THE WELSH are fed up with the status quo, desperate for a change of path and unimpressed by Net Zero. They’re also confused about policy and sometimes inconsistent and self-contradictory in their beliefs and opinions. I learned this on the doorsteps of Swansea, and a recent research paper by the Taxpayers’ Alliance concurs.
It’s no secret that Wales is a public-service disaster area, nor that the Labour-led Senedd has been utterly incapable of solving the problems that have arisen during its quarter-century of running Wales. For much of that time its rule has been propped up by or in coalition with Plaid Cymru, meaning that the misery of living in Wales is now expressed in two languages. The Welsh electorate is longing for change.
The research finds that voters are most concerned about the cost of living (no surprise) and that trust in Labour has collapsed. As Wales is pretty much the birthplace of the Labour movement, that is a huge development. It’s not news to anyone who lives in Wales and was certainly clear when I was pounding the streets of Swansea in the 2024 general election campaign. Labour is even less popular now, for which the clowns of Cardiff Bay and the government of Sir Keir Starmer deserve equal credit.
The poll also finds that voters don’t believe the 2030 target of Net Zero electricity generation is achievable (they’re right). Climate change wasn’t in the top five important issues: it was barely in the top ten. As the report states, ‘the issue of the environment wasn’t mentioned at all in the groups without prompting. Nobody said it was a priority issue for the country or for themselves and nobody said it was an issue that was likely to trouble voters in the forthcoming elections. After prompting, most voters acknowledged that the environment was an important issue but that there were far more pressing issues’. When prompted the responses were that Net Zero would probably be too expensive. Few were planning on buying an electric car, even though petrol cars are to be banned from sale in 2030.
No one made the link between Net Zero, high energy prices and the cost of living as the Net Zero nutters have been very effective at obfuscation. The Labour and Plaid-led Senedd has been very focused on climate change, just like Ed Miliband, and it’s a spending priority. Fixing the roads isn’t. The money thrown at the NHS and education hasn’t delivered either.
This wasn’t a survey on voting intentions, meaning it hasn’t been weighted for extrapolation into national predictions. Politics was discussed, though. Seventy-one per cent said they would vote for the party offering the best chance of change and 23 per cent said they would vote tactically to keep out a party they don’t like. A third said they would vote for something different, 41 per cent said they would stay with their usual choice and the rest were don’t knows.
The voting spectrum in Wales is complex. It’s simplest on the right, where the options are Reform or Conservatives. In the (leftie) middle lie the Lib Dems, then come Labour and Plaid and beyond them lie the Greens. No Welsh Labour voter will switch to the Tories, but they do to Reform. Some might transfer to Lib Dems, and some to Plaid. Nobody knows what the swathe of first-time voters (created by including 16-year-olds in the franchise) will do. All the progressive parties are terrified of Reform and already some are issuing tactical voting instructions. Indeed one of the five reasons Plaid cite for voting for them is that they’re not Reform, which statement of the obvious reveals much about Plaid and the progressives, all of whom are very comfortable on the gravy train of Senedd funding.
The report notes that there is an amount of confusion in the electorate – hardly surprising given the low level of debate in Wales and the domination of left-aligned media, some of which is part funded by the Senedd, via one of the plethora of quangos. On the biggest issue, the cost of living, the Senedd has little direct power (although it can vary some taxes), as the UK’s economy is run from Westminster. On the cost-effective delivery of services, primarily the NHS and education, the Senedd has failed for 25 years. Like Westminster, this is in a large part due to the inability of careerist politicians to understand their briefings and their unwillingness to admit mistakes in their utopian, socialist dream.
Wales should be fertile ground for Reform. Make no mistake, the d’Hondt voting system makes winning a majority nigh on impossible but Wales is in such a state that a party offering credible competence and change could do it. Such a party would field candidates who had demonstrable backgrounds in business and hammer away at the awful decisions of the Senedd (eg in 2023 it spent more of its capital budget on climate change than on health or education). It would hit the streets early and ram the message home. Wales being Wales, it would avoid looking like the Tory Party.
Unfortunately for Wales, Reform chose not to do this. Its protracted candidate selection process ended only in mid-March, despite the selection tests being completed in mid-January. That prevented local candidates getting busy (the exceptions being defecting Tory Senedd members and county councillors, who suddenly became the faces of Reform, having been in the party for about five minutes.
Worse, Reform took an age to select its leader in Wales (rumour is that it struggled to find someone who wanted to do it). Having picked another Tory convert as leader, the candidate allocation process was then abused. Ex-Tories and the connections of football thug-turned-Reform director of external affairs Matt MacKinnon, who ran the selection process, were preferred. Many of their stalwarts have withdrawn (as they have in Scotland – a process also run by MacKinnon). Rather than being the credible alternative, Reform in Wales now looks like being the Tory Party 2.0.
The polls have Reform and Plaid running neck and neck, although it is early days and candidate declarations don’t close until tomorrow. It seems unlikely that either will win an outright majority. Labour, who will probably come third (old habits die hard), would never do a deal with Reform, so after all the huffing and puffing the likely outcome for Wales is a Plaid/Labour coalition. That’s unlikely to be much different to the current Labour/Plaid one. The Welsh are bracing for more of the same, plus the Senedd wasting more money on preparing for independence and imposing the Welsh language.
Whether that bleak prospect will motivate more people to vote Reform, or all Tories to convert to Reform, is impossible to predict. The Farage factor cuts both ways: while he is an astonishingly charismatic politician, for every one voter that likes him two loathe him. Putting his picture prominently on every leaflet, as Reform has done, probably deters the swing voter upon whom the Welsh revolution depends.
This election was Reform’s to win in late 2025. A series of poor internal decisions made in Millbank have probably thrown it away. If that happens, the Thames will be flowing with apparatchik blood in early May.
