Plaid Must Go It Alone

Ben Wildsmith

As the polls have tightened this week, we’ve been employing all available fingers and toes to envisage possible governing scenarios in the Senedd.

Jonathan Edwards’ piece yesterday explains in depth the choices that Rhun ap Iorweth will likely have before him after next month’s vote.

The nuances of whether Plaid would be wiser to govern as a minority, engineer a confidence and supply arrangement, or enter into a formal coalition are labyrinthine in a political environment that is, by design, reliant on the government in Westminster.

Bold choices within the Senedd are subject to obfuscation and punishment from the east. So, what plays well with the electorate in the short term is prone to unravel if hostility towards Wales from central government is ramped up as a general election approaches.

To second guess all of this is, I think, a mistake. We are not living in a world that is predictable from week-to-week, let alone one in which the distant future can be envisaged.

Outside of the political bubble, there is only one factor in this election which holds a clear majority of the electorate and that is that Labour must go. The past cannot be relitigated and the future is not promised but if Plaid are, at last, to be granted an opportunity to lead the nation, its first responsibility must be to shape this moment in its history.

There is a strong argument that ruling out a coalition with Labour at the outset of this campaign would have neutralised the most effective attack line that Plaid have faced. The laughing-emoji crowd have parroted their claim that Plaid and Labour have acted as a cabal relentlessly.

The old epithet ‘Liebour’ soon mutated into ‘Plied’ in their messaging before being conjoined into ‘Plaibour’ as it became clear that Reform UK’s appeal required their voters to perceive Plaid’s on-off cooperation with successive Labour governments as permanent participation in them.

London press

It’s not Reform voters, however, that Plaid need to worry about. The London press is entranced with the notion that ‘socialist’ Wales flocking towards Reform is an ideological earthquake. The truth is that Labour’s dominance of South Wales, in particular, has been so comprehensive that the party has long encompassed both the progressive and conservative strands of Welsh opinion.

The last moment of political import here was the confrontation between Alun Michael and Rhodri Morgan – an internecine struggle that, in a functioning democracy, would have been fought out between two parties and decided by the electorate.

The migration of right-wing Labour supporters to a rebadged Conservative Party in Reform isn’t an ideological shift at all. The rebrand has simply freed them from the cultural baggage that meant voting for the actual Conservatives was taboo.

Plaid’s concern should be to secure the long-term support of those who have travelled in the opposite direction. Here, I feel that an abundance of caution is restraining the party from shaping the moment.

The conversations I’ve had with ex-Labour voters who have moved in either direction suggest that they are never going back. This is not a blip in Labour’s one-party dominance of Welsh politics, but the end of it.

The party’s entropic descent into stasis here is happening in the context of a chaotic UK government – there is no love for it anywhere. Association with Labour in Wales used to carry the respectability of a century’s establishment in society. Now, like the Royal Family, it is becoming a toxic brand, riven with factional warfare and prone to arrest in criminal investigations.

Civil war

The malodorous stench of Labour’s necrosis will be wafting over the border for years to come as its upcoming civil war is amplified by Reform messaging. If Plaid is to govern with confidence it cannot allow itself to be tainted by a party that its own supporters have loudly rejected.

Reform’s conjuring trick is to package its socially conservative, economically larcenous programme as radicalism. It saw off the Tories with this ruse and, as Nigel Farage predicted, it works on Labour too.

No section of the electorate is happy with the status quo, so the moment will be defined by politicians who listen to the clamour for change. If Wales is to retain its national identity, and if Plaid exists for anything it should be that, it must stand apart from the upcoming mayhem in Westminster and declare itself ready to be as stubborn, awkward, and implacable in demanding that our communities receive their due.

Backroom deals, shoddy compromises, and timidity risk delegitimising Welsh democracy at the very moment when we will need it the most.

Magic Nigelism

If enough Labour representatives remain in the Senedd to threaten the government’s programme, let them do it. They have seen what aligning with Magic Nigelism has done for their counterparts in Westminster, so Plaid should dare them to try the same here and let the cards fall where they may.

The direct line that stretches from Keir Starmer to Peter Mandelson to Jeffrey Epstein to Donald Trump represents the abhorrent corruption of politics that has people all over the world reaching for anything at all to be free of it.

Plaid, and the nation it aspires to embody, can’t compromise with that, not an inch. If they do, it will ruin them and, even at this late stage, it would be to their advantage if they ruled it out on principle.