Wales’ values are Labour values

In recent years, the Tories have become more and more entrenched in their heartlands. This has led to their well-publicised effort to win over ethnic minority and northern voters. Less attention has been given to their performance in Wales, with it picking up in recent years. This has caused some excitement, notably Stephen Crabb’s recent piece extolling the ‘progress’ of the Welsh Conservatives and their ‘optimistic’ and ‘ambitious’ future. He points to the 2010 general election, where the Tories picked up 8 seats in Wales. We’ll be generous and assume he simply forgot to mention that Labour took 26 on a bad day for the party. As for ‘optimism’, top quality Labour candidates like Mari Williams in Cardiff North and Jo Stevens in Cardiff Central means Labour looks set to make a strong challenge for the few Welsh seats held by Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

Labour’s success in Wales certainly isn’t a recent phenomenon, either. Labour has gained the most votes in every general election in Wales since 1922. If Wales had been the entire electorate, Prime Minister Foot and certainly Kinnock would have been a reality. There would have been no Thatcher government.

But Labour’s success isn’t simply limited to UK-wide elections. It’s been the biggest party in the  Assembly since the inaugural election of 1999, and currently has more seats than ever. An iron rule of politics is that the longer a government stays in power, the more unpopular it becomes. Not in Wales. A recent poll commissioned by the Elections in Wales blog showed Labour more popular than ever, set to gain 47% of the constituency vote at the next Assembly election and trailed by the Tories on 19%. A 28 point lead is impressive under all circumstances. After 14 years of government, it is simply remarkable.

Wales’ increasingly rambunctious show of support for Labour doesn’t end there, either. The same poll showed that First Minister Carwyn Jones is more popular than Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, or any of the other Welsh party leaders – including struggling Tory leader Andrew RT Davies. For all the media noise about Alex Salmond, polls consistently show Carwyn’s popularity greater than or equal to the Scottish leaders.

The worst of Crabb’s article is yet to come. He makes the exceptionally arrogant statement that ‘support for our [Tory] policies does not actually translate into Conservative votes’. It is unclear whether he believes the people of Wales have the two parties confused and keep voting Labour when they mean to vote Conservative, or if he believes there’s an epidemic of hands slipping in Welsh polling booths, converting thousands of Tory-intended votes into Labour ones.

Another mistake of his is to say Wales’ values make it ‘fertile ground’ for the Tories. To his credit he does correctly identify that Welsh values are less individualistic. Where he slips up is in his theory that they are not left wing. Wales has a strong radical tradition. The medieval laws of Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good) are renowned for their progressive streak, advancing the rights of women. Welshman Robert Owen founded a socialist society in America when Karl Marx was still a child. In the 1920’s Wales became a secular nation, disestablishing the Church. Welshman Lloyd George introduced the ‘peoples budget’, increasing taxes on luxurious goods to pay for welfare. The most successful socialist policy ever implemented in the UK – the NHS – was the invention of Welshman Aneurin Bevan. Countless leftist policies in Britain have Welsh fingerprints all over them.

Nye Bevan once said that nothing could ever ‘eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred of the Tory Party’. With polls showing 46% of Welsh people would never even consider voting Conservative, it seems the rest of Wales agrees.

Wales, Conservative? I think not.