Mick Antoniw draws some important lessons from Labour’s disastrous result in Wales.

The Senedd elections in Wales were a political disaster. If you want to boil it down to bare votes, in some of the formerly strongest Labour constituencies across Wales we barely managed 3-4,000 votes.

Plaid Cymru politically and organisationally deserved to win and despite the disaster for Welsh Labour, we can take some satisfaction from the fact that Reform, although now the official opposition, with a sizeable group , failed to win and failed to achieve their objective of taking political control of the Senedd. That would have been an even greater disaster.

There is no doubt that enormous swathes of centre-left Labour voters supported Plaid as being the main opposition to Reform, the best party to defeat Reform, but also the best choice for standing up for Wales. Opinions as to whether this is rooted in political reality can be argued over, but there can be no doubt that it became the public perception among progressive voters and in politics perception is vital. Plaid Cymru very effectively ran what had been the traditional Labour campaign. Only this time, Westminster Labour were seen as the problem.

It was also disappointing , but not surprising, that so much of the campaign was focused on issues that were not devolved or were Downing Street-related – immigration, Mandelson and the toxicity around Starmer. These were some of the biggest issues on the doorstep.

Issues around health, education and 20 miles per hour speed limits featured, but in a secondary and peripheral way. They should have been central to voting intention, but I see no evidence that they were.

It is difficult to put into words and to explain but for a large section of the traditional Labour vote, there was little enthusiasm, Labour being seen to have lost its way and its working class values.

First Minister Eluned Morgan put up a fiery fight back, but it was all too little too late. Opinions were predominantly formed around events in Westminster over the past two years and have roots that go back over two decades.  In 2019-20 when I was a member of the National Executive Committee, I warned that we could not take Welsh Labour success for granted, that we were on the coat tails of Scottish Labour. These warnings were never taken seriously.

I have seen some of the early responses to the result, that this was all about public service delivery. There may be an element of truth, but this was not the perception in our communities at large. This was a defeat, to use the phrase, manufactured in Downing Street. It shouldn’t have been but it was.  This perception impacted across councils in England and across Scotland where Labour were not incumbent and have not been in government since 2007!

Analysing what went wrong in the aftermath of a cataclysmic election result is always difficult but we have to do it. I am probably as biased in my thinking as anyone, but I and many others with a lifetime of experience in the Labour Party and in Welsh Government have a valid contribution to make in this process. The danger is that the Party resorts to a defensive review which is more about preserving and rebadging the current political status quo. If that happens, it will be a failure and our defeat may become existential, certainly as far as Wales and Scotland are concerned.

For Wales, we must have an evidence-based analysis. I am not sure with all our competing views and biases we have the capacity to do this internally. We need an honest and independent analysis. What I believe it will show is that we failed to understand the changing politics and demography of Wales – how our hard-core Labour vote has been getting smaller and our softer, more politically and socially mobile Labour vote has been getting larger.

We see that, across the UK, regional politics has become increasingly important. Analysis, I believe, will show that the British unionist, pan-UK politics is a turn off for many Welsh centre-left voters. We know some of this already from some of the excellent year-on-year work of the Welsh Governance Centre at Cardiff University. Welsh Labour as a political identity and standing up for Wales retained a broad base of Labour votes often against the political trend. In this election this political mantle was effectively seized by Plaid Cymru.

The demise in democracy across the UK was well analysed in the Report by Gordon Brown commissioned by Keir Starmer. It was largely ignored by the NEC and by Keir. its recommendations for Wales which accorded with much Welsh Government and indeed Welsh Labour Party policy was ignored and abandoned in favour of a more muscular British unionism.

UK Labour failed to grasp the political implications of this. Aneurin Bevan all those years ago wrote about the importance of understanding the nature of power, where it lay and how should be used. I think we have to go back and re-learn some of the basic political lessons from the past. We don’t need to relive history, but we do need to understand it and learn from it, which we have glaringly failed to do so.

In Wales, I believe we have to devolve our Labour rulebook and overhaul Welsh Labour. Two years ago, the Welsh Labour Conference unanimously supported this but it was totally ignored. If we are to regain trust, it will be on a Welsh level, with the Welsh people, and that means having an autonomous Welsh Labour Party, part of the Labour Party but always standing up for Wales. We have to recognise where we have failed to deliver and to focus on  policies  for change and the powers and resources we need to implement that change.

There needs to be a constitutional rebalancing.

At UK level, we need a new leadership and a radical  change in political direction. This change is in my view inevitable. Keir, fairly or unfairly, cannot lead us into the next election. We need a planned transition over the next six-nine months and  a full engagement with the membership and with the country, and an open and democratic contest. Anything less will not  provide the start of the process we need to regain the trust and confidence of the people and enable us to rebuild our democratic socialist movement and win the next general election.

Mick Antoniw is a former member of the Senedd and former Counsel General and ‘Welsh  Government Minister. He has been a member of the Labour Party for 52 years.

Image: Mick Antoniw AM Author: National Assembly for Wales from Wales, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.