The May 7 elections for the 96-seat Senedd Cymru (Welsh parliament) returned devastating results for Welsh Labour, which lost government for the first time since devolution in 1999. It won just 11% of the vote and dropped from 44 seats to just 9.
The Conservatives lost 22 seats, down to just 7, while the far-right Reform UK party entered the Senedd for the first time with 34 seats, winning 29.3% of the vote.
The Liberal Democrats won one seat, while the Greens entered the Senedd for the first time, winning two seats.
Centre-left Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru won 35.4% of the vote, gaining 43 seats, up from 23 the previous election. Plaid Cymru formed a minority government, with party leader Rhun ap Iorwerth elected First Minister with the support of the Greens. The nine Welsh Labour Senedd Members (MS) and one of the Liberal Democrat MSs abstained from the vote.
The results show a clear rejection of the traditional parties of government, renewed interest in Welsh independence and the rising popularity of far-right politics, as seen in England and Scotland.
An Cú from the Welsh Underground Network (WUN), told Green Left that Labour got its “teeth kicked in” after running the country for the past century. “Wales was known for mining, trade unions and the Labour Party, these were the big stereotypes.
“There is a new dimension in Welsh politics now: You have a younger, more progressive bloc of voters in their twenties and thirties who identify more with a Welsh identity and are politically aligned with parties like the Greens and Plaid Cymru.
“Then you have an older, British-identifying group, who align more with Reform … this divide underpins a lot of Welsh politics at the moment.
“Plaid Cymru have come into power on a progressive anti-Reform agenda. It has an interesting history but has developed into a broadly pro-European social democratic party with some tensions around how it engages with the urban working class of south Wales and the small Welsh-speaking farming communities of the north west.”
An Cú said the Welsh Greens have struggled to differentiate themselves from Plaid Cymru other than some policies around the environment and electrification. “In this election, no one was really thinking about what Zack Polanski was saying because of the threat of the far right and the potential for Reform to be the first right-wing government in the devolved parliament.
“However, the Greens are definitely on the up, especially among young people … a lot of well-known activists in Wales who are active in Palestine solidarity or in the ACORN community union are Greens members.”
Housing and jobs
An Cú said housing was a “massive issue” in the elections. “Down south in the built-up areas the rent is ridiculous and the quality of housing is terrible.
“In the west, which is predominantly Welsh-speaking, there is a scourge of second-home Airbnbs that are generally owned by English pensioners.
“These areas have very few jobs outside of farming, tourism and the service industry, and the house prices continue to increase because the market caters to the wealthy, so many are forced to move to the big urban centres in south Wales or to England.
“Young people in particular struggle to find work in Wales and are forced to move to English cities like Bristol, Manchester or Liverpool.”
An Cú said Welsh industries do not keep wealth in the country. “Often tax revenue generated in Wales will go to London if the business is registered there. There are many inequalities built into Welsh tax law and how Wales is run so it is difficult to sustain an industrial or economic base.
“We have lower wages in Wales than everywhere else in Britain — except for some parts of northeast England like Newcastle — which the state uses to promote international investment. But it doesn’t often work and we don’t receive much investment, partly because a lot of the infrastructure is decaying and was built around resource extraction industries that don’t exist anymore.
“Health is a massive issue, with budget cuts to the National Health Service, but also the legacy of industry in the country leading to chronic health issues.
“So many aspects of Welsh economic life take money out of the country. For example we have a lot of renewable energy in Wales, particularly wind as it is a mountainous country, but that energy and the wealth it generates mostly goes to England. The same with water, which is often sold very cheap to England.
“These resources are not allowed to be developed to benefit the country, it is solely resource extraction.”
Welsh Underground Network
WUN is a Marxist group that campaigns for a Socialist Welsh Republic through community action.
“It formed in 2019 and was partly shaped by Jeremy Corbyn, when there was a lot of young activism being thrown into the Labour Party,” An Cú said.
After Labour’s 2019 election loss — its worst defeat since 1935 — Corbyn stepped down as leader and a lot of people were demoralised.
“We all remember the bad times and all of that political activity that never developed into anything.”
At the same time, there was a “developing Welsh nationalist movement”.
“Welsh nationalism has always been quite marginal in Welsh politics. Prior to 2019, support for Welsh independence never went above 10%.
“But there was a cultural moment that began to accelerate after 2019 where Welsh was starting to be a bit cool. Welsh language and culture has always been quite modern and innovating, for example Welsh language music will engage with a lot of modern sounds like reggae and grime. It’s always evolving.”
WUN founder Joseph Jones established its precursor group, the Valleys Underground, in an area of Wales called Merthyr Tydfil, a working-class area near the Cynon Valley. A former mining area, its manufacturing base disappeared after the 1980s and it has been struggling ever since.
An Cú said Jones started the group after attending a big march for Welsh independence in 2019. “There are a lot of old buildings in Wales and they go derelict and just sit there, either get sold off to developers who let the land appreciate or they knock it down and build private houses.
“If you go to Merthyr today you will see all these listed buildings that should be done up and turned into community centres, but are just allowed to rot.”
He said Jones went to an old Synagogue in Merthyr and cleaned it up. “He told people he had done it and said he will do it again at another date in future … When he turned up, some other people were interested in helping.
“From there Valleys Underground became the Welsh Underground Network and became an all-Wales project with a focus on walking the walk.
“We are socialists, Marxists, socialist-republicans, but we are also about being embedded in those communities and actively intervening in the world around us.”
WUN are involved in rehabilitating run-down community centres and intervening in local struggles. “We want to show that you don’t have to put up with this decline and people can fix Wales.”
An Cú said the community action approach makes it possible to connect with ordinary people. “Workers in places like Cefn Fforest or Blackwood can be turned off by what they see as abstract debates about socialism or Marxism, but they are very aware of local problems.
“We were chatting to one fella in Blackwood who worked at a cinema, and we noticed there were so many taxis around from a single taxi company. He told us that company runs the town, and it can cost him £20 to get to work … that kind of social investigation allows us to intervene and be part of the political scene in other areas.
“You can’t wait for the people of Blackwood to autonomously come to these conclusions, we have to go out and talk with the people around us.
An Cú said this is an important part of countering rising anti-immigrant and far-right sentiment in Wales. “A lot of left wing groups have good intentions, but are fundamentally outsiders to a lot of communities … but if you are embedded in these communities you have the ability to speak to people about these issues as a trusted political figure.
“I am known to some people in Blackwood and Cefn Fforest and if they were being a bit racist I could talk to them and help change their perspective … you can’t do that from the top down.
“We want to build up a base at the grassroots level with organisations that can act as independent organisations for the working class in Wales.
“We have issues like trade unions being tied to the state, and only campaigning for the bare minimum wage increases while staying silent on the political issues of the day.
“For example, a lot of the arms manufacturing in Wales, which produces weapons that are sold to Israel to bomb Palestine and Lebanon, is unionised.”
WUN has links with socialist and independence groups in Ireland and the Basque Country. “Ireland is a real source of inspiration and from there we draw a lot of ideas about what liberation looks like and how we understand the British state to function.
“In Ireland the British state is an institution of occupation, I wouldn’t go as far as to say the same for Wales, because it is a different context, but it is a political behemoth that maintains reactionary and, at times, fascist movements in Ireland and Wales.”
An Cú said the way that the British parliamentary system is set up makes it difficult to enact change. “This is something the Scottish Nationalist Party has struggled with, Plaid Cymru is struggling with, and even Sinn Fein to a lesser extent. The ability to force change is tied into Westminster.
“We want to build other institutions that are able to change Welsh society according to a broader political ideology like republican socialism; for trade unions, tenants’ organisations and Welsh language activists to put forward political demands for an independent, socialist republic of Wales.”
[Listen to the full interview here. Find out more about the Welsh Underground Network at its website, or read its publication Y Seren Goch.]