The Tories could be permanently extinct in Wales
Plus Labour voters are not moving to Reform...
Morning!
Welcome to all the people who have joined on the back of my coverage from the Reform conference. Not entirely sure they will give me another interview with Mr Farage but I guess that means I am doing my job.
It was great to see some healthy but polite discussion in the comments section. The whole point of this newsletter is to get people engaging more on Welsh issues so thanks to those getting involved.
Talking of healthy discussion I have now made the jump to Bluesky from X/Twitter (though I will still be posting on both). If you want to find me on there I am on @willhaycardiff.bsky.social.
This week we will be looking at some fascinating insights from how people voted in the last General Election in Wales. Cardiff Uni’s excellent Wales’ Governance Centre has looked at what sort of people voted for which party and from that they draw a very interesting picture of the political state of Wales. Spoiler: it is very bad for the Tories.
But first a few words from our (wonderful) sponsor:
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The HS2 nightmare continues
Before we look at the election insights I just want to draw your attention back to HS2 funding and how the decision to class it as a “Welsh” project is continuing to have serious implications for Cymru far beyond the missing cash.
We have discussed in detail in previous newsletters how HS2 is being deliberately incorrectly classified to make £4bn of savings at the expense of Wales. You can read up on that here. But what we haven’t really talked about is the fact that it will mean future funding for Welsh rail will also be suppressed.
Due to the fact that the Treasury has defined HS2 as a Welsh project, when they look at their spreadsheets they see that Wales has apparently had a huge recent investment. This means that when future rail funding is allocated to Scotland, NI and Wales, we here in Cymru will get a smaller amount because apparently we have already had a big cash injection from HS2.
Dr Ed Poole for Cardiff Uni made this point saying:
Continuing impact of HS2 and rail funding inequity for Wales is yet another reduction in Wales' Barnett consequential for all transport projects, from 80.9% in 2015, to 36.6% in 2021, now down to 33.5%. Stands at 95.6% in Scotland & Northern Ireland. Serious cash consequences.
He goes on to clarify that this doesn't mean that Wales gets a 33.5% share of all transport spending in England. It means Wales gets 33.5% of its population share relative to England. This means that for transport spending in England, Wales will get a third of 5.49%! Scotland and Northern Ireland meanwhile get close to their full population share in Barnett funding.
If you want an analogy to explain this simply try this.
You have a parent (England) who has three kids. Let’s call them Patrick (NI), Alastair (Scotland) and Ffion (Wales) who all live away from home.
The parent buys themselves a new car.
As they have now got a car they give both Patrick and Alastair enough money each to buy their own car.
However when it comes to Ffion the parent says: “Actually Ffion, you are going to be able to use my car whenever you come to visit me so I am not going to give you money for a car”.
It is an appalling injustice that would never have happened to, or being tolerated by, Scotland. And we should never let it go.
Wales Election Study - The Tories dying out, Reform surge, Plaid hopeful, Labour nervous
After every election Cardiff Uni’s Wales Governance Centre conducts a study of the vote to draw conclusions about what this means for Wales and the Welsh electorate. It really is a fascinating bit of work and I have relied on it previously for much of my analysis, predictions and books.
The analysis of this one was done by Dr Jac Larner and Professor Richard Wyn Jones. I will summarise their work here but it is well worth checking out for yourself. They surveyed 2,500 Welsh residents before and the immediate aftermath of the election to draw these conclusions.
I am going to break it down by party looking at the four largest: Conservatives, Labour, Plaid and Reform.
The Welsh Conservatives - Soon to be extinct?
While a lot of analysis has been done on the fact that Wales was the only part of the UK where the Labour vote went down, according to Dr Larner the real story is that the Tory vote utterly collapsed and doesn’t look like returning anytime soon.
The Conservatives were completely wiped out in Wales, not returning a single MP. But where did they go? As you can see from the graph below, of the people who voted Tory in 2019, 35% went to Reform.
But there is something else at play here - the sheer amount of Tory voters who died between 2019 and 2024. A staggering 10% of the 2019 voters for the party were no longer with us five years later (the figure for Labour was 3%).
According to the authors of the study this is to be expected given the demographics of the Conservative vote. Fewer than 10% of people aged under 65 in Wales voted for the Conservatives. Assuming that the voting trends continue, 40% of Tory voters will have passed away by next election!
This is clearly a problem for the party, but the even bigger problem is that they are not replacing them. Back in 2019, the Tories had managed to hoover up a lot of people over the Brexit era who were from lower economic groups who felt “British only” and were younger than their traditional voter. But it is these people who have now abandoned them en masse, mainly to Reform.
There are two other juicy nuggets I wanted to share with you regarding the Conservatives:
Their voters hate young people. Part of the study involved looking at what is called “generational resentment”. It seems that, despite desperately needing to attract younger people to the party, there is huge dislike of younger people among the remaining Conservative voters.
People who “feel Welsh” almost never vote Tory. The study also looks at how identity impacts voting intention. The data suggested that there was almost no one who felt “Welsh not British” who also voted for the Conservatives.
Obviously from this data you can see why Andrew RT Davies is targeting Reform voters in Wales. They have haemorrhaged support to the party. But it also I believe demonstrates how misguided it is to simply try and “out Reform” Reform. They need a defined and clear “Welsh identity” or they risk going completely extinct in Wales (the latest polls put them 4th for the next Senedd Election).
Welsh Labour - there is good and bad news
What I think is probably the most interesting part of the entire study is that Labour is not losing voters to Reform at anything like the rate many people have thought. Let me explain the current situation for Wales’ governing party.
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