While Brecon and Radnorshire voters are today expected to hand a victory to the Liberal Democrats, the governing party will most likely only lose because of the strong showing of the Brexit Party, with Labour way behind in fourth. Across the country the Tories sit on 24%, two points ahead of Labour, with Nigel Farage’s outfit following close behind in third. This means that in one of the EU’s most deprived regions – and historically Britain’s socialist heartland – more than four in ten voters opt for Right-wing parties. [...]
It’s true that many still harbour a great deal of resentment towards the Conservative Party. Some areas of South Wales have never recovered from the crash-deindustrialisation programme enacted by the Thatcher government, and the unemployment rate remains one of the highest in Britain. According to NHS data collected in 2013, one in six residents of Blaenau Gwent was collecting a prescription for antidepressants. Life expectancy in the region is among the lowest in England and Wales. [...]
Labour’s Welsh decline cannot entirely be pinned on Corbyn. Support here has been ebbing for some time and during the New Labour years the party’s share of the vote fell faster in Wales than in either England or Scotland. In fact Labour’s historical dominance of Welsh politics is arguably a factor in its declining fortunes. As Dan Evans wrote in a perceptive piece for Jacobin, one-partyism has encouraged complacency and nepotism in many traditional strongholds. Here “people advance and achieve positions of power not through their political competence or vision, but through party loyalty”. [...]
Labour has also been losing the battle of values, which in part explains the shift to the Conservatives. The coastal regions have long flirted with the Tories, but the Valleys – the traditional bastions of socialist politics – are also home to a small-c conservatism that sits uneasily with some of the liberal shibboleths that dominate contemporary Left-wing thought. Moreover, this anti-Conservative sentiment found in South Wales is partly a legacy of Margaret Thatcher, herself a liberal free marketeer rather than a traditional conservative.
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