Labour’s hold on my homeland began with a Keir and will end with a Keir
Daily Telegraph 24/04/26
Nigel Farage moves closer to Keir Starmer and reaches out to touch him. Keir feels the hand of history on his shoulder. No, not that Keir, but let me explain.
It is a glorious spring morning in Aberdare, and the leader of Reform UK is standing on an overgrown patch of dewy grass next to a handsome bronze bust of Keir Hardie. In 1900, the former Scottish miner became MP for the seat of Merthyr Tydfil, which encompassed Aberdare, and was the heart of Welsh coal production. In the same year, Hardie helped to form the union-based Labour Representation Committee, soon to be called the Labour Party.
After the 1906 general election, Hardie was elected as the first parliamentary leader of the Labour Party. He remains a giant in its mythology. With a keen sense of political symbolism, Farage has come here today, to the birthplace of Labour, in the belief that he is about to read its last rites. “I wonder what this man would make of our Prime Minister,” he muses, giving the statue a mischievous sidelong glance. “From first Keir to last Keir.”
It’s a great soundbite, but Farage may well be right. The impossible is happening here in Wales, where I was born and spent the first 10 years of my life.
Change is coming so fast that people can hardly believe it. Welsh Labour, the most successful political party in the world – it hasn’t lost a national election since 1922 – is on course for a catastrophic defeat in the Senedd election on May 7. As recently as two years ago, Labour was in a triumphant mood, dominating the 2024 general election and trouncing the Tories (now predicted to win an irrelevant three seats in the Senedd).
Today, Reform and Plaid Cymru (pronounced “Come-ree”) are neck and neck in the opinion polls. A YouGov survey this week put Reform on 29 per cent (equating to 37 seats) in the devolved Parliament. Plaid, the Welsh Nationalists, is also on 29 per cent (36 seats), although all the momentum appears to be with Farage’s team.
Labour, who until this month made up around half of the Members of the Senedd, has plummeted to 13 per cent (which would mean some 12 seats), and it may get wHumiliation looms for those whom a century of victory made cocky and complacent. Critics of Welsh Labour would add two more “Cs” to that list: cronyism and corruption. In this de facto one-party state, cushy jobs in Cardiff Bay government offices, NHS Wales, BBC Wales, NGOs, green energy outfits, advisory bodies and as many as 200 quangos are dominated by middle-class Welsh speakers with “progressive” values. The so-called “Taffia” are a nepotistic, self-serving, Guardian-reading elite. Sensing that their sinecures are in jeopardy, they have smoothly switched their allegiance to Plaid, which, with the tattered remnants of Labour and a few Greens, stands a good chance of forming a coalition government.
Reform, meanwhile, is surging in areas where English is the main language (“Wenglish”, a brilliant hybrid, is the dialect of South Wales). Put it this way, Gavin, Stacey, Uncle Bryn and the whole of Barry Island are voting Reform.
Laura Anne Jones, a gutsy, single mother-of-two, who was a Conservative MS and is now standing for Farage’s party, says that several of her Labour colleagues have already packed up their Cardiff offices for good. “They’ve given up. They know, we all know. If you are on the doorstep, you can hear it. People are fed up with these ridiculous policies – 20mph speed limit, 36 more politicians for the Senedd at a cost of up to £120m over eight years, at a time when people are really, really struggling.”
Like me, Jones, who is wearing a scarf in turquoise, the colour adopted by Reform, is exasperated by the “Nation of Sanctuary” title imposed on our small, struggling country by both Labour and Plaid Cymru. “I mean, what is that? It’s just virtue-signalling nonsense,” she says. “We’re all supportive of Ukrainian refugees, but this is putting a neon sign over Wales saying: ‘Come here now!’
“So instead of veterans and our Welsh families, we’re seeing illegal immigrants getting housing first. People have had enough of Labour letting them down. That’s why Nigel’s getting such a good reception here today. People are really thinking: ‘Right, this is our opportunity after nearly three decades to make a difference for Wales.’”orse than that. The First Minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, who has led Welsh Labour since 2024, could well be among the casualties of this political earthquake.
I was shocked to see video footage of Jones being furiously shouted down in the Senedd for speaking up for women’s right to their own spaces and sports. A far-Left identity politics that feels entirely alien to the sensible, decent, chapel-going people I grew up around was allowed to take hold. And Welsh Labour wonders why it’s all over. Jones believes that Starmer’s party will even be wiped out in the Rhondda.
“Yessi Mawr!” as my late mamgu (grandmother) would exclaim in astonishment. Losing in the Rhondda would not just be a regional defeat for Labour – it means a death sentence for the party nationally. If Starmer’s troops cannot hold the former coalfields of South Wales, then Labour is not safe anywhere.
“I cannot see the Prime Minister surviving the loss of Wales,” says Farage, who has cleverly called this election a referendum on Starmer. “You know, he walks into the chamber [of the Commons], and his MPs cheer, but it isn’t really a cheer. And you look at their faces as he’s struggling and refusing to answer anything. And you can see there’s really no support for him.
“All it takes is a backbench rebellion to brew after May 7, and he’ll be gone. Pundits say: ‘No, he’s going to stay.’ But if there’s a complete rout here in their historic heartland, he’s a goner.”
It certainly feels that way today. Since I was last in the place I still call home, my compatriots have acquired a new swear word. “Starmer! STARMER!” They mutter this contemptuous oath with the same disgust with which my mother used to spit on a hanky and swipe at my dirty cheeks, exclaiming, “Achafi! [Yucky!]”
Although this is Farage’s sixth week of non-stop campaigning – the previous night he gave a speech outside the barracks in Crowborough, housing illegal migrants – on the high street in Merthyr, he is full of beans and bonhomie. Tanned and wearing a blazer, mustard cords, a red, blue and white checked shirt, a patterned tie and polished brogues, he looks like a raffish off-duty military chap of a certain era. (The last person to dress like Farage was the Major in Fawlty Towers. It is a costume of sorts, but then Nigel understands the value of entertainment and box office.)
No one around here dresses that smartly anymore, but it doesn’t seem to put people off. As we walk along, there are cheery cries of “Nigel”. He is constantly stopped for selfies. Even when I can’t see him in the crowd, I can hear his distinctive, crackly nicotined laugh – like the static on a wartime wireless.
Like Boris Johnson, Farage makes people smile despite themselves – a useful talent for a political leader. In hot pursuit, the Welsh media – for so long the provisional wing of Welsh Labour and now Plaid Cymru – don’t bother to hide their hostility to this unforgivably genial, Right-wing Englishman. “I don’t care,” Farage says, beaming at another aggressive question. He enjoys it, I think, because he knows he is winning the argument here. An earnest young reporter who frets about “the climate emergency” is told firmly that net zero will be the death of manufacturing in Wales, or what’s left of it.
Don’t get me wrong, plenty of Welsh people hate Farage and all they think he stands for. A man rushes out of a barber shop, still wearing his cape, and shouts: “Racist! Racist!” before running back in again. It is the only angry, dissenting voice I hear from the public all day, although there are thousands like him who will go to the polling booth just to stop Reform as they did at the Caerphilly by-election. They are spitting mad that their fiefdom is falling.
Literally spitting, in one case, at Gareth Beer, a charming local businessman and Reform’s number one candidate for the new Sir Gaerfyrddin superconstituency, pairing the Westminster seats of Caerfyrddin and Llanelli. It can get ugly on the doorstep, Beer says. “They are quite vicious, telling us to ‘Piss off, fascist.’ They bang on about Trump, Gaza and Nigel being a racist. I politely remind them that we are campaigning on Welsh issues.
“Plaid do well in the nice houses, nice teeth, let-them-eat-cake, electric car, work from home, manager of manager of manager having meetings about meetings in the Carmarthen suburbs. Life is sweet for those public sector types,” he adds acidly, “defending their cosy lives at the expense of the people.”
After Farage has moved on from chatting to Sandy, a Merthyr mother of four children who attend a Welsh-language school “because the education’s better”, I ask her why she told him she will probably switch from Labour to Reform. “Well, hopefully, he’ll look after the British people. I don’t really know a lot about him... I think they should do things for us.” You hear that a lot. When are they going to care about us?
It’s as if the Welsh have been in a long, abusive marriage, gaslit by a partner who keeps telling them they’re imagining things. Now, they’ve finally had enough and have found the courage to leave. Farage attributes this astonishing switch, correctly I think, to “this disconnect between the old Labour Party for working men and women, and the new Labour Party, which is basically a north London human rights lawyer who has no connection with working people in any way at all”. Reform, he reckons, will wipe out Labour much as Labour overwhelmed and replaced the old Liberal Party in the 1920s.
Ironically, Labour’s history in Wales began as it may well end – with an educated, metropolitan movement that didn’t understand ordinary people. In 1892, a speaking tour of “missionaries” from London found local customs – such as the rigid observance of the Welsh Sunday – rather horrifying. (My grandmother and her three sisters attended chapel at least three times on a Sunday, and the gloomy Sabbath with its ponderous ticking clocks, hellfire sermons and awful sprouts lasted well into my youth.)
Early takers for the socialist message were university students, professors of economics, teachers and even clergymen. It was only when Labour began to address the real problems faced by manual workers and their families that the Welsh took the party to their hearts.
Labour was at the forefront of the development of maternity and child welfare clinics in the South Wales coalfield, where infant mortality was the highest in Britain. Pregnant women and young children were given free milk, and the poorest got shoes. Labour fought and won important battles for better working conditions, and defeated owners who refused to close a pit for the rest of the day if there was a fatal accident. Over the years, it is easy to see why that old Labour Party became the natural repository of the hopes and tribal loyalty of Welsh people.
Those civilised, practical reformers bore no relation to the fashionable loons in power today, with their fixation on Palestine and wind turbines. A £20bn nuclear power plant on Anglesey was going to be blocked because of “concerns for the Welsh language”, which it was feared could suffer if locals were displaced by English-speaking workers. Concerns for much-needed local jobs, not so much.
I was a small child when my grandfather took me on his shoulders to a polling station. Voting Labour was hereditary, and that was made clear to you from an early age. “See, you put a red rosette on a donkey in Llanelli, and run it against a Conservative, and the donkey would win,” Dat (I couldn’t manage to say “tad-cu”, so he was always just Dat) told me, laughing. My grandfather was an amazing, sweet man. He went down the mine as a young boy (a five-mile walk there and back across the hills, then a tin bath in front of the fire) and absolutely loved it. “Champion days!” He saved up his wages, bought an upright piano and taught himself a baritone repertoire (although he never learnt to read music, and did everything by ear).
In his 20s, he took that peerlessly beautiful voice of his to the annual music festival in Llangollen, where he won the international trophy. (Only recently did I learn that children in the village were given the day off school in honour of his achievement.) The coal dust eventually got him – it got all of them who worked underground – but unusually, he made it to the three score years and 10 the Bible promised him. Some said it was because the singing had expanded his lungs so he could breathe for longer. I like to think it was song that kept him alive. He was already dying of lung cancer when the Welsh channel S4C filmed him singing his favourite arias. There was nothing left of him the last time I saw him. In the dressing table drawer, I found a letter addressed to him from the Coal Board. Four heartless words for the person I loved best in all the world: “Fit for light work.”
“Men like my father cannot die. They are with me still – real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green was my valley then,” said the young hero of How Green Was My Valley.
My grandfather’s life and that of my grandmother, a farmer’s daughter, were not so different from the one depicted in John Ford’s 1941 film about the Morgans, a hard-working Welsh mining family. The film (which absurdly beat Citizen Kane to the Oscar for Best Picture) was criticised for sentimentality, although the close community – pulling together in hard times, sustained by Christian faith, good neighbours, incredible music and a deliriously lovely landscape – is one that I recognise.
As you can probably tell, this election is deeply personal to me. I hate what Welsh Labour have done to my grandparents’ wonderful country. If you wanted to conduct an experiment to assess how much damage socialism can do, then Wales would be the perfect control – no one else can be blamed for the mess. Devolution brought about a disastrous decline. The Wales of my childhood was still a bastion of educational excellence and self-improving night schools. I remember standing at a bus stop holding my grandmother’s softly gloved hand (as a miner’s wife, Mam had limited means, but she took huge pride in her appearance) when she pointed to a handsome lad across the street. “That’s Huw’s boy, he went up to Oxford, now he’s gone teaching.” It became my Holy Grail.
Both my parents benefited from a first-class education at Llanelli’s grammar schools. I marvel at the demanding “home readers” my mother was given aged 13 in 1949 – Thomas Hardy, Keats and Sir Walter Scott. Equipped with the same rigorous standards as children in private schools, kids from two-up two-down pebbledash terraces held their own with the brightest in the land. The grammar schools spawned a brilliant generation of Welsh doctors, scientists, lawyers, professors, journalists, engineers, teachers, judges and politicians (former Conservative leader, Michael Howard, was a Llanelli Grammar boy). When I got into Cambridge, my grandparents posted a notice in the Llanelli Star. I was embarrassed at the time, but now I see only the huge pride of two marvellous people who had to leave school aged 13 – Dat to go down the mine, Mam into domestic service in a big house across the valley.
After education policy was devolved to the Welsh government in 1999, league tables, which had previously been used to measure attainment, were dropped. Wales ignored the sterling reforms of Michael Gove – there are no academies or free schools in Wales, not one. The Left don’t like excellence and giving people a choice, you see – it goes against what Morgan calls “Welsh Labour values”. Standards predictably went into freefall.
The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) soon showed consistently weaker performance than other UK nations. In the 2022 Pisa results, Wales recorded its worst performance, falling behind the rest of the UK and the international average in reading, science and maths. We lagged behind Slovenia. A country so good at teaching its children to read that Catherine the Great sent emissaries to Wales from Russia to find out how it was done, saw its scores for reading fall to 466 (below a 476 average).
I find those scores heartbreaking and enraging. Have Welsh boys and girls suddenly become “twp [stupid]”? Or have their Welsh Labour overlords, in the name of fairness and equality, kept them in ignorance and poverty?
Health, if anything, is worse than education. The NHS was the brainchild of Tredegar-born Aneurin Bevan, another Labour giant who was the former minister for health in Clement Attlee’s government. NHS Wales’s waiting lists and response times are often cited as the longest in the UK, and that’s saying something. An elderly gentleman in my mother’s street who fell had to wait 17 hours for an ambulance, which is a fairly standard horror story.
While Labour continues to genuflect before “our NHS”, the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, serving Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Monmouthshire, Newport, Torfaen and South Powys, has faced “severe criticism” (translation: a total s---show). It was escalated to Level 4 intervention by the Welsh government in December 2025 due to a rapid financial deterioration (forecast £18.3m deficit), terrible emergency services at Grange University Hospital and patient safety failures, including using unsterilised tools. Yessi Mawr!
This is why, after a century of dominance, Labour will be booted out of Wales in a fortnight. A “kick of the age” to match Paul Thorburn’s glorious penalty from behind the 10-yard line against Scotland in 1986. “Well, you won’t believe this, it’s miles to those goalposts,” marvelled the legendary commentator, Bill McLaren. Thorburn’s kick remains the longest in rugby history – just you wait for the Welsh kick on May 7.
“Wales is not a revolutionary country,” Kenneth O. Morgan wrote in his Rebirth of a Nation, “for every act of civil disobedience or industrial direct action”, there have been periods of passivity, of putting up with your lot. We have a pit pony’s strength and tenacity, although, as a small nation, we are not perhaps the most confident of people. Farage points out that Wales did vote decisively to leave the European Union in 2016. Yes, it feels like that Brexit feeling all over again, the people preparing to rise up.
“We are in it to win it,” Farage kept telling me. I’m not sure. Wales, in its current parlous state, would be a poison chalice for an insurgent party which has struggled under time pressure to find enough good, non-neo-Nazi candidates. Far better to win the most seats, or come a storming second, and let Plaid and Labour take the blame for the chaos they created before returning to claim Wales for Reform in 2029.
One thing is for sure. On the morning of May 8 2026, the two-party system of the United Kingdom will be dead. Even in the direst elections over 100 years and more, Wales always backed Labour – the Welsh were the party’s most loyal friends. If the Rhondda is gone, so is Labour.
What would Nigel Farage say to voters who are thinking about voting Plaid Cymru because it’s the patriotic choice for Wales?
“Do you realise how extreme Plaid are? Their attitudes towards five-year-olds being taught trans ideology, their attitudes towards net zero, which, of course, has directly contributed to a de-industrialisation of Wales in the most remarkable way. Their fixation with Gaza, with Zionism, is this really what Welsh communities and Welsh patriotism are all about? Plaid may call themselves the party of Wales. Actually, they’re a party full of conspiracy theorists and, frankly, quite a lot of cranks.” He’s not wrong.
I told my mother that Reform could win Wales. “Your grandfather would be horrified,” she said. “No, Mum, Dat would vote Reform, I’m sure he would. He’d be horrified by Starmer’s Labour.” Hell, at this point, even Keir Hardie would vote Reform.
It’s not often a journalist knows they are writing about a historic moment, but I know. Everything will change on May 7. Wales has been let down so often, and may well be again, but in Aberdare and Merthyr, on that glorious spring day, people were defiant and hopeful.
Men like my grandfather cannot die. They are with me still – real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. It’s hard to resist the feeling that Wales is changing colour in front of our eyes: How turquoise is my valley
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