Without reinvention, Welsh Labour is dead

Owain Williams

After a historic routing that was worse than even the pessimists expected, the penny is beginning to drop, slowly. But many in Welsh Labour are still underestimating what has just happened.

Plaid Cymru have won a historic victory and deserve their chance to govern. Despite my doubts about their sense of urgency and detail-focus, I truly hope they are successful in getting the Welsh economy moving and modernising our public services.

But either way, Wales needs effective opposition which means other parties must get their act together. Welsh Labour might have a narrow window in which to do so.

What went wrong?

Plenty of people have offered their diagnoses. I have read them with interest. But all of them so far are incomplete.

There are two main schools of thought. One camp sees this as primarily Keir Starmer’s and Westminster’s fault. The other points the finger at years of misguided leftism and “clear red water”.

Let me say something that might unite both groups in irritation: they are each half right, and half wrong. And Welsh Labour can never move on without everyone having the humility to recognise that.

Three things have gone badly wrong

First, Welsh Labour, and its governing partners, have not succeeded over 27 years in making Wales a richer, more prosperous country. Some of this is uncomfortable language for the Labour Party. But the great hope of devolution in 1999 was that it would unleash economic energy, drawing on the Irish miracle and the example of other small European economies.

Early on, Rhodri Morgan, Andrew Davies and others did prioritise this. Then we lost our way. The result is a Welsh economy that lags on almost any indicator.

Even if you knew nothing else about Wales, it would be entirely unsurprising that a government in continuous power over this period has now been given the boot.

Second, Welsh Labour has failed to build schools, hospitals and public services that delight the people who use them. The party got trapped in the belief that the only way to improve outcomes was to turn the money taps on, rather than thinking creatively about productivity to do more with less.

Reforms being tried in England and elsewhere were dismissed in knee-jerk ideological fashion rather than seriously considered. Welsh Labour (ably supported in this by Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats) allowed the impression to form that it was far more interested in a series of luxury distractions and virtue signalling than in turning around the Welsh economy or modernising public services.

Underlying this is a fundamentally flawed philosophy: that legislating rights and making declarations is the primary path to progress. So we get a law to protect the wellbeing of future generations when we cannot look after the current ones.

Let me be clear: some of these aims are worthy and I don’t for a minute doubt the motivation behind pursuing them. But good intentions can be ruinous – and in this case, they have been.

To cap it off, Labour built a client state in Cardiff Bay, where far too many organisations rely on Welsh Government funding and therefore are reluctant to criticise it. No wonder so many people are sceptical of the Senedd as an institution.

Third, Welsh Labour squandered its historic reputation for standing up for Wales.

Under Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford, the party projected an unthreatening, inclusive Welshness that appealed to the vast majority of Welsh people. But from spring 2024, it began to look and sound as though its overriding aim was avoiding embarrassment to Keir Starmer and avoiding at all costs the devolution of any further powers to Cardiff Bay, presumably to protect Welsh MPs who did not want their role diminished.

Nothing illustrated this more starkly than the “great Welsh train robbery”: Labour in opposition demanded £4bn of HS2 money for Wales; Labour in government initially offered a mere £400m and then told those who complained to be “a little more grateful.”

This has been doubly foolish at a moment when all the evidence shows Welsh people, particularly the young, identify more strongly as Welsh than ever before.

Underlying all three failures is a dearth of thinking. Welsh Labour has no governing idea, no serious analysis of how the world is changing and what that means for Wales, and no substantive answer for what should be done.

If this sounds harsh, I can only say that this is simply obvious to anyone who has any distance from the party.

What else contributed to the collapse?

Let me address some other views on what has happened.

Some factors are genuinely beyond the party’s direct control. Others have written with great insight about the demographic and sociological shifts that contributed to Welsh Labour’s collapse. I will not add to that here.

Some argue this defeat is primarily Starmer’s fault. I disagree. His government is, as we were told repeatedly on the doorstep, deeply unpopular. But I still believe that Welsh voters primarily cast their Senedd vote based on who they want to form the government of Wales. Evidence shows they are increasingly sophisticated about where responsibilities lie.

Another diagnosis bemoans Welsh Labour getting insufficient credit for its achievements. There is a school of thought from activists that I know and love which goes “if only voters knew everything we’d done, they’d be more grateful”.

Essentially, the diagnosis is that this was a communication issue. This is wrong. Voters do know. And they’re not impressed, painful as that may be to hear.

Others will point to organisational issues: the poor performance of Welsh Labour HQ, and a bizarro campaign that seemed to lurch from “a new generation of leadership” to “this isn’t the time for change.” It’s hard to disagree with any of that, but these were nails in the coffin of the campaign, not the cause of death.

Can Welsh Labour be saved?

The Labour Party has historically been one of the biggest forces for social change and progress in our history. It has delivered a universal healthcare system, a minimum wage, equal rights, SureStart, the Open University, devolution, the Good Friday agreement.

It seems to me we very much still need a party that exists to make sure, as the Labour Party constitution puts it so wonderfully, that “power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.”

But political parties have no divine right to exist. As an activist, campaigner and candidate, I’ve always argued in private and in public that Welsh Labour needs to continually modernise and disrupt ourselves from within, before others do from outside.

If anyone needed a jolt to accept that, then it’s hard to imagine a bigger one than that just served by the electorate.

The starting point, as always, is not the party’s needs but the country’s. Anyone serious about Wales’ future needs to answer some basic but difficult questions: how can we unleash the energy and entrepreneurialism of Wales to create prosperity? How can we make Wales a place where young people want to stay and talented people are drawn to live?

What are the implications of the technology revolution for Wales? What is the advantage that we want to give Welsh children growing up so that they can survive and thrive in that new world? Where should Wales belong in the rapidly changing global-order, including our relationship with our neighbours in England and the rest of the UK and Europe?

By refusing to do this thinking when times were better, Welsh Labour has largely surrendered control of events.

Plaid now holds the ball. If they make a success of it, Labour may never get another look in. “Welsh” Labour has ceded the ground on Welsh patriotism, once our own electoral slogan, to Plaid.

That will be hard to recover.

But there is every chance Plaid disappoints and that the honeymoon is short. It takes office with thin plans, limited governing experience, and too many of the wrong instincts for reforming a bloated, ineffective Welsh state: a fondness for committees, a penchant for third sector virtue signalling that arguably exceeds even Welsh Labour’s.

The early signs suggest an approach that is well-intentioned but, beyond a better Instagram vibe, looks remarkably like the status quo of the past 27 years.

That is not good enough, and Wales needs a credible alternative. There will be an opportunity for a modern, dynamic Welsh Labour party that offers a combination of mainstream Welsh identity (including a fierce determination to fight for the money and powers that Welsh citizens are owed) alongside drastic reform and modernisation of public services. And an obsessive focus on making Wales a more prosperous place, so that we are a land of abundance and can be the compassionate country that we want to be.

Where should Welsh Labour go now?

If Welsh Labour is serious, it needs to reinvent itself. Not careful, incremental changes, but things you can see from space. In short, stop acting like an entitled dinosaur that has a right to rule – or even be relevant. Here are some things that would signal that change:

1. Rediscover the moral outrage. Stop defending the status quo. The best of the radical Labour tradition is its fierce refusal to accept that anyone should be condemned to poverty or lack of opportunity. Twenty-seven years in government has blunted this. Rediscovering it shouldn’t be hard in a country where around one in every three children live in poverty.

2. Obsess about making Wales more prosperous. This is an historic weakness for Labour, which always seems more interested in distribution when the obvious fact is that we don’t have enough wealth in Wales in the first place. This will mean accepting tradeoffs, pushing technology adoption across Wales, and making it easier to build, innovate and invest here.

3. Think creatively about public services for the 2030s. Enlist the best school providers in the UK and the world to support the lowest-performing schools. Design a health service with a higher NPS than England at 70% of the cost. Discard the idea that more money is always the answer. Stop treating symbolic legislation and new rights as the answer to Wales’ problems. Build a programme that removes complexity rather than always adding to it.

4. Home rule for Wales, now. Abandon forever the idea of Westminster MPs deciding what powers Wales can have. Push the next UK Labour Prime Minister to immediately grant the maximum possible autonomy so that Welsh people get all the attractions of autonomy without Wexit obvious problems and risks of a hard border, currency, and so forth.

5. Serve the community instead of seeking their votes. Spend the time working in communities instead of endless party meetings or simply canvassing to gather data. Party time is overwhelmingly inward-focused with boring, process-obsessed meetings. Surely we can invent something better for today.

6. Drop nostalgia as a campaign technique. No more sepia footage of Aneurin Bevan. No more invoking the name of a woman whose premiership ended in 1990. Focus on tomorrow’s world, the implications for Wales, and paint a picture of where we need to be and how we get there.

7. Modernise trade union relationships for the 2030s. The technological disruption about to hit the jobs market will be profound. Of course we shouldn’t just stand back and let the untrammelled free market do its thing. But neither is a kneejerk reaction that instinctively looks for reasons to block new inventions and productivity the right thing. Sensible trade unionists will realise the huge opportunity to design a completely new approach to helping people navigate the world of work in the coming decade. Welsh Labour should encourage and push them to do just this.

8. Formally separate from UK Labour. Rebrand the party, probably with a new name. Force a national debate and write a new constitution for a party of the 2030s. And organise as a scrappy start-up party which has to be appealing to the Welsh public out of financial and political necessity.

Increasingly, I think that the last point is a necessary spur to reinvention. It would force the first-principles rebuild of a Welsh, progressive, lean Welsh Labour party designed without nostalgia to meet the needs of 2030s Wales. Who wouldn’t want that? And if the concern is that the party couldn’t survive without subsidy from London – well if Welsh Labour isn’t confident it could raise enough money to function, it’s probably time to give up and find a new vocation.

A time to lead

My fear is that, instead of doing any of this, Welsh Labour retreats into the comfort zone of its two-dimensional factionalism. That would be short-sighted – not only because it is likely to cost many or all Welsh Labour MPs their seats at the next election, but because the Welsh public will take an increasingly dim view of a party that so visibly places its own ideology above the national interest.

Every institutional instinct will be to lick wounds and play it safe; to hold a review, but one that has a careful remit so as to produce an outcome that offends or embarrasses no one. The Welsh Labour machine is now conditioned by 27 years of safety-first, of protecting itself and hiding behind the “unity of the Labour family” – a phrase we should never hear again. It will be tempting to hope that the political elastic snaps back and a bounce becomes inevitable. Already I hear people talking complacently in these terms.

Welsh Labour needs an electric shock. Ken Skates is exactly right to say he wants a thorough review. The culture across the party must become one of genuine openness, where nothing is off the table and cannot be said, thought or debated.

Who, then, will stand up to lead? Who will be brave enough to shape this thinking?

It would require almost reckless bravery from a sitting Senedd politician or anyone with electoral ambition within Welsh Labour. But when the alternative is near-certain political extinction, what is there to lose?

Owain Williams was blocked by party officials from being a Welsh Labour candidate in the May 2026 Senedd election