How to be Popular? A wicked Welsh issue indeed

How do you respond to populism? How can a Government of the left combine an ongoing sense of insurgency with the reality of making the compromises necessary with being in power?

Wales offers something of a case-study in these universal dilemmas. The Labour Party has been the dominant party for 102 years, and for the last 26 years has been the main party of Government in our devolved parliament.

Next year there will be elections under a newer more proportional system and for the first time Welsh Labour’s position as the largest party is being seriously questioned, and polls suggest that we are within the margin of error of coming third. 

The Reform Party has the wind in their sails. It seems to matter not a jot that they don’t have a policy platform, an organisational network, or any local leadership. 

And this is not a uniquely Welsh phenomenon. As the FT set out in a series of end-of-year charts the trend across the developed world in 2024 was for incumbent governments to be punished. The sitting party in every one of the 12 developed western countries that held national elections in 2024 lost vote share at the polls, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of modern democracy.

Inflation has eaten into living standards and created an anger that demands to be assuaged. From India and France, to Mexico and Indonesia, the story is the same. The party of government is held to account for an economy that is not working for most people; and it is the simple message of anti-establishment populists (primarily on the Right) that is resonating in democracies across the world. 

This is particularly fuelled by dissatisfaction amongst the young who no longer feel they have a stake. 

A confluence of factors have brought us to this point, but the backlash against globalisation that has been evident since the 2008 financial crash continues. The Brexit vote, two mandates for Trump, and the surge in the Right across Europe, provide ample evidence that the anger is finding an outlet, and there’s more to come.

So how should an incumbent party of the left respond?

The answer being offered by the leader of Welsh Labour is to ‘scrape the barnacles off the boat’, to use the phrase most associated with the populist Australian strategist Sir Lynton Crosby. In an end of year interview with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart for their popular podcast, Leading, Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan said “when you've been in power for 25 years you can see that you might get distracted so I've said ‘come on let's get back to bread and butter’ and that's what we're doing now”.

She explained that after unexpectedly taking power after an internal party schism in the summer of 2024 she travelled the country on a ‘listening exercise’. “I just got out on the streets all around Wales and literally just asked people what they wanted - what did they think we should prioritise? And it was raw and it was dirty; and it was ‘you know, what do you want us to do’ and I've come back now, before I appointed anybody to the cabinet I said you got to sign up to these priorities” she said. 

So what was the message that she took from the voters ?

  

“It's make sure the health system works properly; you know they were upset with us at the time about the introduction of 20 mile-per-hour in certain places, it's all that kind of stuff that really upsets them day-in-day out on their streets. You know they thought some of our town centers were scruffy. Those kind of bread and butter issues that we're sometimes distracted from” she told the podcasters.

Eluned Morgan’s analysis is that removing the drag of unpopular policies that do not align with the people’s priorities should be combined with a sharper focus on better communication of a smaller number of simple messages.  “I do think we've got a challenge in terms of how we communicate and how we reach into people's lives” Eluned Morgan said.

A range of measures that had been developed under Mark Drakeford’s Government were quickly jettisoned - proposals to alter the school year to help reduce the disruption to disadvantaged pupils from having to catch-up after school holidays; measures to legislate for positive gender discrimination in the electoral system; conditions to require farmers to plant trees in exchange for public funding; investment in cycling infrastructure was scaled back in favour of filling potholes.

Prioritising ‘kitchen-table’ concerns is a boilerplate response from progressives who face a disenchanted electorate. When Bill Clinton sought fresh-framing for a political brand out-of-step with the late 80s populism of Reaganomics he too embraced the triangulation of a Third Way. New Labour notoriously followed suit. Both were electorally successful formulas, but neither significantly challenged the fundamental inequality of power, wealth and opportunity that labour movements set out to challenge.  

It is the perennial dilemma of the progressive left - what is the balance between leading and following public opinion? 

It is an especially acute quandary at this time when we face an electorate that pollsters tell us are expressing an unprecedented levels of frustration and disenchantment. As UK Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner acknowledged last month “People are impatient for change and people are very angry”.

The challenges of governing in these circumstances are very real. The combination of growing demand on key services from an ageing population, the denuded spending power of a public pound shrunk by inflation, and a hollowed-out State apparatus seriously weakened by the cumulative impact of a decade and a half of public spending cuts, all mean that the firepower needed to combat the significant challenges we face is just not there when we need it most.

And in Wales you can add to this the issues I set out in my recent series of podcasts on the capacity and capability limitations faced by the Welsh Government. 

These intractable challenges pose fertile ground for a populist party such as Reform to capitalise on policy and delivery statis with seductively simple messages and solutions. 

So how best to fight back?

Is it, as the Welsh Labour Party Leader Eluned Morgan instinctively feels, to focus on issues of higher voter salience and downplay system and culture change?

When asked by Tory centrist Rory Stewart if she thought the lesson of the Brexit vote was that there is “something fundamentally wrong with this economic system” Baroness Morgan replied “No, I don't I think there was something wrong”. 

She rejected the idea that there has been ‘a fundamental breakdown of the whole liberal Market Model’, in Stewart’s words, and instead blamed the way the Conservatives managed the economic system, pointing to the impact of austerity cuts and the failure to communicate the benefits of ‘massive sums’ received by Wales from EU funding. 

For her the Brexit result was not a challenge to the globalised economic system and de-industrialisation, but a failure to communicate the impact of grants - ”we obviously didn't do a very good job at telling people how the European Union was touching their lives”.

For me this was a very significant and revealing section of Eluned Morgan’s conversation with the podcasters, and speaks to the broader challenge faced by incumbent Governments of the left best summed up by the economist and Labour MP for Swansea West, Torsten Bell - “The question is whether social democrats can turn themselves from simple defenders of the system into insurgents”.

The recipe for recovery in Wales is being presented as a focus on ‘bread and butter’ issues and better communication, not a deeper challenge to the system of power and inequality. “So I'm very clear that the model is okay. How you manage the model is the challenge” Eluned Morgan told Campbell and Stewart.

When asked whether she thought the balance of power between Westminster and the Senedd was ‘about right’ or if further devolution was needed, Eluned Morgan made no mention of the Welsh Government's long-established policy of devolving policing and justice but said “I think there a little areas around the edges, things like youth justice for example”. 

This comes a week after it was announced that (Baroness) Morgan was appointing as her Chief Adviser a former Welsh MP, Sir Wayne David, who has a track record of opposing the devolution of powers over the justice system to Wales.

The risk with this approach is that it does nothing to challenge the perception that after over a Century as the dominant party in Wales the Labour Party is seen as the establishment and simply seeks to manage the status quo. It does not pass Torsten Bell’s insurgents test.

In his analysis of the trends in geo-politics the FT’s Chief Data reporter John Burn-Murdoch concluded that the defining trends of 2024 are set to continue in 2025. He wrote:

“The latest polls show the incumbent governments of Australia, Canada, Germany and Norway all on course to lose power in the coming months. And in most of these countries it is once again the populist right that looks set to make the biggest gains. Norway’s rightwing populist Progress party currently leads after finishing fourth in 2021, and Germany’s AfD are currently polling in second place. The acute inflation crisis may have passed, but with stubbornly weak economic growth, a widening generational wealth gap and a fragmented media, 2024 may prove to be less an anomaly than one particularly jagged point on a downward trend”.

Is that a trend that we can buck in Wales? And if so, is a managerial approach likely to be the most effective?

We have decided to emphasise the centrality of working hand-in-glove with Keir Starmer’s Government in Westminster, albeit to challenge them for extra funding for railways, coaltip restoration and the spoils of renewable energy developments that are currently flowing direct to the UK Treasury.  

Put to one side the differing electoral cycles, and the trajectory of public approval for UK Government, is this approach likely to work on its own terms? Will a UK Government that has indicated that the injection of public investment it has already offered will be a one-off, be willing to favour Wales’ case in the next 18 months in a way that will make a clear impression on a disengaged and deeply disenchanted electorate?

It seems unlikely. There are no signs of an equivalent of ‘The ‘Vow’ that was offered to Scotland to avert an independence vote in 2014.; or the £1 Billion extra secured for Northern Ireland from Theresa May’s Government in 2017

Even in the absence of a significantly fairer funding settlement there seems to be no appetite to project a vision for a more radical recasting of politics in Wales which seeks to seize the opportunity to challenge the extractive capitalist model and create our own sovereign wealth fund using our natural renewable resources, or to challenge the trickle-down pattern of public and private investment in our under-sized economic base. “The model is okay” is the message.

The international trends are clear. All incumbents are having a kicking. It will take something different for us to avoid that fate. 

At the start of devolution in 1999 a distress call from Wales for extra funding to match EU-aid went unheeded by the UK Treasury and Welsh Labour paid the price. A quarter of a century on history may be rhyming. 

The UK Labour Party will wring their hands if Reform get a foothold in Wales in May 2026, and Welsh Labour face a ‘Scottish moment’ which will take a generation to recover from.

Welsh Labour has done best electorally when we have presented ourselves as ‘Standing up for Wales’. Instead Eluned Morgan has offered the hand of friendship to the Prime Minister. Will it be grasped?

If it’s not, a combination of the populist nationalist left and right is waiting to replace it with a two-finger salute. 

Lee Waters is a Member of the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) for the Llanelli constituency and a former Minister in the Welsh Government.