For over a century, all Caerphilly has ever known, ever voted for, is the Labour Party. That bond was broken last night. Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, won the by-election in Caerphilly by 11 points. Despite Labour’s historical grip on the area, it was not Plaid’s closest challenger. Reform, considered by many analysts to be the favourite, came a strong second, claiming 36 per cent of the vote.
The by-election was triggered by the sudden passing of Labour Welsh Senedd Member Hefin David, who died in August, aged 47. Standing as the victor following the declaration inside a gymnasium at the Caerphilly Leisure Centre, Plaid Cymru’s Linday Whittle paid tribute to David’s legacy. “He will be a hard act to follow,” said a clearly emotional Whittle. “I will never fill his shoes… I can pay no finer tribute to an excellent man.” Acknowledging Plaid’s “eurphoric” win – and Labour’s downfall – in Caerphilly, Whittle welcomed “a dawn of new leadership, and the dawn of a new beginning” in Welsh politics.
Caerphilly and its famous 13th Century castle – the second largest in the UK after Windsor – has enjoyed almost mythical status as the beating heart of Welsh Labour’s heartlands. In election after election, when swathes of Britain turned blue, the town held firm. But over the years, that bond began to fray. When Margaret Thatcher shut local mines and others across Wales throughout the 1980s, then Labour leader Neil Kinnock (who was MP for Islwyn, just West of Caerphilly) dithered. “The miners… deserved much, much better,” Kinnock has since reflected. Still, Caerphilly remained loyal, but like so many of Labour’s heartlands, success bred complacency, complacency bred contempt.
In recent times, a sense of abandonment and betrayal has set in. Conservative and Labour governments came and went, so the narrative goes, but nothing ever really changed. Picking up on that angst was Plaid Cymru.
This election presented “A clear choice for Caerphilly”, as a campaigning leaflet for the victorious Plaid – printed in the party’s trademark green and yellow – read. In Plaid versus Reform, it was not just a decision between left-right, but also a choice about what type of populism people prefer.
“People here are realising that [this] vote is so polarising,” the stout and chipper Whittle remarked on a soggy Wednesday morning, as we canvassed through a working class suburb located a stone’s throw away from the town centre. “The left wing here certainly doesn’t want the right wing to win. It’s vital.“ Whittle, 72, has been a member of the local council for nearly 50 years (first elected in 1976).
The election came at a delicate juncture for a community which has “changed enormously” over his lifetime. “Our close-knit communities are still here, in parts,” Whittle said, highlighting a growing claim that Caerphilly has to handle the residential overflow of nearby Cardiff, inadvertently becoming a commuter town – this, despite the population of Caerphilly falling in ten years. “What we want to do is ensure people enjoy [Caerphilly]; not just live in the town, but use all the facilities and become part of this community. It’s working slowly, but – I’m afraid – with all the [extra] homes didn’t come the infrastructure that we need.”
Plaid placed this angst at the forefront of its campaign, blaming the Labour-run Welsh government for the cost of living, NHS failings, and visible decline. It was a strategy that, in many ways, aped that of Reform’s. But despite strongly leaning into that angst, it is clear that Plaid’s success owed a lot to tactical voting. That, in this by-election, the nationalists’ rise was perhaps driven by disillusioned Labour voters doing what they needed to do to keep Reform out (whilst punishing their usual choice), rather than Plaid being unilaterally seen as genuine bearers of change. This is borne out in the data. Nearly a third of those who voted Labour in the 2021 Senedd elections planned to switch to Plaid for the by-election, polling from Survation found.
“Please give us this opportunity,” Whittle asked on the doorstep of Kath, a late middle-aged voter who answered one of the knocks of the handful of canvassing Plaid volunteers. She considered: “My concern would be that I don’t want to allow Reform in. But the party that represents my interest most is the Green Party.” A slight awkwardness followed. “Our credentials are equally as Green…” offered Whittle; “We work closely with the Greens in Westminster… please lend us your vote,” interjected Rhun ap Iorwerth, the leader of Plaid Cymru, who was out lending his support to the campaign. Eventually, Kath confirmed: “My plan is to vote for you… Just definitely not Reform.” In the end, such compromises are what helped Plaid over the line.
Advancing the Reform cause in Caerphilly was the former Tory-turned-rebel, Llŷr Powell. In 2022, Powell unsuccessfully ran as a council candidate for the Conservative Party, but has lived and worked in Caerphilly for the past five years. Before that, he was part of the UKIP youth faction Young Independence, and once worked for Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK Wales who resigned from the role after he pled guilty to eight charges of bribery to make pro-Russian statements whilst he was a Member of the European Parliament.
“I didn’t work for him during that time… It’s traitorous,” Powell, clearly rattled, proffered when his links were raised during a prime-time BBC debate prior to the election. He instead spent most of the campaign talking about immigration. An issue that in a national context is gaining increasing pertinence, but is a statistical footnote in Caerphilly, where less than three per cent of the population was born outside of the UK. Yet still, immigration in Caerphilly and the UK is “too high”, Powell maintained during the debate. A Caerphilly mother, Alison Vyas, who is white and whose husband and two sons are of mixed and minority ethnic background, challenged Powell. Reform’s “rhetoric” in Caerphilly has made her family “never felt so unwelcome in [our] own hometown”. She added, to rapturous applause from the audience: “Quite frankly, Mr Powell, I blame you for that.”
This watershed moment in the campaign may have depressed a respectable chunk of would-be Reform voters. One opposition strategist suggested, “it made people go into hiding about their support for Reform”, potentially impacting copycat voting trends. This could be particularly true of otherwise partial women voters, they added. On a macro level, according to Whittle, most are “terrified of Reform”.
Powell largely framed himself as the sentiment candidate in this election. He has echoed national Welsh feeling on various issues: a level of discomfort on current immigration rates, and unhappiness over the national 20mph speed limit – causes which have dominated his campaign literature. Powell’s calling card for those who missed canvassing attempts was clear in his and Reform’s headline pledge to “Stop Labour and Plaid Cymru’s mass immigration agenda”. Powell’s boisterous nature only took him and Reform so far – to second place.
Nevertheless, the missteps taken by Reform in Caerphilly pale in comparison to those made by Welsh Labour. Clipboard in hand and scowl on face, one disgruntled campaigner pondered their standing in Caerphilly: “We should have just conceded to Plaid.”
Still, at least that campaigner showed up. Despite this hugely consequential vote being on their literal doorstep, the local whispers are that the Labour councillors of Caerphilly County Borough Council refused to campaign during the by-election. “The only councillors I’ve seen helping out on the doorstep are from outside Caerphilly, from Cardiff,” the Labour volunteer noted.
Why? Because of the contentious process that saw Richard Tunnicliffe, 52, selected as the Labour candidate for the election. The whole thing was a “fix”, declared Sean Morgan, who was the Labour leader of Caerphilly council until he resigned in September, three days after the party’s by-election campaign began. Welsh Labour, Morgan said in resignation, is a “busted flush” for letting an “unknown” stand. Despite Morgan’s allegation that his deputy leader was unable to put themselves forward, Labour said it had applied “robust due diligence” in its selection process.
The Caerphilly councillors aren’t just unhappy with Tunnicliffe’s selection – but also his proposed policies. Tunnicliffe has come out firmly against the council’s plans to streamline (read: close) some local library services. (This, in spite of the council holding nearly £190m in financial reserves.) He believes that new government funding on renewing local communities – the Pride in Place Fund – can be leveraged to protect “these key services”. Tunnicliffe can be characterised as a Starmerite personified: suited, serious, silver-haired; trying yet wooden. He was born in Windsor, brought up in Berkshire and studied in London where he worked in finance, and met his Welsh-born wife. They have lived in Caerphilly for 26 years, and now run a publishing company together.
Speaking to him felt like reading a Labour Party press release brought to life. Tunnicliffe struggled to stray from the narrative the party machine demanded of him. His campaign was “speaking to people”, “reaching out to people”, “reflecting the people and their concerns”; little else mattered. His was a listening campaign of what he called “Labour’s deep roots” – roots that are “staying with us.” But at least he doesn’t deny the obvious. “It has been a struggle. People want change now and they’re not getting change now – or rather it’s not coming as fast as they would like.”
On the morning of the get out the vote effort – polling day – Labour campaigners slowly came to terms with their reckoning. “Why don’t we just chuck it in?” exhaled one campaigner in the party’s corner-shop sized campaign office, based in the middle of the sloped high street in the town centre. The weather leant towards pathetic fallacy: “a fucking-shit, breezy, rainy day,” one councillor remarked via text. The Labour HQ is just a few doors up from the Reform base, which had a meaty security guard posted in front of it at all times. “We’ve got to keep on chugging,” another Labour voice added – albeit with little conviction – after surveying the scene. “This is meant to be our town…”
It was this awful feng-shui that saw Tunnicliffe and Labour so resoundingly rejected at the polls by the people of Caerphilly. But in truth, anyone the party dared put up would have befallen a similar fate. The senselessness and chaos of the Welsh Labour operation seems endemic. Writing for the New Statesman this week on the “Death of Welsh Labour”, Neal Lawson, the director of the centre-left think tank Compass, notes from a senior party figure about the utter chaos of the “factions” within the party: “There are those who never wanted devolution, preferring a colony status, and who are now itching to say, ‘I told you so.’ There’s a batch who simply want to stick their heads in the sand… There’s a third group who want to actively face the music and own and shape a future in which they are almost bound to play second fiddle to Plaid Cymru… [And] there is another group, those that purposefully want Plaid Cymru to win, and then want them to fail so that they can contest a general election that pitches Labour against Reform.”
It is – to put it mildly – unsurprising that a party in this state produced the scatty campaign it did in Caerphilly. In many ways, the questions looming over Welsh Labour are the ones shrouding the national party. Amidst pressure from both the left and right, what does the party stand for, and does it have the – right, convincing – answers to the big questions of our time?
If Reform came as far as it did in Caerphilly so quickly, could it possibly, in time, win everywhere? Perhaps this isn’t the by-election to extrapolate from. As one of the whitest boroughs in all Britain, how telling can Caerphilly be about the rest of the country? A broader take is that Reform’s staunch progress here does blow open many seats in Britain – but not all. What is clear is that the old arithmetic, and assumptions, are done. Supposed safe seats are no longer safe seats. What were once nailed on types of voters are now up for grabs. The fever-pitch political scramble over Britain’s white voters in former industrial areas is reflective of this. Key to Labour winning again – everywhere – is getting many of these people back on side.
Wales, due its Senedd elections next May, hasn’t plumped for anything other than Labour in more than a century. Before Labour, it was the radicalism of Lloyd George’s Liberals. But the polling suggests that Britain’s organised labour is heading for anything but organised Labour. The latest Senedd forecast from Britain Predicts points to a right-wing coalition being a margin of error away from governing – for the first time; whilst Labour play second fiddle to Plaid Cymru.
Caerphilly presents a massive headache for both Eluned Morgan, the Welsh Labour leader, and Keir Starmer. This isn’t some freak by-election; it is national opinion polling laid bare and Labour would do well to heed the obvious lessons. It didn’t have to be like this. Party insiders hold their heads in their hands at how Plaid stole a march on them. “We lost the narrative on this one,” one said. If Caerphilly proves one thing, it is that narrative is everything. On every leaflet put out by Plaid the two-horse was not between the incumbent and challenger, but between challenger and challenger. This by-election result perhaps proves that such a notion isn’t partisan propaganda, but a new reality. That in Wales, now, it’s either Plaid or Reform. Not Labour.
[Further reading: The death of Welsh Labour]
Content from our partners
Related
