With elections to the Welsh Assembly due next year, the red lights should be flashing for Labour
With all eyes fixed firmly on Labour’s disastrous performance in Scotland and much of England, last night should set alarm bells ringing for the party in Wales.
In 2010, Welsh Labour suffered what was deemed to be a difficult evening. The results at the time said it all. The loss of four seats saw the party take 26 in Wales whilst the Conservatives picked up an additional five to secure eight Welsh seats in the House of Commons.
Labour’s proportion of the vote fell by 6.5 per cent whilst the swing from Labour to Conservatives was 5.6 per cent.
Going into this year’s election, all the talk had been of Labour making albeit modest gains in Wales. As the final Welsh Political Barometer prior to the polls opening indicated, Labour were supposed to be on course to bag an additional two seats in Cardiff Central and Cardiff North.
With all 40 seats declared in Wales however, the results make for sobering reading. In the only bit of the UK that has a Labour Government, led by Carwyn Jones, the party saw itself make a net loss of one seat in Wales, whilst the Conservatives picked up an additional three to return 11 Welsh MPs.
This all comes on the back of results in last May’s European Elections which put UKIP in second place in Wales, less than 1 per cent behind Labour in the popular vote.
With elections to the Welsh Assembly due next year, the red lights should be flashing for Labour in Wales with election results going in the wrong direction.
Ed Jacobs is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
83 Responses to “The alarm bells should be ringing for Welsh Labour”
Gary Scott
I’ve got to agree. The Labour Party in Scotland are not of the same calibre as elsewhere. They ran the party into the ground over the past decade and are now blaming the voters rather than trying to understand them
Labour in England & Wales must learn their lesson and get back to the core values and become a movement again. If not, annihilation could follow..
Gary Scott
An interesting perspective. In Scotland the Labour Party is considered to be too far to the right! However, a forgotten fact was that whilst two successive Holyrood Parliaments had been won by the SNP, those very same voters still sent 41 Labour MPs to Westminster in 2010.
The party in Scotland had failed to realise that THEY were the party receiving the benefit of tactical voting. Since 1997 Scots have voted Labour DESPITE viewing it as being right wing. The alternative was ‘letting the Tories in’. From this result, as others, we see this to be nonsense.
I don’t know if Labour in Scotland are finished but the party, as it was, deserves to be.
Mattwales
That was a good way of not commenting on what I actually said. The voters never got as far as the policies Ed got in the way of them rather than selling them, which was the point I was trying to make.
henryGrattan1800
Labour like the rest of the political class in Wales do sod all for the people and Wales sinks deeper into irrelevance
henryGrattan1800
Forget the idea that Labour were going to coddle the poor, their plans were also to cut rates of benefit depending in which region of the UK you live in