MORE than a century of Labour dominance in Wales ended yesterday as the party crashed to a historic defeat in the Senedd election, losing First Minister Eluned Morgan’s own seat and finishing third or fourth behind Plaid Cymru, Reform UK and, in some counts, the Welsh Conservatives.
Welsh Labour, which has led every nationwide vote in Wales since 1922 and has run the Welsh government uninterrupted for 27 years, was reduced from 30 Members of the Senedd to around 10 in the new 96-seat parliament.
Plaid Cymru, led by Rhun ap Iorwerth, emerged as the largest party and is on course to form the next Welsh government, ending the longest unbroken winning streak of any party in British democratic history.
In Casnewydd Islwyn, the seat of Cabinet Secretary Jayne Bryant and one of Labour’s safest in south-east Wales, Reform UK topped the poll with 23,571 votes to Plaid Cymru’s 23,069.
Labour came third on 10,622. In Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg, Plaid took 27,407 votes and Reform 24,602, with Labour pushed into fourth on 9,518, behind even the Conservatives.
Morgan, who had spent the final week urging voters not to use the Senedd ballot as a ‘protest vote’ against Sir Keir Starmer, lost her own Ceredigion Penfro seat to Plaid Cymru, in line with the final YouGov MRP poll that had projected her wipeout.
Speaking in Cardiff, Rhun ap Iorwerth said Wales had ‘voted for a new beginning’ and that his party would govern ‘with humility, but also with the ambition this nation deserves’.
Plaid’s deputy leader Delyth Jewell described the result as ‘the moment Wales found its own voice’.
The Welsh Liberal Democrats were reduced to a single seat.
The Greens, despite the surge in support nationally for Zack Polanski’s leadership, failed to convert hype into MSs in most of Wales, with their vote squeezed by Plaid’s tactical pitch as the only party that could stop Reform.
For Starmer, the loss of Wales is the single most damaging result of his premiership so far.
Wales has been the bedrock of Labour politics in Britain for generations, and its loss to a left-wing pro-independence party on one flank and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the other points to the disintegration of the coalition that delivered Labour’s 2024 landslide.
The Welsh result came alongside an evisceration in English local elections.
Reform UK gained more than 600 council seats across England, taking outright control of councils including Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Kent, Durham and Staffordshire, and ending decades of Labour control in former mining and industrial towns including Wigan, Leigh, Tameside, Sunderland and Doncaster.
Labour lost more than 400 councillors and the Conservatives more than 500, with Kemi Badenoch’s leadership now openly questioned by Tory backbenchers.
In Scotland, John Swinney’s SNP emerged as the largest party in the Holyrood election, holding off a Reform challenge that nonetheless saw the party return its first significant cohort of MSPs.
Standing outside Labour headquarters in west London on Friday morning, Starmer said the results were ‘tough’ and acknowledged voters’ anger at ‘the pace of change’, but ruled out resigning.
‘Days like this don’t weaken my resolve to deliver the change that I promised,’ he said, adding that he was ‘not going to walk away’.
That position is now under sustained pressure. Welsh Labour’s deputy leader Huw Irranca-Davies, asked on Friday morning whether he backed Starmer to remain Prime Minister, declined to do so, saying only that ‘everyone in the Labour family’ needed to ‘reflect on what our role is in taking this forward’.
One Labour insider said that voters on the doorstep had ‘consistently voted Labour in the past’ but had now switched to Plaid, Reform or the Greens, or stayed at home altogether.
The pattern of the night, in Wales as in England, was the same.
Voters who had backed Labour in 2024 to remove the Conservatives delivered a verdict on a government that has cut the winter fuel allowance, frozen public sector pay in real terms, refused to lift the two-child benefit cap, and pursued an immigration agenda openly modelled on Reform’s.
The cost-of-living crisis, identified by Ipsos as the single biggest concern of voters in the run-up to polling day, has not eased.
Reform’s gains in working-class England and Wales reflect the failure of Starmer’s strategy of triangulating to Farage’s right.
By chasing Reform voters, Labour has handed Reform legitimacy and lost its own base to parties to its left, including Plaid in Wales, the SNP in Scotland and the Greens in urban England.
The two-party system that has structured British politics since the war is, on the evidence of these results, finished.
