The Narrative of Decline

FIRST the facts. The European Elections left Labour in Wales the losers in a Wales-wide ballot for the first time since 1918. The swing against Labour was bigger in Wales than any of the other UK electoral regions. The European Elections gave the Conservatives their first victory in Wales since 1859. In that election, the Conservatives polled 2,767 votes to the Whigs (not even the Liberals) poll of 1,585. You can tell from the voting numbers that the election exactly 150 years ago was before the introduction of the universal male franchise. It was a period before even Gladstone and Disraeli had emerged at party leaders. Shocking, isn’t it?

It is almost impossible to overstate how bad these election results were for Labour in Wales. For 90 years they have won every single election. For Wales, read Labour. No wonder UK commentators were stunned when they noticed the Welsh Euro result. The commonly-assumed narrative of politics in Wales was being subverted – and Labour had done it to itself. In Wales, the 12% swing from Labour was double the average move away for the UK as a whole. In real terms, at the last European Election in 2004, Labour won 297,810 votes in Wales. This time round that was more than cut in half, with just 138,852 people voting Labour. Such a drop is chasmic, and has made Wales the cause celebre today, as UK commentators look over the Welsh border for once in order to identify the biggest disaster for Gordon Brown amid the wreckage left by ballot boxes from Barrow to Bodmin via Bridgend.

Consider it also this way. The counts took place in the 40 Welsh constituencies that will return MPs in – if the Prime Minister gets his way – a year’s time. Labour just held on to a majority in just 15 of these. At the same time, the Conservatives were victorious in seventeen seats. Pretty much every single seat that the Conservatives have ever held in Wales at any point in the political past were won by them this week, and some others too, like Alyn and Deeside, where they have no record of previous achievement. Think about that from the perspective of one of Wales’ 29 Labour MPs. On these figures, half of them would have lost their seats on Sunday night.

Coming top in the poll was achieved by the Conservatives in Wales on an increase in their vote of just 1.8%. Not a seismic shift by any stretch of the imagination – indeed they actually polled almost 40,000 fewer votes in Wales than five years ago – but it was a seismic result. Indeed, it was the perfect result for them. Not just because they finished first, but because Plaid was shunted into third place and out of the limelight, and because UKIP took the fourth Welsh seat. Not that there’s much love lost ordinarily between the Conservatives and UKIP, but because Wales is sending two right-of-centre politicians to Europe for the first time ever. Since UKIP never normally polls well outside European Elections, some Welsh Conservatives believe they can capitalise on these voters come the next ballot battle.

Plaid Cymru had of course hoped to do much better in these elections than attaining third place. Even coming second overall would have sufficed, because to have overtaken Labour would have demonstrated that they now had a serious claim to be the leading party of the left in Wales. After all, back in 1999 they came second in the European elections and came within a few percentage points of overtaking Labour themselves. On that occasion, they won a staggering 185,235 votes. This week it was just 126,702. In this election they singularly failed to capitalise on anti-Labour feelings, especially in the Valleys seats they would need in order to make any sort of bigger political breakthrough on a scale similar to 1999. Their strategy was to win in their Westminster target seats – and they did in all seven of them – but they made no real impact across the rest of Wales. Perhaps a strategy based on the European elections rather than the Westminster ones would have suited them better, because Labour was quite clearly wounded and Plaid should have been able to capitalise.

As should, of course, the Liberal Democrats. They ended up fifth again in Wales, despite an energetic and more expensive campaign. Pointing to good seconds in seats like Newport East and Swansea West as evidence of electoral progress was not convincing since they had pointed to the same evidence in 2007. This was their chance to make a step forward and they stumbled and fell. Their spin otherwise sounds hollow.

So where does Welsh politics go now? For all four parties, even for the victorious Conservatives, there is much to think about and learn. Plaid has already started to cogitate and established a long-overdue development unit to try and extend their political strength outside their heartlands. It is a sensible reaction. For now the Liberal Democrats are still pretending they somehow did well, but in time they will, behind closed stores, have to consider the future. And the Conservatives too need to finish the champagne, stop slapping each other on the back and start to work out how to build on the 6% of the Welsh electorate who actually supported them. A strong platform for the Conservatives will soon erode if it is not consolidated and built upon.

But of course it is Labour that has the most to learn from the mauling they have received from the electorate. Some of their number are drawing comfort from the fact that most of their deserting voters stayed home rather than switching to others. One has pointed out that Labour in Wales’ results in 2009 were bad, but the slump also included the consequences of the European Elections of 2004, when Labour increased its share in the vote here while collapsing across the rest of the UK. Thus 2009 was so bad in Wales because Wales is “catching up.” Others are blaming the Prime Minister or hiding behind the MP expenses scandal, despite the fact that no Welsh Labour MP has been particular savaged by The Daily Telegraph in recent weeks. These are excuses, not an examination of what really went wrong.

In 2007 Labour had a very bad Assembly election but the electoral system gave them 26 out of 60 seats and masked the extent of their decline. The story that year was Scotland, where Labour lost power, despite the fact that the swing away from Labour was bigger in Wales. In 2008 the trend continued and Labour ended up haemorrhaging local government votes in Wales at a faster rate than in England. And in 2009 they lose the European Elections to the Conservatives. It is a powerful narrative of decline.

Imagine a new political world with three dominant Welsh parties fighting it out to emerge top. Sometimes it will be one, sometimes it will be another, but there will be no automatic front runner. No one will be in pole position for every race. There will never be the assumption of Labour victory again even before the election campaigns have started. Unless Labour radically restructures and repositions then this sort of pattern may be here for a long time to come. And even if Labour does take some of the hard decisions needed in order to rebuild itself, there is no guarantee that the repositioning will work. For the first time in nearly a century, Labour looks as though – both theoretically and practically – it may have forfeited its hegemonic position in Welsh politics. Labour must act now to change the narrative or face life as a normal sized party in Wales.