The big lesson for Wales in Trump's return to the White House

Ethyrgyl gwych

The article hits it on the head - politicians in power, if they want to avoid what happened in the States, happening here, need to start improving the quality of live for ordinary people as soon as possible. Discontentment will lead to people like Farage with even more power and that is not good for anyone.

Britain did elect an equivalent to trump when we ended up with boris johnson as prime minister following the 2019 general election!

Indeed England did elect a Trumpian PM in 2019 as did a sizeable minority in both Scotland and Wales. Most of those voters are still around and given the right face and the right circumstances, would vote the same way again. What is astonishing to me is that it is blatantly obvious that Trump, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Farage, Truss etc all so obviously put the interest of capital in front of the interests of workers. Yet a slab of joviality and a tranche of false promises was enough to win them votes. How poor has the Left been? I wonder if Martin Shipton ever read the leaked internal Labour post-mortem into the 2017 GE? The one chance in a generation to get a genuinely Left Wing UK government seriously damaged by a Labour civil war. I've spoken to Labour voting friends and family who were vocally critical of Corbyn at the time and asked them would they have preferred Corbyn over May or Johnson? They admitted Corbyn. The reason people feel dissolusioned and worse off is ultimately a direct consequence of 45 years of neoliberalism, of capital hoovering up the assets of workers and the balance of power shifting the way of capital. Result, housing market bubble, standard of living falling, exposure to cost of living crisis. All a consequence of the Right Wing economic consensus centrists surrendered to. So the Left really needs to step up politically. The British nations (plural) require entirely new political, economic and constitutional solutions. Labour on the other hand appear to be invested in sucking up to capital so as not to frighten the horses. Their tax rises will end up indirectly hitting workers. They've done little to nothing to tax the wealthiest or correct the imbalance of power. As for Wales, they have s*** on us from a great height. The budget was pretty terrible for Wales. Labour will get a kicking in 2026. So I appeal to all Welsh progressives to get behind Plaid Cymru. We are the only party seeking to build Welsh Democracy that can challenge Labour electorally. A Plaid majority will put a lot of pressure on Labour UK to deliver for Wales. Can you imagine Rhun ap Iorwerth capitulating on HS2 like Eluned Morgan has? Vote Plaid in 2026!

The "Young angry white men are drawn to Trump" is a myth, often portrayed by the BBC. The CBS exit poll shows the Trump vote demographic was 71% white, 11% black, and 12% Latino. Significantly, the only gain, shift in vote for Harris, was amongst white people, that of 5%. More importantly, there was a shift in the black vote to Trump of 1% and a shift in to Latino vote to Trump of a whopping 25%. It was this what won it. Important to look at reality

Nothing will change. "It’s like they’ve learned nothing. She (Harris) was just the worst candidate for this race. It would be like Emily Thornberry running for Tees Valley Mayor" You KNOW this Labour would cheerfully impose Thornberry for Tees Valley Mayor in a heartbeat if it suited their hedge fund owners and the Mandelson/Blair ideological axis approved. Starmer is just an increasingly redundant wrapper. As for Wales, how do you reverse the last twenty years of grey indifference, elite contempt and absolute political banality in the next two? You can't.

Look again...

Farage wants to privatise it.

Today's politicians come across untrustworthy and bereft of common sense. It seems to get harder each year to find someone who aligns with your beliefs that you could wholeheartedly endorse.

The relevance and quality of a student's schooling has an influence on later life social-economic status. An 'Analysis of the U.S. Educational System' by The Science Survey organisation concluded that: 'The United States education system had been believed to be the best until economists realized in the 1980s what students' test scores had been. - Not one of us had really seen it declining sharply since the mid 1960s.'

The Welsh Reform Party had its conference in Newport at the weekend. I didn’t see any report in Nation Cymru about it. GB News was banned from the Senedd as “it didn’t represent our values”. A fat lot of good that did in the GE where Reform came third in terms of votes. Farage and his party see the Senedd 2026 elections as the bridgehead into the rest of the UK. They want to overtake the Tories as the main opposition here with the aim of doing the same elsewhere. Unfortunately, the Welsh liberal left thinks it can ignore, ban and name-call as an alternative to engaging and debating in order to beat Reform. And yes, that means going on stations like GB News if that’s what Reform voters watch. Voter turnout in the end helped Trump. I fear it will help Reform here in May 2026.

No one wants to write/talk about what so many Americans voted for. Trump said he's going to “keep men out of women's sports” referring to Title 1X which was changed to include men who say they're women —and “cut federal funding for any school pushing…radical gender ideology.” Trans ideology has been imbedded in Britain in the NHS, schools, civil service and councils even though most people know that mammals cannot change sex. Kemi Badenoch was going to address this - our hope now is that Wes Streeting will carry on speaking up for women. Let the woke left in Britain take that in and not impose such insanity on us

Excellent article. Trump winning the election by a healthy margin should be a warning to UK politicians but it's unlikely it will. They know best they think. Clearly the working class in the UK have no real representation in politics, their interests, fears and issues are gaslighted by the main parties, both of whom follow the failed neo liberal mantra. So many people are now left high and dry, like the US families here are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table and the heating on. In other words so many are struggling just to exist. If these bread and butter issues are not sorted and quickly then the door is wide open for Farage to step through. Like the US many, many people here will use the next Senedd election to vote against the status quo that is not coming close to servicing their needs.

This Opinion piece, under Brexiteers, falls into the trap of judging Brexit solely short term. Though, short term I do agree with the prevailing economic disaster. It is the consequences of a failing economy on far too many people that   Brexit has become a moral issue. It is the immorality of knowingly that Brexit will result in a weak economy and fall on the most vulnerable. Notwithstanding Covid, our weak economy has far more societal harmful consequences than Brexit supporting politicians, and Brexiteers will admit, or choose to publicly ignore. Of course, Leave Brexit is not confined to the underprivileged, the middle class and small businesses are also suffering. Many, many are feeling the pinch. It is the deceit of those politicians who caused, and knew, there would be a weak economy that has drawn  people up short. For some, short-term personal economic pain was a price worth living through, in the expectation that democratic deficiencies of the EU would fade. There are increasing concerns about the EU democratic deficit. The Lisbon Treaty is small fry to Hungary’s, and to a lesser extent Poland’s, aversion to EU’s founding principles. Though Poland, following the last election, has moved closer to the spirit of the EU, while Hungary is moving further away from the EU model at an alarming rate.  The Lisbon Treaty put an end to optimism that the UK, with Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands would have the heft to significantly increase EU democracy within the medium term. It will never be known if, had we remained, we would have had the influence to put Hungary back in the box, along with a couple of renegade states. Who knows, but it is probable that one day we may rejoin the EU with a form of the Single Market, such as an amended Custom Union, thereby allowing us to live with the democratic deficiencies. Hungary will remain problematic, but then for the time being we will be out of it, with the hope that EU democracy will become, eventually, more transparent than presently.