If Welsh Labour sticks to a swivel-eyed Starmerite narrative next year, it faces humiliation at the ballot box

Martin Shipton

Welsh Labour, of course, doesn’t exist - at least not as a legal entity.

In the past that might not have mattered, but it’s now a major problem in the run-up to next May’s Senedd election.

A few days ago a friend sent me the accounts for the Scottish Labour Party. For the year ending December 31 2024, it had a surplus of just under £350,000. But the party was only solvent because it received what was described as a “national party contribution” of £777,445.

My friend commented: “Be interesting to see Welsh Labour figures which are probably very similar. Without UK party it would be in shit street.”

There are good grounds for saying that Welsh Labour is currently “in shit street” anyway, not least because of its association with UK Labour.

But it’s worth examining the relationship between Welsh Labour and UK Labour in more detail.

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Website

If you go to the Electoral Commission’s website and put “Welsh Labour” in the search engine, you get a list of five donations made to political parties by English Welsh and Scottish Railway Ltd, a rail freight company formed after rail privatisation in the UK that is now a subsidiary of the German national rail company Deutsche Bahn. Three of the donations, totalling £19,000, were made to the Conservative Party and two, totalling £18,000, were made to the Labour Party. All the donations were made in 2007 and 2008.

But the most interesting consequence of the search was confirmation that Welsh Labour doesn’t exist so far as our political party regulator is concerned. It’s a brand that was carefully nurtured by Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford, but financially it is wholly dependent on subsidies from UK Labour.

My friend’s reaction was interesting: “It's the reason why Sedgebeer and co can do what they like. They listen to their paymasters and Eluned isn't one of them.”

Sedgebeer is Bridie Sedgebeer, Welsh Labour’s deputy general secretary and the wife of Bridgend MP Chris Elmore.

I have written previously of the Starmerite clique that runs Welsh Labour headquarters and that is doing what it can to ensure that those selected as candidates for next May’s Senedd election are Starmer loyalists.

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Red Welsh Way

The clique doesn’t approve of Eluned Morgan’s “Red Welsh Way”, an attempt to revive the concept of “Clear Red Water” that distinguished Rhodri Morgan’s approach to government from that of Tony Blair’s administration in Westminster. It’s also allied with Secretary of State for Wales Jo Stevens, a born again Starmerite who has come a long way from the days when she praised Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as her political hero.

They’re with Ms Stevens when she pooh-poohs the idea of further devolution to Wales, including the Crown Estate revenues, as demanded by all 22 local authorities in Wales as well as the Welsh Government. And there's still no chance of redesignating the HS2 rail line as an England-only project, thus triggering potentially billions of pounds in extra funding for Wales via the Barnett formula.

Half the existing Labour group won’t be standing for re-election, and some big hitters will be leaving the Senedd. The clique is doing what it can to ensure that the team of new Labour candidates offered to the electorate next May will, as much as possible and with a few notable exceptions who manage to slip through the net, be inexperienced, unlikely to come up with troublingly original ideas and disinclined to rebel.

General election

The clique’s focus, of course, is not so much on the 2026 Senedd election, but on the next general election, which will have to take place by summer 2029 at the latest. It doesn’t want any upstarts kicking off about the need for the Welsh Government to have greater powers in certain policy areas or, even more so, criticising the UK Government for letting Wales down. So far as UK Labour is concerned, it has enough of a battle to fend off the challenge from Reform UK, without having to worry about what it perceives as the enemy within.

From Eluned Morgan’s point of view, this is very bad news, because her only chance of mitigating the damage next year is to distance herself from Keir Starmer as much as possible, by playing up the “Red Welsh Way” theme as opposed to the initial offering of “two Labour governments working together for the good of Wales”, whose credibility was shattered within weeks of Starmer taking office by taking away the Winter Fuel Allowance from most pensioners.

Have they learned any lessons? Not to judge from the video posted a few days ago by a new Labour Senedd candidate, who has been promoting himself on social media relentlessly for many months.

Chris Carter, who has been shortlisted for a place on the Casnewydd Islwyn closed list, states against a background of wind noise as he walks along the riverfront boardwalk in Newport: “Hi, I’m one of the shortlisted Labour Party candidates here in the newly created constituency of Casnewydd Islwyn. I’m looking forward to meeting many of you over the coming weeks and months to talk to you about this campaign here in our city and the place that we all call home. We’ve got a tough fight here in Newport and we’ve got a tough fight in Islwyn too. But I know that together we can go out there and take on Reform, we can take on Plaid Cymru, and we can go back into government with our partners in Westminster.

“After 14 years of Tory austerity we at long last have two Labour governments working together at either end of the M4. £1.6bn of investment went into the Welsh budget last year, the best settlement since devolution began. Together with these two governments we can look forward to the future - a future filled with hope, and only Welsh Labour can deliver that future.”

Elementary mistake

Apart from making an elementary mistake about the amount of investment into the Welsh budget - the final Welsh Government budget for 2025-26 included an extra £1.6bn, taking the total to £25.018bn - the emphasis is wrong. People aren’t impressed by big numbers - they want to see improvements in public service delivery to their communities.

And, as has been demonstrated in the past, they want politicians who will stand up for Wales, if necessary when met with intransigence from politicians of the same party in Westminster. There is no hint in Mr Carter’s video that he would be prepared to do that, and no hint that he supports Eluned Morgan’s Red Welsh Way.

If Welsh Labour sticks to this swivel-eyed Starmerite narrative next year, it faces humiliation at the ballot box.