A New Reality

Ben Wildsmith

This week’s Senedd voting intention poll is challenging some voters’ notions of reality. The headline is that Plaid Cymru are 3% ahead of Reform UK.

The one certainty we can draw from this is that the next few months are going to be politically frantic here in Wales as a new order in the Senedd is decided.

Our elections will be taken as a bellwether, not only for the Westminster government, but also for the fortunes of Reform UK as a genuine contender in UK politics.

The hype around Nigel Farage’s prospects in Wales led to an outpouring of disbelief, laughing emojis, and abuse from Reform fans online when this poll was published. Despite their disappointment in the Caerphilly by election, many are convinced that their party is poised to take power in the Senedd.

One incredulous commentator on Leanne Wood’s Facebook explained that the YouGov/Cardiff University poll had been conducted by ‘woke students’.

Reform seems to be stuck just short of 30%. This might be enough to come out on top in Westminster, but the maths doesn’t add up for the party in our new proportional system (which will doubtless be blamed for Farage not being crowned as our king on 8th May).

Whilst Reform’s online supporters still seem convinced that they’ll be deporting people by Whitsun, social media messaging from Reform-adjacent commentators tells a different story. There’s no policy offer for Wales, no suggestion that life under a Reform-led Senedd would improve for people.

Instead, Welsh Reform accounts and those of anonymously-funded propagandists who favour the party increasingly focus dissatisfaction on the Senedd, rather than the Welsh Government.

The implication is clear: when Reform fails to become the Welsh government, the party will conclude that the Senedd is anti-democratic and must be abolished if the party wins in Westminster.

These well-known accounts, which I choose not to name and amplify, often don’t mention the party affiliation of Labour or Plaid MSs when putting out criticism of them. Instead, they are styled as ‘Senedd member’, as if all members were equally cursed.

Disorientated

If Reform UK supporters are disorientated by bumping their smooth heads against the glass ceiling of electoral reality, then Labour’s remaining fans must be punch drunk. It’s surreal looking at a Welsh poll that has Labour on 10.4%, which would translate into 10 seats if repeated in May.

The permanency of the party as top dog in Wales predates everybody alive. Generations have been born and passed away in Labour-dominated areas without so much as considering that power might shift.

With a landslip clearly well underway for the party, I’m not convinced that its support has yet bottomed out. Amongst the politically disinterested, a vote for Welsh Labour, in many areas, was simply a civic duty to rubberstamp business as usual.

These voters will be the last to realise that the status quo has collapsed and that voting Labour has become a minority position. Labour is losing five times as many voters to Plaid and the Greens in Wales as it is to Reform, so, once again, the UK Labour strategy to lure voters in England from Reform is proving a hindrance in Wales where the pressure on Labour is from the left.

Disrupting

The potential routing of Labour will have a real disrupting effect on life in much of Wales. For areas like the establishment media, publishing, lobbying, the third-sector, and academia, proximity to Labour has been as much a prerequisite to success as existing in the glow of the Sun King in Versailles.

Comfortable relationships that have greased the wheels of business in all these fields will count for nothing soon, and the effects will be felt in communities as much as the corridors of power. Labour’s hinterland of soft power in Wales is decades overdue for refreshment and, it seems, that will now be imposed upon it. Many whose lives have been spent ‘on the committee’ will be in the cold.

Reform’s Head of Policy, Zia Yusuf, seized on the Conservatives’ 9.8% showing to suggest that the Tories stand aside in the election. This is clearly trolling but underlines the existential crisis facing Kemi Badenoch’s party across the UK.

Fundamental differences

Whereas Labour can point to fundamental differences with Plaid as it appeals to keep voters, the Tories have scurried along so faithfully in Reform’s wake that they now seem to have nothing distinct to offer.

2026 will be a historic year in Wales, however the election goes. We are facing a new reality in our politics and how we adapt as individuals and organisations will have far-reaching consequences for the future of our democracy.

This is a moment that must be reckoned with, perhaps the eventual beginning of the 21st century after twenty-five years spent clinging on to the past. That isn’t an option anymore.