Radical Wales?

Tweet Looking at the share of the vote obtained by the different parties in Wales last Thursday, one thing which obviously stands out is how well UKIP did, despite winning no seats.  Taking the chart of percentages from Roger Scully’s blog, in a fully proportional election the numbers of seats won by each party would have been as follows (with the actual numbers shown in brackets):

Labour                       15        (25)

Conservative               11        (11)

UKIP                           5          (0)

Plaid                           5          (3)

Lib Dems                     3          (1)

Green                          1          (0)

It’s not an entirely valid projection of course.  There would only be a fully proportional result if there was a single national list for Wales, and as far as I’m aware, no-one is suggesting that there should be.  Any system which includes a number of multi-member constituencies across Wales will end up delivering a less proportional result than that.  But the key point to draw from this is that Labour remains significantly over-represented by share of vote, and the losers are UKIP, Plaid, the Lib Dems, and the Greens.  Interestingly, the Tories’ share of seats actually matches their share of the votes.

The second thing that I draw out of that table is that the combined number of seats for the Tories and UKIP would be higher than that for Labour – broadly speaking, the parties generally held to be ‘of the right’ (a term with which I’m far from happy, and which needs further discussion in itself, but which I’m using here as shorthand) outpolled the Labour Party, a repeat of the result in the European election (which, because of the lower turnout, was far too easy to ignore).

Even under first past the post, looking at the results in individual constituencies, if Tory and UKIP voters had, in each case, voted for the higher placed candidate of the two, Labour would have lost an additional 8 seats to the Tories – a result which would have left Labour on 17 and the Tories on 19.  Again, that’s an unrealistic analysis, because votes are not that easily transferable between parties, and there are a whole series of reasons behind the UKIP vote which aren’t all down to supporting a party of the right.

But it reinforces the point arising from the table above – there were more people in Wales prepared, for whatever reason, to vote for a party ‘of the right’ than for the Labour party.  And that is a truly remarkable outcome in Wales, underlining the fact that the result was far, far worse for Labour than the overall drop of 1 seat suggests.

I draw three things from this.

Firstly, for decades now the Labour Party in Wales has depended heavily on the fact that they are ‘not the Conservatives’.  There has been a demonization of that party and all those associated with it, based largely on folk memories which are becoming weaker with each passing generation.  But it’s a demonization based on ‘being Conservatives’, not on ideology or policy or actions, which means that if another party comes along which is also ‘not the Conservatives’, even if its ideology is very similar to that of the Tories, the demonization doesn’t readily transfer.  The very superficiality of Labour’s core message in Wales now works against them.  And it’s more than possible that many former Labour supporters, who have been convinced never to vote for the Tories, have been quite happy to vote UKIP as a result.

Secondly, much that Labour said during the election (and Plaid, too, come to that) was based on an assumption that there is a set of communal (broadly ‘social democratic’) values in Wales which is widely shared.  In that context, the electoral appeal needs only to speak to those values to motivate people to vote, and the debate is about which party (Labour or Plaid) can best speak to those values.  But the assumption is profoundly wrong; the romantic image of a radical electorate in Wales is more myth than fact.  Even if it was right a few decades ago, it isn’t now (and I say that with regret, rather than any feeling of pleasure).  But by only speaking to those who hold those values, any party which assumes them to be general has ended up speaking to a diminishing proportion of the electorate in wide swathes of Wales. 

And thirdly, there is a reservoir of Tory support in Wales which is bigger than many of us have chosen to believe.  It’s been there a long time, albeit not always visible – ‘why vote when the votes for Labour are going to be weighed rather than counted?’ has been the view of some of them in the past.  And it’s growing, for reasons which this post is too short to cover.

Whilst politics in Scotland and England are diverging, the opposite is true here – at Westminster level, Welsh politics is becoming increasingly similar to English politics (outside a handful of constituencies where the Welsh language remains strong).  The supposed difference has been taken as read for too long already.  

The values which were prevalent in the past need to be fought for and sold to people, not simply taken for granted; but elections have become too superficial for that to happen.  They’ve become more to do with reinforcing existing views and motivating supporters to vote than with winning people over to a different view.  That doesn’t mean that people’s political standpoints don’t change; it just means that the changes happen outside the formal political process and that political parties are not the main influencers.  And allowing that to happen will always help the ‘right’ rather than the ‘left’.

The danger in the analyses which parties will be making in the aftermath of this election will be that they arrive at the right answer to the wrong question.  Instead of asking how they change people’s values and viewpoints, they will ask how they appeal to people with a different set of values.  That’s precisely what New Labour was all about.  But what we need is a different future, not just the same future under alternative leaders.