Since​ 1922, the Labour Party has won in Wales at every general election, and has been the largest party in all of the country’s devolved governments since the National Assembly, now known as the Senedd, was convened in May 1999. During the extended periods when the UK has been under Conservative rule, Welsh Labour has made much of its political integrity and electoral success. Such one-party dominance is rare in democracies and is now coming to an end. After the elections to the Senedd on 7 May, it is all but certain that the Welsh government will no longer be under Labour control.

The party’s long run in Wales has allowed it to avoid the introspection of defeat. Instead, it has constructed a set of folk memories of past achievements by which to define itself, chief among them the still miraculous creation of the NHS by Aneurin Bevan and the federated socialism and autodidactic municipalism that existed in the mining communities of the South Wales valleys. Welsh Labour politicians have had every reason to feel that their belief in social democracy was shared by y werin – the ordinary people of the country.

Tony Blair inherited the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh Assembly could be plausibly included in the 1997 Labour manifesto. Just four months after that landslide election, referendums were held in Scotland and Wales. The vote in favour of partial devolution in Wales succeeded by one of the narrowest margins in British electoral history, 50.3 per cent – a stark contrast to the 74.3 per cent in favour in Scotland.

Previous devolution referendums had taken place in the spring of 1979, just before Labour’s loss of a no confidence vote (the SNP voted in favour) resulted in the election of the Thatcher government. On that occasion Wales rejected home rule, with only 20 per cent voting yes. Less than twenty years later, the effects of Conservative rule on a country that had never voted for it, and the desperate conditions brought about by deindustrialisation, led to the wipeout of the Tories in Wales at the 1997 election. After a campaign in which Peter Hain, one of the few high-profile New Labour cabinet members with a constituency in Wales, was prominent, Wales opted for partial self-government.

Six years earlier, Blair had been sent to help campaign in the Neath by-election, which Hain would win. In need of somewhere to stay, Blair accepted an offer from the Cardiff West MP, Rhodri Morgan, whose home was variously described as ‘bohemian’ or ‘a tip’. Blair slept in one of the Morgan children’s bedrooms beneath a poster of Bob Marley. Rising early, he was wrongly identified as the TV presenter Lionel Blair by Morgan’s mother-in-law. He left in a hurry, deciding there and then, the story goes, to avoid working with Morgan at all costs.

In September 1998, Morgan stood unsuccessfully against Davies, then secretary of state for Wales, for the leadership of the Welsh Labour Party. The contest was intended to determine who would lead the new Assembly, but Davies’s candidature was short-lived. After a tabloid scandal concerning his sexuality – he had been mugged after meeting a man on Clapham Common – he was replaced by Alun Michael. Michael was considered a New Labour placeman, particularly by Morgan, who stood against him and lost. Michael decided to lead a minority government rather than enter into a coalition, and left office after just nine months rather than face a vote of no confidence.

Morgan became first minister at his third attempt. He had gone to Oxford and Harvard, but his unkempt appearance, easy rhetoric and suburban Cardiff accent made him seem far more streetwise than his predecessors. He also had a rare gift for seeming authentic: he was filmed during a rugby international taking off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt when the game got exciting. Morgan wasted little time in making a stronger case both for the devolved administration and for Wales itself, giving a landmark speech at Swansea University in December 2002 in which he put ‘clear red water’ between Cardiff and Westminster. In Wales, he said, ‘the relationship between economic and social policy was one forged in the industrial revolution … This is the sometimes proud, sometimes agonising history of a nation built very largely on the efforts of working people in hard surroundings.’ Labour in Wales, he said, owed more to ‘the traditions of Titmus, Tawney, Beveridge and Bevan than those of Hayek and Friedman’. The speech repudiated the marketisation of health and social policies embraced by New Labour in favour of ‘the fundamentally socialist aim of equality of outcome’. And, making plain his objection to foundation hospitals and his commitment to comprehensive education, Morgan insisted that the individual was a citizen, not a consumer: in Wales there would be no prescription charges, no more PFI initiatives, no school league tables. A Downing Street memo released under the twenty-year rule described the speech as ‘grim stuff’. In a handwritten note in the margin Blair wrote that Morgan’s thesis was ‘dreadful and a big mistake. But it shows how the wind blows there.’ ‘Still,’ he added, ever the pragmatist, ‘if it succeeds electorally, we will have to put up with it.’

The Government of Wales Act 2006 reformed the Assembly, which had been conceived on the model of a large local authority – ‘Mid-Glamorgan County Council on stilts’, according to its opponents. It was reconceived as a national parliament capable of creating and enacting primary legislation on matters including health, education and housing. Even so, the caricature had some truth to it. Cardiff benefited hugely from devolution, transforming itself into a city with a modern service economy, but West Wales and the valleys remained among the poorest areas in Northern Europe.

Constitutional change on this scale was bound to take up a lot of time and energy; it also expended a lot of the new government’s political capital. Three Wales Acts were passed between 2006 to 2017, creating the impression of an administration preoccupied with governance. The location of the new Assembly building, designed by Richard Rogers and opened in March 2006, didn’t help matters. Cardiff has a distinctive Edwardian civic centre, but the Assembly building joined other developments on the edge of the city, on a site with inadequate transport links. Cardiff itself had not voted in favour of devolution; the administration was psychologically and geographically detached from the capital city, to say nothing of the rest of Wales.

In 2009, Morgan stepped down as first minister. During his decade in charge he embodied a new political confidence in Wales. He was replaced by the more orthodox Carwyn Jones, whose tenure began a few months before the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took power in Westminster. Thus began a fourteen-year ritual of Tory prime ministers in Parliament citing the poor performance of the Welsh NHS as evidence of socialist iniquity. Health is a devolved policy in Wales, though the Welsh NHS budget is set by the Barnett formula, the method used by the Treasury to determine the funding allocated to the devolved governments through a block grant. The funds are shared out according to population size rather than need. Wales has the weakest economy and the highest proportion of people over seventy in the UK, as well as worse premature death rates than England and some of the poorest cancer outcomes in Europe. Health and social care absorb almost half of the Welsh government’s budget.

Levels of child poverty have hovered around 30 per cent since the mid-2000s, and research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published last year showed that the proportion of the population living in deep poverty has increased from 33 per cent in the mid-1990s to 47 per cent in the early 2020s. The Rowntree Foundation also estimated that by 2029, even against a background of modest economic growth across the UK (which is likely to prove elusive), child poverty in Wales will increase, after housing costs, to 34.5 per cent. Child poverty rates in Wales are almost 10 per cent higher than in Scotland, where the government issues a cash payment of £28.20 a week for every child whose parents receive Universal Credit or are on a low income. The Bevan Foundation recently conducted a modelling exercise which demonstrated that the most effective policy the Welsh government could introduce to reduce poverty would be to reform the childcare system so that mothers could return to part-time work, alongside a child payment scheme on the Scottish model. It is inarguable that public services in Wales are under great pressure as a result of high poverty levels and that the limitations of the Barnett formula restrict the Welsh government’s capacity to deliver social democracy. But it does have the freedom to prioritise the devolved areas of health and housing, the two principal drivers of poverty.

In 2016 Wales voted for Brexit, even though it had benefited more than anywhere else in the UK from the European Commission’s Objective One structural funding scheme for regions whose development is ‘lagging behind’. Two years later, Carwyn Jones was replaced as first minister by Mark Drakeford, the author of Morgan’s ‘clear red water’ speech, whose leadership campaign proposed ‘21st-century socialism’. During the Covid pandemic, Drakeford’s measured handling of the crisis, and the image of him self-isolating in a hut in his garden to shield his wife and mother-in-law, were in marked contrast to the speciousness and debauchery associated with Downing Street. In the 2021 Senedd election he led Labour to an unexpectedly decisive victory, with the party capturing thirty of the sixty seats.

Drakeford formed a government by making a ‘co-operation agreement’ with pro-independence Plaid Cymru, and its policies deepened the clear red water between Wales and Westminster: universal free school meals, council tax reform, action on second homes and, inevitably, further constitutional reform. But the goodwill built during the pandemic began to erode. The Labour manifesto contained a pledge to establish a 20 mph speed limit on residential and restricted roads. A lot of Welsh people rely on their cars to get to and from work and a culture war began, widening to include resistance to proposals to expand the Senedd from 60 to 96 members. Labour’s enthusiasm for time-consuming legislation to define ‘Welsh Values’ was, similarly, a cause of irritation.

In the spring of 2024 Drakeford was succeeded by Vaughan Gething, who became the first black leader of a European country. But he was gone in under four months, after a lengthy controversy over a £200,000 campaign donation from a business whose owner had been convicted of illegally dumping waste. In the 2024 general election Labour’s vote share in Wales fell by 3.9 per cent, Plaid Cymru’s grew by roughly the same amount and although Reform UK didn’t win any seats, it finished second in thirteen constituencies, many of them in the South Wales valleys.

Gething’s successor as first minister, Eluned Morgan, gave a speech called ‘The Red Welsh Way’ a few months after taking office. Bevan and the NHS were duly invoked. So too were characters from the sitcom Gavin and Stacey. Morgan could point to a few genuine achievements: Wales is the only nation in the UK that offers free meals to all children at primary school; prescriptions are still free; care workers are paid the Living Wage; the Health and Social Care Act 2025 mandates that all children’s and foster care must be delivered on a not-for-profit or charitable basis. Morgan has talked about ending homelessness by 2034 – but in the 2021 Senedd campaign, Labour presented a High Level Action Plan that promised to do the same thing by 2026.

In When Was Wales?, published in 1985, the historian Gwyn Alf Williams wrote that Labour majorities ‘stand like Aneurin Bevan’s memorial stones on the Pound above Tredegar and they are beginning to look like the Stonehenge of Welsh politics’. The memorial comprises three monoliths, representing Rhymney, Tredegar and Ebbw Vale, which formed Bevan’s constituency, and a fourth, larger stone, which stands for Bevan himself. The stones for the monument, which was completed in 1972, came from the nearby Trefil quarry, then owned by British Steel. Today, the memorial seems more like a monument to the Welsh Labour century.