It’s not the first time Labour’s seen humiliation in “the valleys”. But never like this. Once upon a time Plaid Cymru’s leader Leanne Wood took the Rhondda to great fanfare in 2016… to only lose it five years later. Disgruntled party candidates disenfranchised by the London Labour machine have gone on to win as insurgent independents too. So for Labour, a defeat in this part of the world is not unheard of.
What makes this result so stark, so different – and so worthy of a “this is important” write-up – is it accompanies a national polling picture saying the exact same thing. Whereas insurgent upsets were once the exception, they have now become the rule
An isolated by-election, for a seat that will not even exist in six months’ time, shouldn’t matter on paper. But as Caerphilly goes, so, it seems, can go much of the rest of Wales. And England. And even Scotland. The humbling of the two party structure; and the abandonment of this incumbent advantage to narrative can ring in chaos for any and all. As I and my colleague Harry Clarke-Ezzidio writes, no seat is a safe seat anymore.
Activists on the ground, bussed in from outside Caerphilly, have spat insults about the local campaign. One board-runner, exasperated with the conditions he was sending his activists to, declared: “I’m sending people to doors [in Labour wards] we haven’t knocked in 14 years. And here on polling day we need them to turn out to win.”
It’s a tale increasingly common in Labour locales, streets and towns “taken for granted,” in that they’ve been unknocked for years, are most prone to insurgent and alternative voices. Whatever the effort of the imported volunteers, Labour locally only has itself to blame. But what’s also telling about this result is how defined it became from a narrative standpoint.
For much of the summer months what scant polling there has been of Wales has put the nationalists ahead – not of Labour, but of Reform, with Labour in third place. The news of Plaid having the whip hand in a hypothetical Senedd elected today is not new. It’s been the case for the best part of this year. And Plaid, as they themselves will admit, have wasted no time in going hard on that, talking it up at any and every moment possible. Anything to dislodge the myth of Labour’s incumbent advantage, one that has kept it in control of Wales for so long.
Laid bare in the ballots, that myth ended in Caerphilly. But how did it come to pass? A campaign of campaign literature. Find me a leaflet that doesn’t promote a bar chart relegating this party or that. They’re few and far between. And Plaid won that battle. Labour activists, knocking up Labour voters identified as late as the second week of October, returned on polling day to apologetic faces and “sorry, but I really want to beat Reform.”
The Survation poll of the seat, though wrong in the headlines, found more than three-in-ten Labour voters moving Plaid. And one in five moving Reform. It wouldn’t be beyond of the realms of impossibility that a majority of Labour’s historic vote moved Plaid in this election. It worked. Labour’s loss here is one part defeat, one part irrelevance to the real battle at hand: stopping Reform.
In council by-elections up and down the country, Labour, the Conservatives, the Greens and Liberals are missing out on seats that fall just – only just – to Reform. In some parts, be it Cleveland or indeed much of the east coast, the wins are emphatic. But it’s not a universal phenomenon. Reform can be beaten. With a united front – a tolerable front. In Caerphilly, it required the humiliation of the incumbents. And it worked.
[Further reading: Plaid Cymru ends century of Labour dominance in Caerphilly]
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