The Welsh Conservatives need to embrace their Welshness, or face another wipeout
Lewis Norton
If the 2024 General Election results in Wales tell us anything, it’s that the Welsh
Conservatives are in a lot of trouble.
In Wales, the Conservatives not only lost all the seats they held, they were beaten handsomely in nearly all of them. In only four seats were they within 5% of the winning party, while the party saw large majorities overturned in areas like Monmouthshire, and Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr; the latter of which had never returned a Labour MP in its long history as the constituency of Montgomeryshire.
While the election results have made sombre reading for Conservatives in Wales for the last few weeks, an even more sobering reality is the prospects for the 2026 Senedd election.
The Welsh Conservatives are being encircled from various angles: their poor UK General Election performance, the continuing emergence of Reform UK, and the electoral reforms to the Senedd for 2026, just to name a few.
With the many factors going against the party, how then, can they brave the tide and come out the other end?
A Distinct Identity
The problems for the Welsh Conservatives in the recent general election lay largely within the performance of the UK Parliamentary Party during its time in government.
Whether it has been through scandals or policy miscalculations; the UK-wide party has hardly done the Welsh party any favours.
On the other hand, the Welsh electorate soundly rejected the few distinct policies that the Welsh Conservatives proposed; which controversially included the removal of the 20mph speed limit policy in Wales by Westminster, perceived by many as an attack on Welsh devolution.
The relationship of the Welsh Conservatives with devolution for the large part of its existence can be summarised as a begrudging one; the party has accepted devolution and have presided over increases in devolved powers in the UK party’s 14 years in government, but often conveys the image of a party not eager about the process of devolution.
It is clear that this pattern of unenthusiastically tagging along the devolution process will not bear fruit for the Welsh Conservatives.
Now more than ever the party needs to find within them their Welsh identity and communicate that to the electorate.
At the very least, the Welsh Conservatives need to carve themselves an identity distinct from the UK party.
Differences in opinion
Much has been said within the Senedd about Welsh Labour and their relationship with UK Labour in the debate surrounding further devolved powers, but the differences in opinion between the UK and Welsh Conservative parties are much harder to distinguish, and as such the parties can come to be seen as one and the same.
The Welsh Conservatives need to grapple with the problem that many in Wales are not familiar with the Welsh party, and those that are do not believe the party to be one that has Wales’ best interests at heart.
According to a recent YouGov poll, 40% of Welsh people do not know how good or bad of a job Andrew RT Davies is doing as Welsh Conservative leader (just 1% shy of the 41% who believe him to be doing a bad job), and only 37% believe him to care about Wales, compared to 53% for Vaughan Gething.
What would help with this? Well, some enthusiastically Welsh policies and distinctions from the UK party might prove a start.
The now-ousted former Welsh Secretary, David TC Davies, previously advocated for collaboration with Plaid Cymru to combat Welsh Labour dominance. There is clearly room in the party for more enthusiasm about devolution and Welsh issues, it just needs to be utilised.
The Reform Problem
Some may ask, why not go the other way? If the party needs to be distinguishable, why not double down on scepticism of devolution.
Quite simply, it is electorally untenable for various reasons.
Putting aside the two referendums which make opposition by a major party difficult, and the electoral underperformance of parties openly hostile to devolution; namely the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party and UKIP; the biggest reason why the Welsh Conservatives cannot become more devolution-averse in 2024 is the emergence of Reform UK.
Its rise was perhaps most striking in Wales, where they marginally missed out on becoming the second largest party by vote share despite not gaining a single seat.
Reform beat the Conservatives in 17 of the 31 seats in which they stood in Wales, and if these results were replicated in the 2026 Senedd election, or worsened by a more proportional system where the need for tactical voting will disappear, it would spell disaster for the Conservatives.
While Reform UK did not go into the UK General Election with any policy regarding devolution, considering its history as the Brexit Party and crossovers with the 2016-21 UKIP cohort, it is likely that it will adopt some policy averse to devolution.
Whether this policy is closer to abolition or scaling back is yet to be seen, but regardless it is almost
certain that the Welsh Conservatives will be outflanked by Reform on aversion to devolution.
The threat of Reform needs to be what pushes the Welsh Conservatives to become more enthusiastic about devolution and their ‘Welshness’.
While ultimately the party will seek to balance this with their sense of British identity, the need to reinvent the party has never been clearer.
Lewis is a recent BA Politics graduate from the University of York and incoming MA Welsh Government and Politics student at Cardiff University
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damn this is crazy good
Never mind the tories, every one knows they’re anti Wales and would suck up to Westminster and give away our devolved powers in an instance, people should be worried about reform or whatever farage calls his limited company now, They have The Senedd in their sights, I have the misfortune of knowing several people who are/were vehemently anti inglish yet voted for reform. I just can’t handle the cognitive dissonance that’s going on with them, they are no longer friends of mine,
I’m not sure that’s wholly true. While I’m sure that you’re right about Reform UK, the situation in respect of the Tories in Wales strikes me as being rather more ambiguous. Because there are by now a whole clutch of Welsh Tory politicians who have carved themselves a niche, career-wise, in Senedd politics, and those guys and girls know well enough that if devolution were to be abolished their own chances of any further political career on a UK-wide level would be distinctly tenuous. But as regards the general sentiment of the Conservative party in England, I’m sure that you’re… Read more »
Oooo! Somebody woke up realized that even the Welsh who are Luke warm about devolution have noticed that the Conservative and Unionist party in Wales is just that.
An irrelevant outpost of an English party.
I don’t know how they got away with it for so long.
Becoming WELSH first and Conservative 2nd is their only hope.
I also think the same applies to Labor. Just to a lesser degree.
Impossible. A Welsh Tory? No such thing.
I think the Welsh Conservatives’ challenges stem from more than just ‘welshness’, as there are much broader issues within the party which are why they lost all their seats in Wales. There are core issues in the conservative party as a whole, from leadership to policies, and the welsh conservatives cannot escape from being associated with all which comes with the Tories as a whole – their overall reputation, criticisms of all their past leaders. There is a reason they also lost in England, part due to reform stealing the vote, which just shows overall there is a lack of… Read more »
A very insightful comment, although I find myself disagreeing in regards to devolution / independence. There is a stark difference between being pro-independence and anti-devolution – they are the two extremes of the Welsh political spectrum, and I feel as though you confuse them in your last point. By saying that not many people voted for devolution in the first place, I assume that you’re referring to the 1997 referendum, which is more than 25 years ago. A more recent result that shows the general trend of Welsh attitudes towards devolution is the 2011 referendum, where 63.49% of the votes… Read more »
Don’t those sellouts Andrew RT Davies & David TC Davies understand this simple premise. You can’t embrace what you don’t have. Welshness. The English Conservatives, and let’s give them their real title, are a political party made in England , controlled by England , for the benefit of England. Truth be told.
I wonder what Nick Bourne thinks of all of this. I am a liberal democratic socialist and I don’t find too much in common with conservativism, even when done competently. However, I do recognise that Wales does have people on the Right of politics and that we must rebuild our nation together. The Welsh Conservatives under the useless blowhard Andrew RT Davies have made themselves unelectable. He has consistently played to a small but noisy minority. His bluster barely masks his incompetence as an opposition leader. Moreover, he cut a ludicrous figure as an apologist for abjectly dreadful Tory Prime… Read more »
Someone in the Conservative Party in Wales needs to look carefully at the way the organisation has a relationship with the public. It’s like they are permanently in a coma and only come to life if someone stirs. Let’s have more of a relationship with the public, sit around a table and LISTEN to voters .
We need to remember that the words Wales or Welsh are English derogatory terms to describe people of this country as ‘outsiders’. The original and correct ‘Cymru’ is now increasingly used with regard to native people, but maybe we can retain the Welsh / Outsider term for those people who reside in this country but have no empathy or respect for the country.
They should speak to David Melding. He had some great ideas. His essays on the future governance of the UK, as a kind of federation, were a very interesting read.
I feel the need to mention that this is the second article in recent times to accuse Reform of coming after devolution. The only available information online on this matter suggests this is far from the case.
“Devolve by Default” is their stated intention. I’ve even seen Farage give the thumbs up to a federalised UK.
I say this as a lifelong (often frustrated) Plaid voter.
Hmm. What about the aricle 29 July showing results for Wales using the new Sennedd voting system. Labour 25%, PC 24%, Conservatives 16%, Reform 16%, Abolish assembly 7%, Greens 6%, LD 6% others 1%. The article points out it is difficult to make predictions on seats but the best attempt gives Labour 28.7 seats, PC 28 seats, Reform 16.2 seats, Conservatives 15.1 seats, Green 3.1 seats, LD 3 seats, Abolish 1.8 seats. The most interesting aspects of these results are how poorly the Greens are doing and how the LDs are also very lowbeing I would argue neither left or… Read more »
I’d suggest that it is pretty effectively a Tory wipe-out if Reform UK were indeed to secure more votes than the Conservatives.
Hard to tell at this early stage, of course, but that strikes me as a possibility which I’d hesitate to rule out.
With a Senedd result as described above there would probably be some sort of agreement between Labour and Plaid to form a government. The leader of the opposition would then come from Reform! In my opinion that would be awful.
So they should embrace their foreigness to these shores? We only identify as Welsh because we were forced to speak English. A term that wholeheartedly denies out entire history on this island.
I don’t see why we should be forced to abandon a term that has been with us for 2000 years. All because we weren’t strong enough to to stop it’s adoption by England…I’m from Wales and proud of that, and my flag is and will always be the Draig, but I refuse to call myself “Welsh”, I’m a Cymro-Briton (or British). I don’t care if it has become synonymous with England, I’ll just correct everyone that assumes that falsehood.