Because these former mining valleys in the wilds of Glamorgan were the cradle of working-class politics in Britain. Revolutionary socialism is almost as old as the mining communities in these hills: the red flag of socialism was flown for the very first time in anger over the skies of Merthyr Tydfil in 1831. And, in time, this people and landscape gave rise to the British labour movement and the party that bears its name, a party that knew who it represented and what it wanted to change.

Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, was elected MP for the Merthyr and Aberdare constituency only a few years before he would oversee the transition from the Independent Labour Party to the more familiar abbreviated title in 1906. A former miner who first entered the darkness of the pits at just 10-years old, he knew first-hand the toils and struggles faced by these hardened communities, and never forgot them in Parliament, wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket in place of the expected top hat and tails. But Hardie himself never lived to see the party he conceived in power. An idealist and a pacifist, he died a broken man in 1915, as his contentious objections to the First World War (on the basis of the working-class dead and war profiteering) went unheeded.

Just nine years later though, and 100 years ago this week, the Labour Party did form its first government. It was led, though, by a Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, later expelled as a traitor and a turncoat for his collaboration with the Conservatives. Throughout this fractious period, as the Labour Party split and reformed, mutated and reorganised, South Wales remained its natural home. It was here that institutions later synonymous with the party, such as the National Union of Miners, were first established. And the area produced the radical autodidactic streak that gave Labour’s second prime minister, Clement Atlee, his greatest lieutenant: Nye Bevan gained his education in the libraries and reading rooms of Tredegar’s Miners’ institutes, arguably the most impressive educational bodies promoting the socialist cause anywhere in Europe.

Nationwide, the party’s electoral fortunes waxed and waned after the war and into the Sixties. But, like working-class industrial regions across the United Kingdom, the party’s grip in South Wales was as firm as the iron smelted in the furnace-town of Hardie’s coronation. But now this relationship has been lost. A proud heritage has withered, and Labour means as little to these parts as “politics” itself. Understanding how such a bond could be neglected and dismantled is essential to understanding the story of Labour over the past century, and its origin can be traced to a single moment: the tragedy that stopped a school clock dead at 9.13am one Friday morning that became the moment of reckoning.

Some places are so synonymous with a tragedy that their very name becomes a byword for unimaginable suffering. Today, our own most baleful metonym is probably “Grenfell”, immediately evoking corruption, betrayal and the dereliction of state duty. But in the valleys of South Wales, a different tragedy bears a single name: Aberfan. That was the village where, on the morning of 21 October 1966, approximately 105,000 cubic metres of discarded coal waste slid into the community and engulfed the Pant Glas school and houses below. Half the town’s children were wiped out by the black avalanche that sped down the slopes, along with 28 adults.

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Labour was never a revolutionary movement

By David Torrance

Aberfan had already been foretold through numerous warnings, and in previous slippages in both the village itself and nearby. But even as the slurry settled and the spoil began to be cleared, the story was only just beginning. Much as at Grenfell, those who should have been held responsible, the people this community had most faith in, were absolved of any responsibility. John Collins, whose entire family was taken by the black mountain, later said: “I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people — a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour nationalised coal board.” This Establishment cover-up was fatal. As veteran BBC broadcaster Vincent Kane later added: “Half a dozen or so organisations or individuals should have brought help to those stricken people, but instead they betrayed them.”

The central figure in this episode was Lord Robens who, as Chairman of the National Coal Board, continually presented himself as a defender of coal, while overseeing widespread pit closures. His arrogance was matched only by the lack of compassion he showed towards the families of the bereaved. Insult piled upon injury as the official tribunal into the cause of the disaster was marred by misinformation, delays and attempts to obstruct the truth. And the victims could see it — as a father of one of the bereaved children cried out when giving evidence: “Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate”.

Worse was to follow: it was at the behest of the Labour Minister for Wales — the valleys-born George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy — that the villagers themselves were required pay to remove remaining slag heaps still towering over their homes from the disaster relief fund. But this tragedy was to become the epicentre of a far greater conjuncture, where Wales began to reckon with all the false promises of industrialisation and unionism. If there is no history of South Wales without Aberfan, there is no complete history of the Labour Party which does not chapter the devastation and fury it sowed in this heartland. And, while the latter part of the Sixties was marked by the beginnings of a turn away from Labour, the following decade saw nothing arrive to replace it. Voter turnout in elections started to decline, while industrial action by the miners threw the country into darkness, a faction of the working class seemingly at war with the country — and, after the 1974 election, at war with a Labour government too.

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Brexit has galvanised Welsh independence

By Martin Johnes

Labour’s hold here wasn’t immediately severed. A son of the valleys, the Tredegar-born Neil Kinnock, would later assume the helm as Margaret Thatcher instigated a very different kind of revolution. An impressive intellect and pragmatist, Kinnock’s accent and bearing connected the party back to its past. He could speak with genuine feeling of the strength of those communities, “who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football”. But that would in part be his undoing: a conservative national press constantly mocked his “boyo” persona. And while he could give voice to South Wales through his own, it ultimately became the voice of political defeat, as the pits central to valley-life were shut and sealed, something the Labour Party proved powerless to stop.

The coming to power of Tony Blair offered a symbolic rupture from a party once grounded in working-class, Celtic regions. But he too had his ways of disrupting community life, for instance with his insistence that more children from deprived areas should be given the option to attend university. While many rightly welcomed the chance to escape, the continued lack of sustained investment in the South Wales valleys simply meant they had no reason to return. And, as Blair opened more of the country to the punishing writ of the free market, the last vestiges of industry petered out. The last of the pits closed, and some of the most prominent local employers such as Hoover in Merthyr and the Polikoff’s and Burberry factories in the Rhondda, dramatically cut their workforce, until their inevitable closure a decade or so later.

With the National Assembly for Wales established in 1997 following devolution in the Principality, the strength of support for Plaid Cymru, which had been gathering momentum since Aberfan, was now evident in the valley heartlands. By 1999 they would even manage to win seats in the once unimaginable ward of the Rhondda, where the old joke ran that even a Smurf would win should they be dressed in red. Blair’s appeal to Middle England was traded in Wales, and the party barely scrapes ahead of the Conservatives nationally now.

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Keir Starmer and the triumph of the middle class

By Terry Eagleton

Kinnock was probably the last leader of the Labour Party as it was originally conceived. But he was ultimately given the impossible task of trying to lead a party born in another age, a product of the dire need to have political representation to counter the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. Now, it has lost its identity, just as much as the people it represented were losing theirs. As Thatcher transformed Britain and placed it at the forefront of the post-industrial neoliberal revolution, without the constancy of a manufacturing and industrial base, was there even any meaning to the term “labour”?

Today, as the party seeks to commemorate 100 years of its electable “progress”, it should turn is attention the places which gave the party its name and yet where poverty and abandonment persist. While you can be sure that disdain for the Conservative Party is still strongly felt, the Labour Party is regarded with something equally dangerous: an apathetic rolling of the eyes by a people whose rolling hills speaks to the layered memories of resigned weathering. Even as another Keir looks set to return the Labour Party to power, Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club won’t suddenly reopen. Suspended in neglect, its rooms will remain empty as another electoral season passes. And all the while, what passes for progress will continue arriving at these towns from elsewhere, just explanations that try and fail to make sense of the greatest dereliction — the dereliction of the mind and soul of a people.

Every football fan grew up watching the World Cup, but for most in Wales it was always someone else’s party. We’d come to expect disappointment. It wouldn’t have been so bad had we not had to watch the world’s biggest sporting competition through a UK-media that assumed every viewer was an England fan. To make things worse, we were always subject to a barrage of “Come on England” advertising in shops and on television. During the 1998 tournament, I wrote to my local supermarket in Cardiff to complain it was full of England flags. They replied, with more than a touch of sarcasm, that they’d get behind Wales if we ever qualified. Well, now we have — and tonight are taking on the English team we were tacitly expected to support.

The current buzz around football in Wales represents more than just matters on the field. Unlike other Welsh national institutions, the Football Association of Wales (FAW) has been unashamedly political in recent years. Players have received lessons on Welsh history and official social media has marked important anniversaries. The official Welsh World Cup song is “Yma o Hyd”, an Eighties anthem that proudly declares that the Welsh are still here, “despite everyone and everything”, despite Thatcher and her “crew”. It was written and sung by Dafydd Iwan, a former president of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, who was imprisoned several times during the Sixties and Seventies civil disobedience campaign for the Welsh-language rights. The FAW’s video for the song includes footage of those protests, and iconic moments from Welsh history such as the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the flooding of the Tryweryn valley in the Sixties to build a reservoir for Liverpool. And the interweaving of historical archive with contemporary scenes of flag-waving fans resembles a video by the campaign for Welsh independence. Whereas once this would have been controversial, it has been embraced by most fans regardless of their politics and language.

The Welsh language has been central to Welsh identity and the historic Welsh independence movement. Welsh has been used and respected by the FAW, not just in a symbolic way but in interviews and press conferences, showing the world and the Welsh people that it is a living language. For more than a century, parts of the Welsh population had a schizophrenic relationship with Welsh. They were proud that it existed but also prone to think that it had no practical use, that it was a language of the past, not the present or the future. The FAW have challenged that view, helping normalise the language by using it where English might have been easier and more widely understood. The last line of the national anthem translates as “May the old language endure”. In the FAW’s actions, there is hope this can become reality.

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But football can also give a misleading picture of modern Wales. The Welsh language is only spoken by around a fifth of the population. Its future in its rural heartlands is endangered as young Welsh speakers move away in search of jobs and affordable houses and their place is taken by older English migrants. In urban areas, the language is undergoing something of a revival as more and more parents choose to send their children to Welsh-medium schools, but that can make those children think of the language as something educational and consequently uncool. The playgrounds of those schools are dominated by the English language. Too often their pupils make little of Welsh after they leave.

The particularly assertive and self-confident sense of nationhood that is depicted around football is also misleading. Support for Welsh independence has risen dramatically since Brexit but it remains no higher than maybe a quarter of the electorate. The emotional Britishness that held the union together is fading with generational change, but the old ideas that Wales is too small and too poor to be independent remain very powerful. Migration from England has changed the dynamics of Welsh society. In the 2011 census only 66% of the population recorded their national identity as Welsh. In a recent YouGov poll, 17% of respondents in Wales said they would be supporting England at the World Cup. The proud Welshness so evident in football is not shared by the whole population.

Yet sport has been fundamental to why Welsh identity has survived in the modern period. Through the historical accident of the two sports being invented in the UK, Wales had its own national teams in football and rugby. In the face of internal political and linguistic divisions, these teams provided an emotional symbol to unite behind. It allowed both migrants and the different forms of Welshness to come together and reminded the Welsh, and the wider world, that Wales was a nation. In the face of the immense cultural and political shadow of England and the absence of any real political self-government before 1999 this mattered. The historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that the “imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people”. In Wales, there has been little else that has done this.

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Wales has never been a nation

By Polly Mackenzie

Since the advent of devolution, sport should matter less. The actual devolution referendum in 1997 was won with a majority of less than 7,000 and just a quarter of the total electorate voted in favour. But today it is only a fringe that wants rid of the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament). As political scientists say, devolution has become the settled will of the Welsh people. As is so clear in football, the Welsh have become more comfortable being Welsh. But devolution has in many ways been a disappointment. There are fine words about inclusivity, environmentalism and economic regeneration but little real action. A third of Welsh children grow up in poverty. Waiting times for NHS treatment are much longer in Wales than England.

Yet the Welsh Labour Government gets an easy ride. The Conservative opposition suffers from remarkably poor leadership and has yet to find the distinctive Welsh voice it needs if it is ever to make significant electoral gains. The nationalist opposition is not really an opposition at all. It has an agreement of cooperation with Labour and is often reluctant to criticise anything the Welsh government does, seemingly for fear of being seen to criticise the very concept of devolution. The London media is not interested in Welsh politics, while the Welsh media is too small to offer substantive criticism. The result is that, after 23 years in power, Welsh Labour are secure, complacent and perhaps even arrogant. They made a song and dance about managing Covid in their own way and yet they refuse to hold a Welsh inquiry into what happened.

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Wales’s smallness contributes to this. Everyone in Welsh public life seems to know each other. In the media, academia and the voluntary sector, the networks that give people access to funding and power are too small to risk rocking the boat. Rather than criticise, it is often easier to celebrate, and the Welsh media’s upbeat treatment of the World Cup is evidence of this. There has generally been less discussion of the politics of Qatar than in the London media. The Welsh Government has a presence at the tournament and put chasing investment and tourism opportunities before its stated principles of equality and diversity. Yet it has not had substantive criticism for this. Even complaints about the tactics and squad selection were responded to angrily by some fans, who seemed to think it was unpatriotic or ungrateful. In Wales, we too often just seem happy to have qualified. We have waited too long for this for politics to get in the way.

But we shouldn’t just be happy to be there. Our game has matured enough that we should be debating team selections and tactics. Likewise, we shouldn’t just be content that, after centuries of governance from Westminster, we now have our own Senedd. We need to be critical of our institutions and our government. We need to move beyond celebrating the fact that Wales and Welshness are still here and start asking where we are going next. Football shows how deeply many care about Wales, but that passion and patriotism has yet to be put to full use.

There has been no general election in which Labour won fewer than 50% of Wales’s seats. The party’s post-war average is an impressive 71%, compared to the Conservatives’ 17%. And the picture is the same in the Senedd, the Welsh Assembly: since devolution, Labour has won the most votes and seats. Four years ago, in the 2017 general election, the party won nearly half the vote, taking 70% of the seats. And yet, just two years later, in 2019, it won 40.9% of the vote and just 55% of the seats — its second-worst performance since the “National Government” election in 1931 (1983 was Labour’s nadir in Wales, as in the rest of the country).

And recent signs suggest Labour has made no headway in regaining its grip on Wales. A poll by YouGov for ITV Cymru Wales/Cardiff University has put the party on 36%. That approval rating is roughly the same as in 2015 and 2010, but this time the Conservatives are breathing down Labour’s neck: they are just 3 percentage points behind. The Tories are still riding high on their 2019 success, which left Labour with a solitary single seat north of the coalfields.

Things are no rosier in the Welsh Assembly, where Labour is down 1.5% on their 2016 performance; Plaid Cymru is up 3% and the Conservatives up 6%. And with elections just three months away, the Tories are gearing up to convert their 2019 wins into Senedd seats.

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Labour, understandably, is desperate to work out what’s going wrong. And given the recent intensification of Scottish nationalism, it’s easy to assume Wales is feeling the same way. While support for Plaid Cymru, the only party committed to Welsh independence, has not really shifted, support for independence has — in 2014 only 12% of respondents said they were in favour, compared to 74% against. Now the figure is 23% in favour, 52% against.

This rise coincides with the arrival of a new pressure group for independence — YesCymru. Launched in 2016, it really hit its stride in Spring 2020 when membership doubled from 2,500 to 5,000. When the Westminster government refused to furlough Welsh businesses during Wales’ 17-day firebreak lockdown, membership of YesCymru increased by a further 3,000. Now, it claims to have 17,000 members. YesCymru’s own polling with YouGov suggested 33% of Welsh people with a view would support independence.

Eyeing the threat of Plaid Cymru riding the waves of Welsh independence, Welsh Labour have become much more Union-sceptic. Alun Davies MS claimed: “This union fails Wales every day. And until there is an acceptance of that, then the campaign for independence will only continue to grow.” Mick Antoniw MS called the Union “an increasingly Anglocentric, London-based institution with which [the Welsh] struggle to identify.”

But would a panicky pivot to a more Union-sceptic position actually help Labour win back its old voters?

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To find out, I used various waves of the British Election Study to compare two camps of 2017 Labour voters: those who are still intending to vote for the party and those who are not.

The latter, Labour defectors, have scattered: 16% to Plaid, 15% to the Liberal Democrats, and 14% to the Conservatives. But the biggest grouping are the ‘don’t knows’, at 34%. Perhaps unsurprisingly, defectors tend to be less Left-wing — on a scale of 0 to 10, Labour voters are placed at 1.9, and Labour defectors at 2.6. Labour voters are also more libertarian, at 5.2, while Labour defectors more authoritarian at 6.1.

So this defection could easily be a part of a broader UK realignment of political values and voting behaviour, with Labour’s electoral coalition coming from Left-wing social libertarians, and the Conservatives doing better among a less Left-wing and more socially authoritarian voter coalition. Defectors are more likely to think that attempts to give equal opportunities to ethnic minorities, women, gay people and lesbians have all gone too far, compared to Labour voters — so probably thought little of Starmer’s pandering to the Black Lives Matter protestors over the summer. Defectors are also less likely to think immigration brings cultural or economic benefits, compared to Labour voters.

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What about the pull of nationalism? Are defectors abandoning Labour in search of a party that will explicitly support independence? It doesn’t seem so. When asked how happy or sad they would be if Wales left the United Kingdom (with 0 being extremely sad and 10 being extremely happy) there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Both Labour voters and defectors would be sad, with a score of 3.6. And who wants a policy that makes people sad?

Defectors don’t even want more devolution. If we construct a scale of how Wales should be governed — with 1 equalling abolishing the Assembly, 2 giving the body fewer powers, 3 representing the status quo, 4 more powers, and 5 full independence — we find no significant difference between the two groups. And the icing on the cake is that Labour defectors actually trust Westminster more than Labour voters do — on a scale of 1 to 4, Labour voters place at 1.5, and Labour defectors place at 1.9 — and there is no significant difference when it comes to trusting the Welsh government.

So it is fair to conclude that Labour is not losing support to other parties because of their stance (or lack thereof) on the devolution settlement, no matter how angrily YesCymru tweet.

If this isn’t about devolution, is it about identity? No, not really. There’s no significant difference between how Labour voters and Labour defectors see themselves in terms of either Welshness — both place themselves at 5, on a scale of 1 (not at all Welsh) to 7 (very strongly Welsh) — or Britishness (5.2 for Labour defectors versus 5 for Labour voters). In fact, the identity which seems to make a difference is Europeanness — Labour defectors feel less European (3.6) than Labour voters (4.5), again suggesting that Labour’s troubles in Wales are not due to Welsh-specific factors, but rather UK-wide developments.

What about good old-fashioned party politics? Leadership evaluations do seem to matter. Those who remain Labour voters are more likely to rate Starmer highly (8.4, on a scale of 1 to 11) than Labour defectors (6.1). The same is true for Corbyn (7.2 versus 4.6). And those who have defected from Labour rate Johnson higher than those who remain Labour voters (4.2 versus 2.3).

Other party-political factors come into play here too — Labour defectors are more positive about how the UK government has handled Covid; Labour voters, unsurprisingly, think the opposition would have done a better job. Similarly, Labour defectors give the Westminster government more credit, and the Welsh government less, for their handling of lockdown than Labour voters do (although both groups rate the Welsh government’s attempts higher than Westminster’s). Wherever we look, there is little support for the idea that Labour needs to become more anti-Westminster or pro-Welsh independence.

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By Ed West

Overall, the data shows Welsh Labour shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to out-bid nationalists when it comes to devolution, nor should they flirt with independence. They might not like the Conservative government in Westminster, but constant attacks on the Union in a misguided attempt to win votes back. It risks undermining both the nation-state itself and the party’s own voter coalition. As Henry Hill notes, polling shows more Welsh voters back abolishing the Senedd than back independence. By fanning the flames of independence, Labour risks polarising the nation’s electorate. Welsh Labour should take a hard look at their colleagues in Scotland to see the consequences of playing with nationalist fire.

Instead, the party desperately needs to do three things. Firstly, it needs to separate its critique of the Conservative Westminster government from a critique of the Union, and remember that it’s only a ‘Tory Westminster government’ because of Labour’s numerous failings since the great financial crash.

Secondly, Welsh Labour needs to articulate a narrative which can unite those who feel Welsh and those who feel British (equally sized groups), and explain why both groups are better off within the United Kingdom.

Finally, it needs to appeal to the type of voters they are losing: those who are more centrist, who are socially conservative, and who don’t think the economy is working for them. These voters aren’t really bothered about constitutional reform, but if Welsh Labour keep blaming Westminster or England for every problem they face then the party risks radicalising them into the arms of YesCymru.

Welsh Labour is still the dominant force in Welsh politics, and the political dynamics of the Wales are not yet like those of Scotland. But if Welsh Labour really are a unionist party, then they need to defend the Union themselves instead of using it as a scapegoat to distract from their own failings. Their current tack won’t protect their vote come 2024.