Wales’ Brexit vote disaster and Welsh Labour’s culpability
Geraint Davies
Wales continues to suffer a decade after voting for Brexit and Welsh Labour must bear some responsibility for allowing voters to do so.
We face reduced trade with the EU – our biggest and closest market – which accounted for 60 per cent of Welsh exports. In addition Wales has forgone £billions in convergence funding provided for being one of the poorest countries in Europe.
The previous UK government failed to make up for the lost funding it promised Wales after Brexit. Now new Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s focus is northwards not westwards with no suggestion of making up Wales’ lost EU cash let alone a Number 10 for Swansea.
Most recently the EU has negotiated a cut in US tariffs from 15% to 10% applicable to all products. This gives the EU an export advantage over the UK as the 10% deal Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson negotiated excludes sectors such as clothing, chemicals and beverages. For example a Welsh wool jumper will be charged a 22.5% tariff vs 10% for an EU jumper. Exceptionally Scottish Whisky has a zero tariff thanks to King Charles’ US visit,
The Brexit scam from Reform Leader Nigel Farage was always going to mean that the UK standing alone would have less negotiating power than as part of team EU. So now Wales is suffering less favourable trading terms with the US. That’s on top of the UK-Japan deal being worth only £1.1billion – £1.5bn less than had the UK still been part of the EU.
Trump’s earlier divide and rule tactic of giving Britain a good deal vs the EU was designed to try to fool people that Brexit could still have been a good idea whilst annoying the EU. The last thing Trump and Putin want is a stronger EU with the UK back in it. But Britain’s short-term advantage has just evaporated as Brussels leveraged better terms.
We all remember that Wales tragically voted for Brexit in 2016 but few pin any blame on Welsh Labour. They should because Welsh Labour didn’t mention the benefits of EU membership in any of its campaign literature prior to May 2016 – whether for trade, funding or the environment.
Their cunning plan was not to do so as it might put off anti-EU voters from voting Labour in that month’s Welsh Assembly election. So voters got leaflets saying Welsh Labour was good for our NHS, education, local government etc then others from UKIP saying the EU took our money – when in fact it gave us £billions – and took our sovereignty – whereas in Wales since Brexit much of the Senedd’s environmental policy has now been taken over by Westminster.
In short, voters were bombarded with anti-EU propaganda in the run up to the EU referendum in June, and Welsh Labour kept silent on Europe. It’s no surprise Wales narrowly voted against its own interests for Brexit whereas in Scotland and Northern Ireland – who also received EU funding but voters knew about it – they voted to remain. In Wales the strategy helped the election of Wales’ first UKIP Senedd members giving Leave further public profile in the final run-up to the June 2026 Brexit vote. Even then Welsh Labour campaigning was lacklustre.
The point here is that there is a prevalent “you’ve only yourselves to blame” attitude to Wales for voting to leave the EU.
Facts
As Keynes famously said “when the facts change I change my mind” and in Wales’ case people weren’t given the facts by the then dominant party in the first place.
Two weeks after the Brexit vote I presented a bill (the EU Terms Of Withdrawal Referendum Bill.[66][67] ) to require a public vote on the EU Exit Deal that later became the People’s Vote Campaign.
In 2016 a two per cent UK swing from Leave to Remain would have changed the result.
Wales has five percent of the UK population so it’s mathematically possible that if enough of the half who voted Leave voted Remain instead – because they knew the facts – then Britain wouldn’t have Brexited at all.
Minimally, three of four UK nations voting Remain would have affected the post-Referendum politics. In Wales people do now know the facts and ten years on 69% with a preference actually support rejoining the EU.
Scam
Nevertheless, given the facts, many people are still supporting Reform whose leader Nigel Farage was the architect of the Brexit scam. You couldn’t make it up but Nigel Farage still does.
Perhaps in the Clacton byelection the penny will drop as voters put their faith in Count BinFace to bring some comedy to the Brexit tragedy.
Meanwhile, let’s hope Parliament will belatedly acknowledge that the EU is best for Britain’s security, economy and fundamental values and has the courage to navigate a return to our natural home.
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Up here we blamed Plaid’s poor showing as champions of the EU, of course Welsh Labour were in a glide pattern, turn up, take the money until the game is up. But seriously, nobody down South had a clue what that circle of stars on a blue background meant, really meant to most of the population of the South East. It was less so up here, we could but wonder at the largesse and the frivolous and devious use of it. Ignorance was labour’s ally, about what side was buttered and the lack of Hanes Cymru to light the way.… Read more »
This article is very revisionist. Welsh labour campaigned to remain. But the referendum was UK wide, and basically an internal debate within the Conservative party. Virtually all national newspapers focused on what Cameron or Johnson said. Welsh labour, SNP, even Lib Dem’s were a mouse in this debate. Whatever labour front bench said was largely ignored also. And obviously local campaigning for senedd etc isn’t about non devolved issues, which brexit was, so it wasn’t discussed in the local pamphlet The author discusses (which nobody reads anyway!)
Eluned Morgan is on record saying they deliberately avoided talking about the EU during the Assembly election. They could’ve made the case, they could’ve countered the lies, and they didn’t because they didn’t want to lose votes. Cynical and selfish.
Really? Please share date of interview! She was obviously a europhile.
Labour obviously made a strategic decision to focus on domestic issues post referendum. That was an NEC decision. Morgan was a pretty low key Senedd member in 2016…
I can confirm from personal experience of campaigning for Labour in the Welsh Assembly 2016 election that we were asked not to raise the EU on doorsteps in case our support for Remain discouraged some people from voting for our candidates.
So how does that fit with Scotland (with an SNP government) voting 62% against Brexit?
No mention of the role of the right-wing press and the deluge of misinformation that preceded the vote.
“In 2016 a two per cent UK swing from Leave to Remain would have changed the result.
Wales has five percent of the UK population so it’s mathematically possible that if enough of the half who voted Leave voted Remain instead – because they knew the facts – then Britain wouldn’t have Brexited at all.”
This laughably bad maths. The overall difference was almost greater than the entire amount of votes in Wales. You’d need nearly everyone here to vote remain to flip the result.
Gentle reminder that it was all Corbyn’s fault. He was paid well over half a million pounds of public money to be the leader of the official opposition and he completely failed in that leadership role.
Yep, quite agree. Corbyn has a lot to answer for.
Welsh Labour’s Brexit failure was not down to Corbyn. I was a Labour member at the time and followed Corbyn’s lead in actively campaigning for Remain through canvassing and leafleting. The failure was in Wales. We were told not to raise the the EU during the 2016 Senedd election. Subsequent campaigning was lacklustre. I remember taking my own initiative a few days before the referendum, going to Transport House to ask for leaflets so I could go round my local area again. Party officials eventually found some in a giant pile in the underground carpark that they had no plans… Read more »
The farther left wanted out just as much as the farther right. Two peas in a pod.
Many on the left did want to leave the EU but for reasons diametrically opposed to those of the far right. The EU’s response to the financial collapse of 2008 had been to impose austerity on Europe’s working people. In 2011, the ECB’s anti-inflation obsession has inflicted a second recession on the Eurozone. Just a year before the UK referendum, the EU-ECB-IMF troika had destroyed a left leaning government in Greece. It was hard to be enthusiastic. Indeed, the EU’s disastrous response to the financial crisis gravely wakened the European economy, the effects of which are still being felt both… Read more »
Corbyn won over 3 million more votes in 2017 than did Starmer in 2024.
That’s beside the point. Corbyn has always sceptical towards Europe throughout his whole career. In the 1970s and 80s, Euroscepticism was more prevalent on the left, (Tony Benn, Michael Foot, George Galloway etc). They failed to understand the benefits of European Integration: peace, economic stability and international cooperation improve living standards for ordinary working people which they claim to be standing up for. Corbyn was a throwback to that era, yet suddenly he became Labour leader and an EU referendum was around the corner, we were suddenly expected to believe that he changed his mind and was now in favour?
Brext needs credit where credit is due, the appetite for Welsh and Scottish independence has tripled since leaving as Wastemonster has demonstrated they can’t run things on their own.
Ironic that Brexiters have actually split the UK.
To continue to blame this or that party for not providing this or that snippet of information lets off the real culprit: the Welsh electorate. If they had been less ignorant then they wouldn’t have drilled a hole in their lifeboat.
See Educators and their talking heads, Drakeford !
I’m not sure what has started all this finger pointing but I don’t know what it will achieve. The fact is that we voted to leave compared with Scotland and Northern Ireland who voted to remain. There was a great deal of naivety at the time. I remember hearing that Wales would vote to remain because of how well we did out of Europe. The vote revealed how little we understood ourselves on this big issue. The issue now is how we persuade voters of the benefits of the EU. What arguments are likely to cut through in today’s political… Read more »
It is not “finger pointing”, it is historical analysis, the purpose of which is to understand mistakes so they are not repeated, and to do things better in the future. Those who think of this process as mere finger pointing fall right into the hands of propagandists who rely on the short-term memory of the hard of thinking.
There’s nothing analytical about it, it’s all speculation. The analytical question is why did Wales vote to leave the EU.
Compare Wales against rest of UK and you see time and time again Wales outperforms – if an organisation can only perform with a tax break, it may grow quickly and then their business model will be copied with a lower cost base by an ethical organisation. Scottish Whiskey may get preferential treatment from the King – but Penderyn is a premium product, based in an economically depressed region (low wages / low transport and distribution costs) and is growing steadily. Clogau Gold is also growing steadily and has not mined all the Welsh gold – they probably followed Ratners… Read more »
Should Cardiff Met close? This is complete nonsense! Why are people hung-up on limiting opportunities for education, what does this achieve? I’m afraid you fall into the category of those who know the financial cost of everything but have limited knowledge of their value – very similar to the average Brexit voter actually!
Annwyl Geraint Davies: seems you are 66. Back to politics, just not with Labour? Wales needs all the talent it can get. 50% of the Welsh don’t vote. What sensible policies would get them to vote?