How far is Caerffili from Cardiff Bay? In terms of physical distance, not very far at all. You drive out through Cardiff’s affluent northern suburbs, over the optimistically-named Caerphilly Mountain, and you’re in the town centre in forty minutes. It’s a little over ten miles. But it feels like a different world – and the town of Caerffili is only one part of a constituency that stretches north to the small former mining villages of Senghennydd (scene in 1913 of the worst mining disaster in Welsh history, in which 440 men and boys died) to Nelson to Ystrad Mynach.
It is in these towns and villages that probably the most important by-election in the history of the Senedd is being fought. Senedd by-elections are a rarity; this is only the fifth in its 26-year history. In none of the previous four contests has the seat changed hands (although Peter Law, the Independent member for Blaenau Gwent who was succeeded by his wife Trish in a by-election following his death in 2006, was originally elected for Labour). And this is a constituency which, since its creation in 1918, has never at any election – Westminster or Senedd – voted anything other than Labour, by substantial majorities.
But that looks to be about to change. A Survation poll for Camlas, published yesterday, confirms that this election is a race between Plaid Cymru and Reform, with Reform appearing to be slightly ahead. Labour’s support has collapsed to 12 per cent – a figure that matches recent polls showing that the party that has dominated Welsh politics for more than a century is polling at 14 per cent for next year’s Senedd elections.
Labour’s woes
Labour’s campaign got off to a disastrous start, following – in true Welsh Labour fashion – a row over candidate selection. Caerphilly Council Deputy Leader Jamie Pritchard had been considered a favourite but had been told by Welsh Labour that he would not be eligible for selection; his offences apparently included tweeting in support of Jeremy Corbyn when the latter was Labour leader. The nod went instead to Richard Tunnicliffe, the son of an English Labour peer; a long-term Caerffili resident but one who, critics of the decision claim, had been far from active in Labour politics. Former Council leader Sean Morgan resigned from the party and penned a furious article in which, among other things, he reflected acidly on the incongruous spectacle of a Labour peer and a Labour knight of the realm sitting in his office browbeating him into supporting the candidacy of the son of an English Lord, suggesting that this was not really the Labour Party he’d joined
But Labour’s mailaise goes far deeper than that. The Welsh NHS is widely perceived as being on its knees, and outcomes in other key services like education remain poor. Child poverty is among the worst in Europe. A quarter of a century of devolution has not delivered the economic change it promised. And the arrival of Labour in office in Westminster appears to have changed little, and to have ushered in renewed austerity – whether that takes the form of the means-testing of winter fuel allowance in a nation with an older, less healthy population living in poorer housing than the rest of the UK; the maintenance of the two-child cap in a nation in which nearly a third of children live in poverty; or cuts in PIP in a nation with poor public health outcomes. Change has not come to Cymru, and increasingly a country that has loyally voted Labour for a century is asking itself what good it has done them.
Increasingly, the conversation is about what comes after Labour in Cymru.
A vision of transformation
To get some pointers, I visited the Plaid Cymru campaign this morning, hoping to get a clearer sense of the issues in this crucial election. Arriving at Plaid’s office – opposite the massive grey bulk of Caerfilli’s castle, the largest in Cymru and originally built by Normans to keep the native Welsh in order – I found one of Welsh nationalism’s legendary figures, the singer and composer Dafydd Iwan, parked comfortably behind a mug of tea. He commented that he was down from Caernarfon for a couple of days and had never seen an election quite as fluid or hard to call as this.
If Dafydd Iwan – composer of Yma o Hyd and once imprisoned for painting over English language road signs – represented the traditional Plaid Cymru, my conversation with Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorweth touched on changing visions of political identity.
In that conversation the word “transformation” came up again and again. He suggested that Cymru was at a political turning-point that was not about left and right, but about who we are – about identities that continued to shift and develop. Commenting on Welsh Labour’s dismal poll performance, he argued that if the polls were right this was Labour’s core vote – the people who would always vote Labour come what may. He was finding a deep disenchantment among former Labour voters, often among people who had regarded themselves as Labour for years.
I put to him the suggestion offered by some academic commentators that political allegiance in Cymru was breaking along Brexit lines – between the former leavers and remainers. His response was interesting – that it was clear that not only were new political alignments forming that did not reflect the traditional left and right divide, but that one of the effects of Brexit was how it had changed political identities – especially among those who thought of themselves as what he called British-facing. Plaid Cymru’s support was, he argued, moving far beyond its traditional base.
I also asked whether he felt that this situation resembled Scotland in 2007. He replied that the SNP had only just made it over the line then, but the effect had been – that word again – transformative.
Identity and sanctuary
These thoughtful reflections on identity and political transformation sit in profound contrast to the Reform Party, who, without a Welsh leader and a Welsh policy agenda, mount an insurgency that relies on the dire state of public services in Cymru and – inevitably – on immigration. As it happens, the Caerffili constituency has one of the lowest proportions of its population born outside the UK of any UK constituency. Immigration is not, in the real world, an issue here. But the emotions it generates certainly are.
The issue of identity has perhaps been most obvious in the way in which the question of Cymru’s status as a Nation of Sanctity has emerged as a key talking-point in this election. There has been widespread – and in the mouths of some politicians, wilful – misunderstanding of what this means. The Welsh Government has no powers over immigration, which is reserved entirely to Westminster. Nation of Sanctuary is about how people who come to Cymru are integrated into communities, how they are supported to find work and housing, and to gain proficiency in English and Welsh. The vast majority of those it involves are Ukrainians fleeing Putin’s war – accounting for around 85 per cent of spending under the scheme so far.
Yet voices on the Right – both Reform and Conservative – appear to have sought to toxify the issue. Members of the Ukrainian community in Caerffili have complained to the Returning Officer alleging that material printed on Reform leaflets misrepresents the scheme, linking it – falsely – with asylum seekers and refugees crossing the English Channel in small boats. Ukrainian community members point out that they are neither, but have temporary visas allowing them to live in the UK with no route to permanent residency. But Reform and Conservative politicians continue to double down on the issue.
A changing political nation
Whatever happens in Caerffili, Welsh politics is undergoing fundamental change. It is difficult to see how Welsh Labour can recover from its current lows – and it seems inevitable that, after next May’s elections, we will no longer have Labour-led government in Cymru, for the first time since devolution. The Labour brand, which in the days of Rhodri Morgan and Carwyn Jones and their “clear red water” policy appeared so impregnable, is now in tatters. For all the rhetoric of governments working together at “both ends of the M4”, there is a feeling that over issues like HS2 consequential funding or the devolution of the Crown Estate, Welsh Labour no longer has any real influence in with its head office in Westminster.
So what follows Labour? The choice appears to be between the progressive, inclusive civic nationalism of Plaid Cymru – drawing on the shifting senses of identity that Rhun ap Iorweth described – or the more aggressive English-focussed nationalism and nativism offered by Reform.
It would take someone braver than me to predict the outcome on Thursday. But I do know that by the end of polling, a substantial minority of the voters of Caerffili – an area with one of the lowest immigrant populations in Britain – will have voted for a party that seeks to blame immigrants for the effects of austerity. People who are rightly angry about falling living standards, the decimation of public services, the remoteness of a political establishment only ten miles away in Cardiff Bay that patronises them and take them for granted, will have effectively had their anger appropriated by the proposition that a handful of the world’s wretched arriving on the South Coast of England represents an existential threat to their way of life – in an election for a body that has no influence over immigration policy. By a party that argues that their lives will be improved by removing the people who staff their public services, and breathe life and energy into communities that people have been leaving for decades. And populist politicians can do this because they know people have lost faith that mainstream politics offers them anything better. We need to ask how our political discourse has come to this.
It feels as if in this by-election – and most of the Senedd elections next May – nothing less than the soul of Cymru is at stake. This feels increasingly like an election about who we are.
A list of candidates can be found here.
