Pundits have confidently asserted throughout the last six weeks that this general election would be different in Wales. Thanks to devolution, Welsh assembly responsibilities, such as health and education, would be sidelined and the focus would be on Westminster issues – policing, Europe, tax. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Not only were public services at the heart of any sensible local campaign, but they headed virtually every Welsh news stories.
Two things confounded the pundits. First, television and radio news has still completely failed to work out the difference between England-only stories and UK-wide ones. So the vast majority of people in Wales regularly accept as gospel school and hospital stories that have no impact on them. In Wales there is no concordat with the private health sector, for instance, but you would need extraordinary forensic skills to spot that from the BBC News at Ten.
Second, whilst the political classes of Westminster and Cardiff may revel in understanding the complexities of devolution, the population at large are only interested in whether the local hospital is going to be built or not. I was regularly met with the assumption that if I won my seat, Plaid would also automatically lose control of the local council. Indeed, on two occasions I was bluntly told that I was lying when I asserted that it was Plaid, not Labour, who ran the council. The intricacies of political control are of far less interest to ordinary people than the quality of public services in their area. And any political campaign (such as those of both the Tories and the Nationalists) that ignores the basic political truth that, in the eyes of the public, politics is simply and solely about bread, butter and jam, will tend to falter at an early hurdle.
Devolution also had virtually no effect on the voting pattern of Wales. As in the assembly election results, there was a general swing to Plaid. However, it certainly failed to deliver Plaid’s hoped for major realignment of Welsh politics. The catastrophe that saw Islwyn, Llanelli and the Rhondda fall to Plaid was not repeated.
On the eve of the election Leanne Wood, my Plaid opponent, was declaring that she had 53 percent of the vote in the constituency sewn-up and that she confidently expected to be elected the first woman MP for Rhondda. Thirty six hours later she even started her speech: ‘Tonight Plaid Cymru have overturned a Labour majority of 25,000…Oh, sorry, I mean reduced…’
Yet the Welsh political landscape has changed. A minister from the assembly, not from the Welsh Office, has been asking me about the local waste strategy and I shall be pursuing the health minister in Cardiff Bay to ensure that my campaign promise to get the Llwynypia hospital built is met.
Moreover, the next Welsh assembly elections will be tougher than the general election. Many people confessed that they will vote differently in Welsh-only elections. Despite winning 34 out of 40 seats in Wales last week, Labour will have a tough fight if it is to win control of the assembly and win back the seats it so spectacularly lost last time.