If Rhun ap Iorwerth becomes First Minister, those to thank should include Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage

Martin Shipton

It was billed as an election campaign like none that Wales had seen before.

And that – in the worst possible way – was how it turned out.

There once was a time when party policies were poured over and dissected by ordinary voters, as much as by academics and political journalists.

But after years of austerity when most people have become used to social change of a negative kind, when public services cost more and deliver a worse service, when in other contexts costs rise yet quality deteriorates, promises are difficult to take seriously any more. Many have got to the point where they take that view instinctively, but for those who delve a little deeper, reports from the likes of the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirm that all parties have made at best generous and at worst dishonest assumptions about what they will be able to afford.

The detailed pledges wash over us as if they are part of some gilded fantasy that bears no relation to real life. Wales has got used to being short-changed and will only believe in the tangibility of what is offered when it’s actually delivered – something that’s highly unlikely in the short term.

While promises have been made – and are accessible via party manifestos and news stories – the campaign has been framed in a wholly different way, with insurgents on both sides of the political spectrum hoping to profit from disillusionment.

While Reform likes to portray itself as an anti-establishment force that will cut through decades of incompetence, unneeded bureaucracy and money wasted on projects that deliver nothing of social value, it actually encourages a dystopian view of our communities in which anger is stoked against supposedly pampered “others”, who are given advantages that set them above locals.

As last year’s Caerphilly by-election showed, and as the Senedd campaign has shown, Reform will resort to gross distortions and outright lies to get its message across. It has huge amounts of money at its disposal and its deceitful narrative appeals to many who are struggling financially and who are receptive to simplistic propaganda that puts the blame on the wrong people while ignoring the grotesque inequality that favours the party’s elite funders.

Labour’s century-plus reign as Wales’ largest party is over thanks to Vaughan Gething and Keir Starmer. Gething’s arrogant presumption that he was the victim of the scandals which enveloped him destroyed the illusion that Labour was a party of good faith, while Starmer’s swift betrayal of compassionate Labour values and complicity in Israel’s war crimes alienated a high proportion of those who had previously been loyal core supporters.

This inevitably had an impact on the campaign. Labour, after all, was the incumbent party of government in Wales, had a record to defend that was not wholly negative and had the opportunity to present itself as the party best placed to deliver a programme of renewal.

‘Red Welsh Way’

For a time, it seemed that Eluned Morgan’s “Red Welsh Way” would frame Welsh Labour’s campaign, but as the election approached it ceased to be mentioned and ultimately appears to have been retired.

The Red Welsh Way was a conscious echo of Rhodri Morgan’s “Clear Red Water”, the phrase devised for him in 2002 by Mark Drakeford that distinguished his administration from Tony Blair’s New Labour agenda in Westminster. Ideologically Welsh Labour was to the left of New Labour, but not far enough to be considered extreme. It also embraced an appealing form of soft Welsh nationalism that again wouldn’t frighten the horses. Such a stance served Labour well during the Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford years, but hit a wall because of Gething’s travails.

Eluned Morgan took over the party leadership at an immensely difficult time, with Welsh Labour adrift and UK Labour under Starmer haemorrhaging support.

The Red Welsh Way was in theory meant to replicate the success of Clear Red Water, but it never amounted to more than a slogan.

When it was still seen as a plausible way forward in late 2025, a Labour MS told me that it needed to be fleshed out, but was expected to be an essential theme of the Senedd election campaign.

Asked whether the campaign’s focus should be on the Red Welsh Way, the MS said: “Yes, it has to. I don’t understand why the Caerphilly by-election campaign didn’t mention the Red Welsh Way.

“I think the wording is a bit clumsy, and there’s a responsibility here for the Welsh Government, which has got to define what it means by that. It’s very easy to define the Red Welsh Way in opposition to certain things at Westminster, whether it’s the Crown Estate or Barnett or rail and the rest of it. It’s very easy to define when you’re defining yourself against somebody else, but what does the Red Welsh Way mean for education policy? How does it drive policy on the economy or health? What does it mean for the environment or for social justice? What is the Red Welsh Way in policy terms, and how does that deliver for the people we represent?

“Otherwise it’s like a 1950s advertising slogan for toothpaste. It has to mean more than that.”

But in the end it didn’t.

‘Starmer loyalists’

It’s known that there were disagreements within Welsh Labour over the use of Red Welsh Way. Starmer loyalists disliked the term because they disagreed with what it stood for, seeing it as an unwelcome wedge between the Welsh Government and the UK Government, and the countervailing idea of two Labour governments working together at both ends of the M4. Yet the latter position was at odds with the view of many MSs that Wales was not being treated with the respect it deserved over issues like HS2 and the devolution of the Crown Estate.

Eluned Morgan seemed unsure of what stance to take, sometimes emphasising the “two Labour governments working in harmony” line, while on other occasions being critical of the likes of Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens, who since taking office had become a “muscular unionist”.

The upshot was that Clear Red Water didn’t feature in Labour’s Senedd election campaign, leaving the party with what amounted to an incredibly weak offer to the electorate, especially from an incumbent government, based on a combination of historic promises from the turn of the century like free bus passes and free prescriptions and forward-looking spending commitments that literally sounded too good to be true.

Standard bearer

This ceded the role of main challenger on the progressive left to Plaid Cymru, which found itself unexpectedly in its centenary year at long last on the verge of power. With Reform – a demonstrably nasty party – as the main enemy, Plaid could frame itself as the standard-bearer who from a position of benign insurgency was able to occupy the moral high ground.

Policies like its childcare offer had their attractions, but they were not the central focus for the many who were intent on voting for the most plausible rival to Reform but had become disillusioned with Labour.

If Rhun ap Iorwerth succeeds in his ambition to lead a Plaid Cymru government, his message of thanks should include acknowledgements to Keir Starmer, for making Welsh Labour unelectable, and Nigel Farage, for personifying the demon Plaid joined battle with.