The nightmare scenario for Welsh Labour – and how to avoid it

Martin Shipton

The Labour Party’s decision to keep supporting Vaughan Gething is undoubtedly doing it harm, and if it carries on doing so it will risk losing its status as the largest party in Wales.

This may seem a bold claim at a time when Labour is riding high in the general election polls and predictions are being made about the possibility of a wipe-out of Welsh Tory MPs.

But the YouGov poll this week that put Plaid Cymru just seven points behind Labour in a Senedd election indicates that people in Wales are increasingly prepared to vote differentially when they have a grievance.

We have polling evidence that Mr Gething’s decision to accept £200,000 from a convicted criminal has gone down very badly with the Welsh public. His reaction to that has simply made matters worse.

His instinctive arrogance, his narcissism and the way he surrounds himself with people who will bolster his sense of entitlement rather than tell him hard truths are factors that foster his apparent inability to recognise the damage that is being done to him personally, Welsh Labour and Wales’ political sphere.

Discreditable behaviour

People who have been only marginally interested in Welsh politics at best are now talking openly in pubs and on buses about Mr Gething’s discreditable behaviour. And every time he or his supporters seek to diminish the significance of what he has done, they make the hole he is in deeper.

The poll showing that the gap between Labour and Plaid Cymru is narrowing has to be taken seriously.

Yet while the majority of the Senedd Labour group understand the extent of the problem, they have not yet reached a position where they are prepared to take decisive action.

The non-event of Friday’s group meeting, where the implications of the no confidence motion passed in Mr Gething were not even discussed, illustrates that perfectly.

Any thought anyone has that the problem is going to go away is illusory. There are more revelations to come that will make Mr Gething’s position even more untenable.

But let’s imagine that he is still in office at the time of the next Senedd election in May 2026. By then a Starmer government will have been in power for close on two years. After 14 years of decline under the Conservatives thanks to misguided austerity policies and Brexit, people are feeling worse off.

They want their economic circumstances to be transformed for the better. Yet the unambitious programme being put forward by Starmer and Reeves is highly unlikely to deliver on people’s expectations.

High point

The general election performance from Labour on July 4 will be a high point. If Mr Gething leads Labour into the Senedd election, he will be seen by many voters as the personification of a party that has disappointed them not only economically, but whose claims of moral superiority over the Tories are laughable.

With a new electoral system in place that will make tactical voting obsolete, people who have previously opted for Labour because voting for another party might let the Conservatives in need fear such an outcome no longer.

How many times in the past have Labour candidates in Tory-Labour marginal seats appealed to supporters of Plaid and other parties to “lend me your vote on this occasion”?

In the future, such appeals will fall on deaf ears.

So what might the electoral outcome be in 2026 if Mr Gething remains the First Minister?

Instability

Rachel Reeves is promising “stability”. Mr Gething can only offer instability. The change to a wholly proportional voting system will make it even more difficult for Labour to win an overall majority – something, of course, that the party has never managed to achieve under the hybrid system we have had up to now.

Even if Labour remains the biggest party after the election, it will undoubtedly have to rely on support from elsewhere to form a government. Having voted against Mr Gething in a no confidence motion, how likely is it that Plaid Cymru would come to his rescue? The terse but obvious answer is “no chance”.

Labour has been in government ever since what was initially the National Assembly was established in 1999. But after the 2007 election, when Labour did badly, the opposition parties came very close to forming a so-called rainbow coalition that would have ousted Labour from power.

In fact, it was only serendipity that prevented such an outcome. One evening, there was a crucial meeting of a Welsh Liberal Democrat committee taking place in Powys. If the committee voted for the rainbow coalition deal, Labour would have been out of government.

Together with a small number of other journalists I was at First Minister Rhodri Morgan’s house in the Vale of Glamorgan, drinking beer and eating ordered-in pizza as we speculated on what the outcome of the meeting might be.

Rhodri had no better idea than the rest of us about what would happen, but he was prepared for the possibility of Plaid leader Ieuan Wyn Jones becoming First Minister of a rainbow government that included Plaid, Tory and Lib Dem ministers.

That didn’t seem an outlandish prospect, as it certainly does now.

Sleaze

It would be difficult to imagine Plaid Cymru being prepared to go into coalition with a party whose Westminster branch had presided over so many years of austerity and sleaze. But in 2007 we had a Labour Westminster government that had lost popularity because of the Iraq war and other factors, and the Welsh Tories didn’t seem quite so toxic, especially under the emollient leadership of Nick Bourne.

However, eventually, after the umpteenth slice of pizza, the news came through that the Lib Dems had rejected the rainbow coalition on the casting vote of the Chair, as I recall.

The deal was off and Rhodri Morgan shortly afterwards concluded negotiations for a coalition with Plaid, with him continuing as First Minister and Ieuan Wyn Jones as his deputy.

Throughout the 14 Tory years that are now drawing to a close, it’s seemed inconceivable that Plaid would enter a coalition with the Welsh Tories.

Yet I’ve just been told of an idea that was apparently being kicked around after Adam Price became Plaid’s leader in 2018.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, Plaid would at the very least have required the consent of the Welsh Conservative group to have been able to form an administration. My source has told me that one option would have been to invite individual “One Nation” Tory MSs to become ministers in a Plaid-led government.

The names David Melding, Paul Davies, Angela Burns and Suzie Davies were mentioned in this context.

By issuing individual invitations – much as Carwyn Jones and then Mark Drakeford invited non-Labour MSs Kirsty Williams and Dafydd Elis-Thomas to join their administrations – there would not, so the reasoning went, have been the need for a formal coalition with the Tories, which had been ruled out by Plaid.

Fanciful

That in itself seems rather fanciful, but in the event, of course, nothing like that came to pass. Covid intervened and Labour did well in the 2021 election largely because of the perceived favourable contrast between Mark Drakeford and Boris Johnson over the handling of the pandemic.

Besides which, only Paul Davies of the four mooted Tory ministers remained in the Senedd after the election.

Nevertheless, the dynamic will have changed again by the time of the next Senedd election in 2026.

Labour will be in power at Westminster, so the perennial excuse of blaming everything that goes wrong on the Tory UK government will be redundant. The buck will stop with Keir Starmer in London and Vaughan Gething in Cardiff.

For any Senedd deal to work between Plaid and the Tories, the Welsh Conservatives would have to revert to a Bourne-like centrist stance and they’d have to replace their current leader, who couldn’t cope with the compromises that would be necessary.

But with Vaughan Gething still in the First Minister’s office between now and May 2026, such a deal seems a very plausible option.

If the Labour Party wants to avoid an outcome of this kind, it knows what it has to do.