West Wales is within reach for a Labour party that reaches out beyond its core, argues David Green
Between the M4, linking south Wales’ major conurbations, and the A55, strung along the north Wales coast and its seaside towns, is the Wales that Labour has forgotten. Eight constituencies make up the Welsh assembly’s Mid and West Wales electoral region; only one, Llanelli, is currently Labour.
The rural seats of Wales’ interior can seem unattainable, even unknowable, for a party of increasingly metropolitan mores. But Labour has won every seat in Wales, barring Montgomeryshire, within living memory; in Wales, more than in England, rural folk have been willing to vote Labour, at least when they have considered it close to their cultural values. In The British Voter: an Atlas and Survey since 1885, Michael Kinnear writes of Labour in Wales: ‘Their victories included several rural constituencies where the working-class vote could not alone account for their wins … much of the Labour vote could be attributed to nonconformist middle-class and farming voters who considered themselves radicals’.
These rural radicals appear to have died out, and their children vote differently. In the north-west of the region, two seats – Ceredigion and Dwyfor Meirionnydd – are out of reach; Plaid Cymru won each in the nationalist surge of 1974, and neither has come close to returning to Labour. In the latter seat Labour came third in 2010, with 14 per cent of the vote; in Ceredigion, the party was fourth, with a barely deposit-saving performance of just six per cent.
It would be a mistake, though, to take all of rural Wales together. Ceredigion and Dwyfor Meirionnydd have rugged terrain and thin soil; tourists flock to the Snowdonia national park, where the mountainsides provide a tough living to hill farmers raising hardy livestock. A majority of the population speaks Welsh as a first language, and ‘chapel’ – belonging to any one of a number of subtly different nonconformist denominations – still, to an extent, binds rural communities together.
Further south and west, at Wales’ furthest reach into the Atlantic, Pembrokeshire is very different. The land is more fertile, the landscape less dramatic and more gentle, allowing arable as well as livestock farming; agriculture and tourism account for a smaller proportion of employment, with a more mixed economy similar to rural areas elsewhere. Curiously, for the part of Wales furthest from the border, it is less Welsh – known as ‘little England beyond Wales’ for centuries, Welsh-speakers are in a clear minority, Anglicans have always outnumbered nonconformists, and even accents are clearly anglicised.
Unsurprisingly, both seats here (Preseli Pembrokeshire, and Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) have been rather more forgiving to the Tories than the rest of rural Wales. Both now have Conservative MPs, and both are on Labour’s list of target marginals for the next election.
Voters arguably decide their vote in two linked stages: before making an assessment of which party meets their material best interests, voters apply a ‘filter’, excluding from serious contention parties which appear impressionistically not to appeal to them, their lives, their culture, and their aspirations. This explanation of voting behaviour accounts for why working-class Toryism is more common in the south, and middle-class leftwingers are found in the north and in major cities – parties which might be aligned to voters’ economic interests are excluded from consideration because they are incompatible with voters’ views of themselves.
After several successful decades, since the rise of nationalism Labour now clearly fails the filter test in upland, Welsh-speaking Wales. The party must ensure that it makes the cut where it still has a chance elsewhere, and the test that south-west Wales’ voters will apply will be similar to that of voters in non-urban and southern England. A Labour party which looks like it wants to reach beyond its current pool of support, and which is interested in the views and interests of moderate voters who voted for other parties last time, is most likely to bring these constituencies home to Labour.
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David Green is a management consultant and former Labour party organiser
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