“The Conservatives were the only party to make gains, Labour is breathing a sign of relief, Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems are licking their wounds” was how the BBC neatly summed up last week’s election results in Wales. While the Tories gained five Welsh seats, the swing to them was smaller in Wales than in England and Labour still claimed 26 seats, remaining the biggest party by a long shot.

Winning in Blaenau Gwent and Ynys Mon, and keeping hold of seats like Clwyd South have undoubtedly been significant in stopping David Cameron winning an overall majority, but a closer look at the figures presents a more worrying picture for us. Where once a Labour majority of less than 10,000 could be classed as marginal, now only six Welsh seats can make that claim. Indeed Labour MPs’ majorities across Wales have been falling to such an extent that we now hold 15 seats with majorities of less than 5000 – ten of those with majorities less than 3000.

We can put some of this down to a national move against Labour, along with a key seats campaign strategy, and assume that we’ll win these seats with bigger majorities next time round when the political climate is more favourable. But it’s also possible that times have changed in Wales. If that’s so, then without dramatic action this swing against us will continue. Because, although Labour is still the instinctive choice in Wales for my parents and most of their generation, talking to my old schoolfriends and the other younger people I met on the doorstep in the run-up to the election, it was clear that they were not guided by such traditions. They might live in the same town and still remember how the Conservatives treated Wales in the ‘80s, but their lives are dramatically different – most have travelled extensively and lived elsewhere. Unlike their parents they haven’t had jobs for life, nor worked in unionised workplaces and they’ve solved local job shortages by getting in their cars and commuting to Cardiff, Bristol or even Reading each day. As a consequence, their views of the world and of political parties and voting are more like those of the ‘swing’ voters I met on the doorstep in marginal seats in Brighton and London and less like the more tribal instincts of our parents.

So we might have breathed a sigh of relief at the number of seats we kept last week, but now that we have London councillors with bigger majorities than Welsh MPs, it’s definitely not the time to take a breather. We cannot assume that we’ll hold on to these newly-marginal constituencies. As well as marginal-style year round campaigning, we need to open up the party to new members and new ideas, so that we once again speak clearly to the ordinary working people of Wales, offering a vision for building a modern, vibrant Wales for the 21st century and making Labour the deliberate choice of the new generation of Welsh voters.

Photo: Walt Jabsco 2010