When the Scottish and Welsh parliaments were created on the eve of the millennium, the then Labour government in Westminster believed that it had engineered a win-win situation. Devolution, it was hoped, would see off any nationalist threat in Scotland and Wales. Meanwhile, the Labour party’s longstanding political dominance in both nations would see it take comfortable control of the two new parliaments.
That was then. Last week’s devolved elections left Scottish and Welsh Labour battered, bruised and humiliated. Plaid Cymru’s historic victory in Wales, and a fifth successive triumph for the Scottish National party (SNP), mean that pro-independence governments are now set for the first time to rule in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast (where Sinn Féin won in 2022). The starting gun has been fired on a new and constitutionally contested era in the politics of the UK.
The seismic nature of Plaid’s win is hard to overstate. The Labour party’s grip on Welsh politics has been more or less absolute for more than a century. Yet last Thursday, the outgoing Labour first minister, Eluned Morgan, was among those to lose her seat.
Anger and disillusionment with Sir Keir Starmer’s unhappy premiership, and with Welsh Labour’s own failings in areas such as health and education, led progressive voters to migrate en masse to the nationalist alternative. A vote for Plaid was also seen as the best way to stop Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which nevertheless will now form the official opposition in the Senedd.
In Scotland, Anas Sarwar’s pre-election gamble in calling for Sir Keir to resign failed as Scottish Labour recorded its worst result since devolution. Mr Sarwar hoped to distance his party from the sinking Westminster mother ship. But similarly to England, many progressives opted for the Scottish Greens, and Reform picked up voters in Labour’s post-industrial former heartlands. In a fragmented landscape, the SNP cruised home with its lowest share of the constituency vote share since 2007.