welsh Labour’s strong performance
Many on the radical left and radical independence movement, who have spent years highlighting the failures of Welsh Labour in power – from implementing Tory austerity to acquiescence to big business – were surprised by the party’s strong showing.
Firstly, it’s important to note that the low turnout at the Welsh election means that levels of disillusionment in the political system at large remain high, and any conclusion drawn from the result has to bear this in mind.
But we should consider why Welsh Labour were able to outperform expectations and pull off such a solid electoral performance, something that is a distant dream to the party in England.
There are some obvious places to start with. The Welsh Labour government has been in charge of the Covid response in Wales, something that has become increasingly clear to people during the pandemic.
The goodwill that some voters might have felt towards Boris Johnson in England or Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland as lockdown eased and the vaccine was rolled out also applied to Mark Drakeford.
Wales has been vaccinating at a faster rate than anywhere else in the UK, and possibly even the world. In the weeks leading up to the election, people in their twenties were getting their jab. News like that spreads, and Welsh Labour played on it heavily.
This, however, only gets you so far as an explanation.
Like the Tories, the Welsh Labour government has made some catastrophic decisions when it comes to Covid. These include closing down testing centres when they were so crucial, delaying the first lockdown and the one before Christmas, and releasing care home residents from hospital when they had Covid.
But these things didn’t feature in the election, and arguably were not what people were thinking about when they went to vote.
Instead, what a lot of people remember about the Welsh Government’s Covid response is that it has been generally more cautious than the Tories and on a few occasions, Mark Drakeford has been willing to take a different path to Boris Johnson. As a result, the Welsh Government’s handling of Covid has consistently been shown to be more popular than the Tories’ throughout the pandemic.
When people went to the polls, it seems reasonable to assume that they were responding positively to the moments when Drakeford was prepared to be more confrontational with Westminster.
On numerous occasions, the Welsh Labour leader has been publicly critical of Johnson’s approach. And even though this has been relatively tame, it nevertheless made headlines and helped to sideline the Welsh Tories.
For their part, the Conservatives in Wales have been even more hawkish than the party in government in England, frequently representing the business lobby and demanding an end to lockdown measures.
This has jarred with the overall public mood, which has generally been in support of measures aimed at containing the spread of the virus.
This dynamic helped to draw clear distinctions in people’s heads: on one hand, of an uncaring Tory party who were happy to ‘let the bodies pile high’ and on the other, a more cautious Mark Drakeford. This mobilised people to vote Labour in Wales.
And whatever one thinks of Mark Drakford’s politics, he has proved himself to be as effective a political operator as Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson.
He has certainly been more adept than the UK Labour leader Keir Starmer, who’s non-opposition to the Tories’ disastrous Covid response has been understandably met with a mixture of indifference and disdain from ordinary people.
According to the Labour MS Mick Antoniw, Mark Drakeford’s popularity was clear on the campaign trail.
There may be some embellishment here, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that lots of ordinary people – who aren’t frequent Labour voters – think that Mark Drakeford ultimately cares, and is prepared to stick up for them.
Even if this belief is thrown into doubt over the testing and care home fiasco, it has nevertheless taken hold.
As well as being based in the real political dynamic of the crisis, it has also been propagated by Welsh Labour and even many in the Welsh Independence movement.
Every time Mark Drakeford clashed with Westminster over Covid strategy, he received warm praise from big pillars of the Indy-sphere, including both Yes Cymru and the website Nation.Cymru.
This has led to a softening of relations between the independence movement and Welsh Labour in general. One way of explaining the poor performance of Plaid Cymru is that many ‘indy-curious’ or ‘indy-supporting’ voters will have voted Welsh Labour because of this new-found alliance.
Drakeford – a committed unionist – has deliberately fostered this relationship, choosing to speak out on constitutional issues far more than any other political questions.
This growing admiration for Drakeford among a section of the independence movement poses its own challenges for the radical indy campaign and socialists alike.
But before delving into them, it’s important to look at Welsh Labour’s vote and particularly its class character against that of English Labour.
The endurance of Welsh Labour vs English Labour
Many people in the Welsh Elections were voting with class instincts at heart, and for the same reason that working class people have voted Labour for a century. That is to say that regardless of any dislike they may have for the party, many working class people still think that Labour will provide them with some basic level of protection against the Tories, who are the open advocates of the capitalist class.
When we consider what happened in the pandemic, the idea of being shielded from the urges of the boss class have been more pronounced than ever. Business leaders have agitated for an end to lockdown, even if it means more deaths. Their insistence on putting profit over human health, when they know it will be workers, their families and communities who will suffer the most if restrictions are scraped, has become clear for all to see.
In Wales, the Tories were the biggest advocates of this strategy. So when Welsh Labour figures stood up to this, even slightly or in a roundabout way, it went some way to rekindling its historic role as a party that provided a certain level of protection to ordinary people. This is also why Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester performed well.
Put simply, there are material reasons that people have traditionally voted Labour and it’s simply not true – as several mainstream media presenters have claimed – that working class people have simply done so in the past “because that’s what they’ve always done.”
Instead there has always been a class basis behind the Labour vote, and the party has an historical function in class society to represent, in a limited way, the interest of workers against the interests of bosses. Of course, it does so in a way that manages workers demands in order to maintain the overall running of capitalism and the state, and so can never truly represent workers interests, but it should, at the very least, advocate progressive reforms.
When Labour – or any social democratic party – stops playing this historic role, working class people have less reason to vote for them, and simply don’t turn up.
This can be seen by Labour in England’s electoral collapse in the Hartlepool and Batley and Spen by-elections, where rather than a Tory surge, Labour’s vote has plummeted in both cases, albeit in the latter case they just held on. In face the scenes we are witnessing in English Labour are eerily similar to the major decline of European left parties over the last decade.
In one online video, two men in Hartlepool explain their reason for deserting the party and express this dynamic perfectly; they no longer thought that Labour was of any use.
This decline was arrested through the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the brilliant 2017 election campaign, which saw Labour’s vote rise dramatically across the working class as a whole as Corbynism offered a serious attack on the Neoliberal doctrine.
But it proved to be temporary, and by 2019, with the adoption of a disastrous second referendum position, the party was once again seen as a second wing of the establishment who viewed much of its base with contempt.
This raises key questions about Welsh Labour that are important to grasp for anyone struggling to see how the party increased its vote after 22 years in power, when Wales is a country still blighted by widespread poverty, exploitation and systemic injustices.
When Labour was wiped out in Scotland at the 2015 general election and the party began to really struggle in many of its so-called heartlands in England, many assumed the same fate awaited Welsh Labour.
Yet despite suffering losses in the 2010s, the party clung on, as many working-class voters continued to vote for them.
Welsh Labour’s contradictions
Part two will look in more detail at the role of Welsh Labour since 1999, but in summary: the party rejected some key Blair-era neoliberal reforms in their first decade but implemented devastating Tory-led austerity in its second decade.
The qualified resistance to Blairism in the first decade is still a major factor in Welsh Labour’s continued support, but it was in the second decade that the party looked most vulnerable as it administered huge cuts. So how did they hang on?
Whilst it is true that Welsh Labour opted to be the administrators of Tory-led austerity, it has often done so quietly, sometimes even whilst saying they are against cuts. This is why you have the sight of self declared anti-austerity Labour politicians drawing up plans for cuts with barely a word of protest.
Many on the left rightly decry the hypocrisy of labelling yourself left wing but failing to fight against cuts that hit working class people.
But the overall result of the approach has been a less severe rupture between Labour and its base. At the same time, the party membership and affiliates often conclude that the party in Wales has little choice over austerity and will administer it in a fairer way.
Another key factor in the party’s ongoing dominance is that the open tension seen between Labour and some union leaders in England simply hasn’t existed in the same way in Wales. The party has maintained close union links and a line of communication into a large section of the organised working class.
In doing so, it has been able to hang on to its reputation among much of its base as a reforming, social democratic party, and the political expression of organised workers.
This has also been fostered by the biggest unions themselves, who have avoided any major showdown with Welsh Government over devolved issues, such as public sector job losses or NHS pay. And it has happened in spite of the fact that the party has implemented several neoliberal reforms and cuts which have had an extremely negative impact on workers.
Even with some outlandish Blairites like Alun Davies taken into account, most Welsh Labour MSs are what you might describe as soft left, and rather than make headline-grabbing pitches to the right, often opt to say very little at all.
In England, several senior Labour figures, and indeed the party leadership at times, have openly called for welfare cuts on the poorest, advocated for the party to be in favour of austerity and engaged in racist attacks on migrants in a bid to win votes.
You will generally be hard pressed to find examples of this in Welsh Labour, where leading figures tend to stay quiet in public on issues that may be dominating the party over the border. Welsh Labour MPs are usually more hawkish in this regard, but they often exist separately to Welsh Labour in the Senedd, and people are increasingly drawing a distinction between the two groups.
On the question of racism, Welsh, Labour’s approach is more outwardly anti-racist than the brazen anti-migrant politics of the Labour right, who have often advocated a tough stance on immigration as a way to win round working class voters.
But one of the most interesting and under-reported lessons from the Welsh Election throws cold water on this strategy.
In fact the strong performance of Welsh Labour in working class, leave-voting areas, when compared to the party’s disastrous record in England, debunks the idea that these voters are reactionaries turned off by so-called woke politics.
It is actually the lack of open and brazen attacks on migrant workers and the working class as a whole that has meant Welsh Labour have had far less public confrontation with its traditional base, and therefore held on to it more.
This lack of open attacks, however, doesn’t usually translate into Welsh Labour taking a principled stand on key political issues. For the most part, the party often says little at all, and certainly has not actively resisted the Tories over austerity in Wales.
The end result is a social crisis of poverty, low paid jobs and poor housing that often gets hidden from view by the political class in Wales. But it this reality that matters, and which will drive the wheels of change in Welsh politics.
Part two will look in more detail at this, and the role of Welsh Labour in its new incarnation, as a party that is seeking a different constitutional settlement, and how the left and radical movement for Welsh independence should relate to it.
SC Cook is an editor of voice.wales
This article was amended
