Beyond Labour’s shadow: the case for a governing offer in Wales

Jack Meredith

After a quarter-century of devolution, Welsh politics still too often argues by negation. Long incumbency narrows the choices parties feel able to offer, and the choices voters feel able to trust.

Since 1999, Welsh Labour has not just governed Wales; it has set the terms of competition. Over time, political gravity takes hold. Opposition parties are pulled into defining themselves as the alternative to Labour’s image, rather than its record.

This is one of the quieter ways democracy gets translated from principle into practice: systems built for contestation can drift into habit, and habit rewards the familiar over the sharp.

In Wales, the question is not whether democracy exists, but what kind of competition devolution has produced, and what type it still struggles to produce.

Plaid Cymru has offered the clearest counter-story through independence, yet even that counter-story is being tempered.

Rhun ap Iorwerth has insisted that the 2026 Senedd election is not about independence, and he has ruled out an independence referendum in the first term of a Plaid-led government. Independence, on this telling, is a destination to be prepared for, not a commitment that begins on day one.

That moderation matters because it shifts the terrain of debate back towards a language Wales has heard for years: more powers, fairer funding, a better settlement. Ap Iorwerth has talked about using time in government to make the case for Wales to take more levers of power into its own hands, while stressing that there is business to do right now on the everyday pressures that dominate Welsh politics, from health and education to jobs and the environment.

The instinct is sensible. It is also revealing. When independence becomes a horizon rather than an immediate plan, parties end up competing over delivery within the same constitutional frame, while still borrowing the language of constitutional grievance to signal ambition.

Welsh Labour, of course, has long cast itself as Wales’s shield against a hostile centre, and as the patient reformer of a system it says is stacked against us. That is what makes the “better settlement” turn so politically convenient. It allows an opposition to sound radical while staying legible to a cautious electorate; it also enables Labour to claim that the destination was always theirs, and that any alternative is merely a change of tone.

In that environment, elections slide into contests over managerial competence, credibility, and who looks like the safest pair of hands. Policy becomes a collection of retail offers, and ideology narrows into mood music.

Commentator

Plaid’s most effective recent line has been its refusal to accept the role of permanent commentator. At Plaid’s conference, ap Iorwerth put it plainly: “We’re not here to act as Labour’s conscience… We are here to replace them.”

That lands because it names a real pathology of Welsh politics: too many parties have behaved as though the best they can do is pressure Labour to be better Labour.

Yet replacing a dominant party requires more than sharper elbows and better slogans. It demands a governing offer that is not simply “Labour, but more Welsh”; it requires choices, priorities, and a credible delivery plan.

So the real test is straightforward. If independence is not the ballot question in 2026, and if “a better settlement” is a promise everyone can make, what is the concrete alternative?

What does NHS reform look like beyond another reorganisation? What does economic strategy look like beyond another fund and another partnership board? What choices would be made on local government, housing, education, and taxation, and which interests would lose out as well as gain?

Welsh politics does not lack ambition; it often lacks a culture of argument about trade-offs. One-party dominance has helped create that problem, because it trains opponents to aim for “not Labour” as a first step, then never quite move beyond it.

Opposition

But it would be too simple to treat this only as a failing of the opposition. It is also a feature of the political settlement that has emerged since 1999: Labour’s longevity has shaped both the expectations voters bring to elections and the kinds of promises parties think Wales will accept.

If 2026 marks a transition, it will not be because one set of slogans finally outperformed another. It will be because Welsh politics begins to speak more honestly about constraint and choice, and because parties make credible arguments about what they would prioritise and why.

That is what it would mean to move beyond politics in Labour’s shadow: not abandoning big aspirations, but grounding them in the complex, specific work of governing. This is democracy, translated into habit, and it can be translated differently.

Jack Meredith is a member of the Welsh Liberal Democrats